iPhone

Originally published on 2025-11-13

tl;dr: If you’re going for lowest total cost of ownership, iPhone will serve you better than Android or its derivative operating systems. You’ll have to sacrifice your software freedom, but then again… maybe we never had much freedom in any mobile ecosystem in the first place.

As a freedom-loving FOSS nerd, my mobile device of choice has traditionally been Android-based. In particular, I have been very happy using a Pixel 5a with GrapheneOS.

And then the phone died. And I’m frustrated that the total cost of ownership (TCO) for that old phone (it was already old when I bought it) was 11 Euros per month.[1]

If you are fine with upgrading your mobile device every 2 years, then Android is compelling. You’re going to be dropping a lot of cash on phones this way, so you might as well buy the cheaper devices.

However if your goal is to avoid using your mobile device as much as possible, and you want to spend as little money as possible on this horrible[1:1] ecosystem… Android makes zero sense. While iPhones may be more expensive up front, they offer better hardware and longer software support. Apple devices are useable in practice for twice as long as their equivalent Android devices, yet do not cost twice as much.[2]

So today I bought a refurbished iPhone 13 mini with a new battery. Along with a case and screen protector, it cost around 300 Euros. This is a 4-year-old phone. If I can get it to last another 4 years (until 2029) (with perhaps one battery replacement), I can expect TCO to be around 7 Euros per month. My stretch goal will be to get it to last 6 years, bringing TCO down to less than 5 Euros per month.

Footnotes

  1. I like to think of mobile device ownership cost in per-month terms. It makes it feel like a subscription. However since basically everyone needs a mobile device in order to function in modern society, it’s more like a tax than a subscription. And most of those taxes go directly to either Google or Apple. ↩︎ ↩︎

  2. Of course if you go the iPhone route, you’re giving away a lot of software freedom and replacing it with a walled garden. Though honestly folks, if you want reasonably-priced software freedom, Android (including its derivatives) isn’t the place to go. The mobile ecosystem is broken, and will stay broken until our governments figure out a way to uproot this insane Google / Apple duopoly. Choose a device that gives you a reasonable degree of privacy, use it when you’re forced to, and get back to a Linux device for everything else. ↩︎

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