Pre-order completed…
My upgrade cycle is normally 3-4 years (my old phone then becomes a backup). My XR’s battery is at around 75% capacity though and giving up the ghost fairly quickly now (takes a lot longer to charge and depletes a lot faster) so I decided to pick up an iPhone 16 Pro (my iPhone 14 will become my new backup). This is also the first time I am getting a “pro” model.
I’ve always just bought these phones outright (and kept the old ones). Most of the stuff I still purchase from Apple is paid for by dividend (income) from the stock. As I previously wrote on my old tech/investing blog, the bulk of my AAPL (and other tech company) shares are in my Roth IRA (individual retirement) brokerage account. I also have a much smaller number of shares in a standard (higher liquidity) non-retirement brokerage account. Most of my Apple shares (from ESOP/RSU’s plus 401k when I worked there) I rolled into the retirement account. Most of the AAPL positions I bought on the open market (over several years) are in the non-retirement brokerage account.
I use this as an illustration of how to let your money work for you (especially if you start doing this at a young age). Yes, it took years (plus costly past mistakes) along with a modest lifestyle to reach this point. As much as many despise Apple as a company (and/or have an opposing tech ideology where all they can do is complain/gripe about the company), that company in general has been very rewarding both personally and financially (like Sun Micro, I met a lot of great/smart people there and oversaw some of the best group of people one could ever hope for).
Let me be blunt. No corporation out there is altruistic. Some are better than others. Google’s motto USED to be “do no evil” but that went out the door (their business model requires using our information; where we are the product for all of the software/platforms we get to use for “free” including Android, Gmail, Blogger, etc) where even I reached a point of simply divesting myself completely (same thing with Facebook; more so because their revenue model relies heavily on their algorithm pushing disinformation/taking “dirty” money).
Apple, IBM, and Microsoft (none of whom are angels either) I’ve remained invested in for that long haul dividend income; when Apple re-introduced quarterly dividend payouts in 2012, that really set things up for financial freedom along with those dividends buying whatever Apple product I wanted to get (which in recent years, wasn’t exactly a lot). Part of making your hard-earned money work for you requires taking advantage of that thing called the stock market (which itself is filled with a lot of less than desirable actors; I still point people to Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis as a must read).
Digressing, are iPhone’s the best around? Depends on your definition of best. I’m still not deeply tied into Apple’s ecosystem (that as I wrote before was a conscious decision to not be entrenched in iCloud), but I just like how it works with what I do use. The costs of the products are a non-factor because as mentioned, my holdings in just Apple stock pays for them. The following was the most recent dividend payout for AAPL in my non-retirement brokerage account.
The period of COVID threw off my planned divestiture timeframe (to exit various long-term positions so that I could actually lock-in those gains/have more cash liquidity for my self-imposed early retirement which began well before COVID + family emergency) which ended up being beneficial as far as capital appreciation goes. While I could afford to do the annual iPhone upgrade (like what some do), that is where the “modest” (financial discipline) part comes into play. There’s little need for me to do that (it’s a waste) so long as what I have works/isn’t reaching the end of its usable lifespan.
It’s why I also am finally upgrading to an iPad Pro (11″ M4) from my existing iPad Air (3rd generation) along with an Apple Pencil Pro. 2024 is the first time in over a decade that I’ve bought several different just released Apple products (MacBook Pro M3Pro, iPhone 16 Pro, iPad Pro M4) after what was several long droughts.
