An ordinary smartphone should be seen as an electronic good with a short lifespan. The longest operating time of a top smartphone for me was 1 year and 1 month. And this without interfering in any way with it, without dropping it in water, without damaging it, in normal use.
Taking into account this aspect, if we take into account the price, for an average phone in terms of performance, which costs, let’s say, 3600 lei, we pay phone manufacturers 300 lei per month. Or for many 300 lei per month or thereabouts is a mortgage.
And not everyone uses a smartphone for a year. Others after 6 months trade it in, selling the old phone at a discounted or very discounted price. From which it follows that we pay, or most of them pay about 500 lei per month, from their hard-earned money, to own a more or less top-notch smartphone. The amount is indicative, but I think it’s like that on average. Let’s just take the case of iPhones of 6-7000 RON.
And then why do we need an expensive phone? A smartphone is necessary for everyone. First of all, the basic function of a smartphone, the most important, that’s what I mean, is to read emails. You can also make a phone call with one with keys. The next important function from my point of view is searching on Google or other search engines. You need a doctor, a clinic… you search on the net, you don’t bother bothering your neighbor anymore. You can do this without a laptop anytime, anywhere.
The order of importance is not necessarily the actual order of use, because most people use a smartphone for pictures to post on Facebook the muffins, the tree, the red eggs, the latest makeup, the muscles, or the luxurious locations that others only dream of from an unheated room in -a miserable studio apartment.
How expensive should the phone be? How many GB of RAM should it have, how much hard drive? We should first think about what we are using it for. It is clear that if you are an influencer on Insta, you need great pictures. And then you buy the phone that takes the best pictures. If you’re a traveler, you travel, that’s what you make a living from, you buy your phone that takes the best pictures like this.
If you’re a businessman, you buy a phone with which you can read your emails, because that’s the most important thing, to read your emails, and you’ll leave the camera quality aside, because that’s not what you use. Now it also depends on the degree of development of your business. If you’re the CEO of a company or your own, you might need a phone that moves fast and has more memory to install all kinds of apps needed to coordinate your team.
The lifespan of a smartphone in my case was one year. I took it in for repair, drove it for another six months, drove it once more for another 6. And once again, another few months. This was an additional financial effort on my part, which I don’t think covered the amount of money that phone brought me.
We buy phones, if we were to think logically and practically, for utility and less to brag, to impress. As disappointment is also normal, for some, thus raising their self-esteem, you can also buy the latest iPhone. But this one is…mortal. That is, you will put 7000-8000 lei in a phone that will not last you a lifetime, but one or two years, in the lucky case. The mentality of the smartphone buyer…hardened up, is to buy the latest, newest model. We don’t put up with it and I have nothing to object to.
What I want with this article is to make you understand what phone you need and how you can settle for the iPhone 11 (an example) instead of the iPhone 16 that has a Tera of memory, which you will never use, and not even 30 percent. And then? What are you doing? What phone will you buy when it’s time to buy another one when the old one stops working?mIf you want to buy the iPhone 16, buy it, because that’s what you want! If you want to be thrifty, manage your money well, and spend it all on one phone, but see that phone as a way to make some extra money, go for it!