In 2017 my employer gave me £1150 to buy my own iPhone X for work. I knew I would not be working there forever and decided to start saving £10 per month in monthly saver accounts, 2 years later I left the company and they didn’t want the phone back as it was too old. Yay!
I continued saving every month in accounts ranging from ~4-8% interest and my most recent monthly saver just matured and my fund has reached £1121.64
I’ve also been really savvy with my mobile plans over the last 5 years, my current monthly charge is £6 but has been as low as £3, and has absolutely been less than £5 on average. So my mobile phone costs have been on average £15pm.
The iPhoneX is not getting software/security updates anymore, but there is nothing really worth having in this years upgrade:
- 120hz vs. 120hz with ProMotion
- MagSafe - meh!
- 12MP vs. 48MP camera with better low light
- 4G vs. 5G - but HD video streaming works perfectly on 4G.
Do I keep saving and ignore the upgrade again? Or am I silly for running a phone with no security updates because I’m not that interested in a better camera?
Either way I thought my little-by-little saving to get something nice and a little extravagant was worth sharing. The number of people with £50-£60 phone contracts is crazy.
so you got a phone that works for you but you still want to replace it because... idk, just 'cause.
you could spring for an used, ex-flasgship phone that was abandoned by its brand but still has lineageOS support. e.g. Poco F1 or Oneplus 6T fit that bill. I can get em locally in the $50-$100 region. that thing has a fast SDM845, 8 GB RAM, full LineageOS support and even postmarketOS, Mobian and Ubuntu touch support, you can swap the batteries, etc.
so for like 5% of your budget, you get a new toy to play with and test what life is like on the other side of the fence and possibly gradually ween yourself off the corpo spyware. so, if it scratches your itch for that kinda money, I'd call that frugal.
I’ve not heard of lineageOS until today, PostmarketOS looks interesting, but with so many different devices it’s got to be really hard to keep track of all the different distros and make sure nothing nefarious slips in.
In all likelihood I will need a ~£100 battery replacement soon, while my phone works for my current use case it is getting less secure and some apps have already dropped support for iOS16. I’m just planning for my future and thought my planning process might be interesting for other frugal people.
While your options are more frugal they are probably not secure enough for me, but I will take a look.
I’ve not seen any credible reports of Apple devices containing spyware inherently.
first off, there is no spyware shipped with iOS, iOS is the spyware. aside from apple being repeatedly caught lying about the extent of its spying, the convoluted and cumbersome iCloud decoupling with the unencrypted backups and the fact that you have a covert peer-to-peer network running on your own hardware that you can't turn off or opt out of should be more than enough to give those fucks zero benefit of doubt.
second, if you've been on iOS since the iPhone X days, you have no idea what's possible on this side of the fence. that's why I'm suggesting getting a cheap, yet capable, used phone and figuring out things without breaking the budget. you could get a flagship pixel or whatnot for the same purpose, but this is the beauty of android - a $50 phone runs the same software as a $1000 one.
I assure you, you're plenty safe and secure with a regular, supported lineageOS build, unless you're pursued by nation-state actors and such. the postmarketOS and friends note was to illustrate the plethora of options you got with the same piece of hardware; none of them are ready for prime time.
I’ve not seen any credible reporting of Apple using or selling user data, do you have any links to real investigative journalism into this?
Regarding iCloud decoupling I have a VM running iTunes which backs up my phone once a week, I’ve no complaints with that process and it saves the iCloud monthly charges.