Your Phone Loses Value Pretty Fast (Unless It’s an iPhone)
Priceonomics’ Rohin Dhar says they firmly believe that resale value is the best objective indicator of product quality, and if you wanted to figure out the best cell phone, you could look at all the reviews, test out all the phones, talk to all the experts, but still your assessment will be subjective. Or you could let the market tell you which phones are the highest quality by seeing which ones best retain their value over time.
Priceonomics phone pricing data strongly indicates that Apple phones are a better value than smartphones on other platforms. The market has spoken, and Android and Blackberrys do not age well.
“Car buyers know that depreciation matters,” says Dhar. “Some cars lose much of their value the second you drive them off the lot. Others cars you can sell after a few years and recoup most of your initial payment. Cars with high resale value have strong demand, high reliability, and happy owners. A high resale value is the market telling you, this is a good car.”
Because Priceonomics has built the first price guide for used phones, it is now possible to measure phone resale value and depreciation to see what the market suggests are the best phones. They measure depreciation by comparing a phone’s current used price to its new price (without a contract) the day it was released. They examined all iPhone models and the 70 most popular Androids and 30 most popular BlackBerry models, then split phones into five different cohorts (newly released, 1, 2, 3, and 4 year-old phones). they then calculated which phones had the best resale by cohort, as well as which platforms in aggregate tended to retain their value the most.
The highest quality phones should have the best resale values over time and crappier phones should depreciate the fastest. The evidence is clear – the winner is the iPhone.
Also, iPhones have a reputation for being premium products, while Androids have a more democratic marketing angle (BlackBerrys consumer marketing angle appears to be indecipherable). However, the total cost of ownership of an iPhone is in fact the lowest of all platforms.
For the full report visit here:
http://priceonomics.com/phones/#cell-phone-depreciation