Apple has more new iPhone options at nearly every reasonable price band than it has before. Here’s which iPhone you should consider acquiring, whatever your price level happens to be.
Apple has more new iPhone options at nearly every reasonable price band than it has before. Here’s which iPhone you should consider acquiring, whatever your price level happens to be. Over the years, Apple has been keen to offer consumers a wide selection of iPhones, and at an equally wide range of prices. With relatively few exceptions, there’s practically an iPhone available at the majority of price points, from $399 at the lowest all the way up to $1,399. Of course, everyone has a different idea of how much they want to spend on an iPhone. Everyone who intends to buy an iPhone has a price in their head that they want to work around, or ideally below. We hope to make the choice of what iPhone to get easier, as regardless of how much you have available to spend, there’s probably an iPhone that fits the bill for you. If you were to check out the prices of all iPhone models Apple has in its current range, it covers quite an array of price levels. With the exception of two $50 gaps, Apple has practically covered every single price point between $399 and $1,399. Apple has managed to do this because its current iPhone range as sold through the online Apple Store includes devices from multiple generations, from the two-year-old iPhone XR and year-old iPhone 11 to the latest models, the iPhone 12 range. To round out the value end of the spectrum, there’s also the second-generation iPhone SE. This leaves consumers with a wide array of devices to choose from, which may seem bewildering until you consider that there’s a wide range in price at play. The graph above shows the overall range of the current catalog, and it’s clear to see that you could easily put together general price bands. If you break down the list to how much you want to spend, it only covers a few iPhone models at a time. Knowing how much you want to spend, the task becomes a case of working out which would be the best from a much smaller selection, without needing to consider the rest of the pricing spectrum. As the first graph shows, there’s still some crossover in price. While this means you may be able to pick between multiple models of iPhone, the exact amount you want to spend will also help err you towards one model or another. A key element of this is storage, as Apple charges more for higher-capacity models. In some cases, this could mean a trade-off for users, namely having to decide between getting a lesser iPhone model with more storage capacity or to risk it for a higher-specification model with lower storage amounts. To be fair, this has become considerably less of an issue as time marches on. In the days when consumers would be highly swayed by storage capacity due to its scarcity, it’s not really a problem anymore. Most of Apple’s current range of iPhones start at 64GB of storage, which a few years ago would have been the upper-end of the capacity scale. In most use cases,64GB will be enough for normal users. For power users who need that storage capacity, such as mobile gamers and those who work in fields such as videography, it becomes more of a concern, and that potential trade-off becomes a real issue. The extreme value end of the range consists of two models: The iPhone SE and the iPhone XR. Unlike the rest of the categories, there’s actually some hard decisions to make here, due to some considerable differences in features. The iPhone SE is the most intentionally-retro smartphone of the two, bearing a 4.7-inch Retina LCD screen with Touch ID. It’s also the physically smallest out of the two, and can be acquired very cheaply at the lowest 64GB capacity for $399.
