Q: If I decide to buy one of the new iPhones, should I get it from Apple or my wireless carrier?
A: In the bad old days — by which I mean, up until just over a decade ago — you had no choice. Carriers sold phones at what seemed like a low price, except that you’d make that up in higher service fees that stayed high even after the carrier had recouped its subsidy of the phone price.
Now you have a choice. And in most cases, that choice should be Apple. That company lets you buy an iPhone on the same installment-plan terms as most of their carriers — but without selling you an iPhone electronically locked to their services.
This option, however, won’t jump out at you on Apple’s site. You’ll have to pick out an iPhone and a carrier, then select “Show more payment options.” With AT&T, Sprint or Verizon, you’ll then see an “Apple iPhone Payments” choice listed that has you make 24 monthly payments on a phone that comes unlocked, ready to use with any other carrier.
Of those three choices, the Sprint and Verizon phones offer maximum compatibility with U.S. services, as PCMag’s Sascha Segan advised in a post after the iPhone 7’s debut.
Apple’s installment-plan option provides the biggest advantage over AT&T’s comparable choice, since that one leaves your phone locked to the carrier until you pay it off. So you can’t switch to another carrier, and if you go overseas you’re stuck with AT&T’s international roaming, which while better than before at $10 a day still costs more than a prepaid SIM card bought overseas.
With Sprint, your options are either leasing the phone — on terms that over two years add up to the same total cost as buying it — or paying the full price upfront. With a lease, the phone also stays locked to Sprint domestically until you pay it off. Sprint will, however, unlock phones for international use on request, and its own roaming option — free but slow 2G data, free texting and calls at 20 cents a minute — isn’t bad.
Verizon, meanwhile, doesn’t lock its own phones — so you’re not locked into its $10/day international roaming — but does offer installment-plan payments. So in that case, you might as well decide based on which store is closer or which company you like better overall.
What about T-Mobile? Apple’s site will offer a no-interest-for-a-year financing deal tied to getting a new Barclaycard Apple Rewards Visa. T-Mobile has a normal installment-payment plan but, again, that keeps the phone locked to T-Mobile until you pay off the device. It offers international roaming on the same terms as Sprint.
If you plan on replacing this new iPhone in a year, I would ask you to reconsider. The pace of phone evolution has slowed, while you can count on Apple to provide years of software updates. Most customers now keep their phones for from two to three years, analyst Jan Dawson of Jackdaw Research said.
But if you’re a compulsive upgrader, Sprint’s lease plan will let you trade in an old iPhone for a new one after 12 months of payments. Apple’s iPhone Upgrade Program allows the same flexibility but it costs about $5 more a month by virtue of including the company’s AppleCare+ device-protection plan — which could be a good thing if you’re accident-prone with phones.
Whatever choice you make, I will offer one other suggestion: Please don’t line up to buy a new iPhone on the day it goes on sale. This will be the 10th anniversary of that particular ritual; it’s time to find a new hobby.