About Apple iPhone, From My Eyes...

Recently, I came across an article from the February 2014 issue of Chip Malaysia magazine, detailing how much Apple (as in Steve Job's company) earned from the owner of their most recent iPhone line-ups namely the iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C.

How much Apple gets from the new iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C owners

What an eye opener! However, I would say that the article dismissed the intangible aspect such as the time cost and ideas involved in building these as well as sales and marketing efforts in promoting these products, but again, with profit margin of about 80%, it's definitely pretty high if you ask me.

I will not comment if it's wise or not for people to go after these products as it is up to personal preferences and the definition of the word "wise" is quite subjective. I will instead share my personal experience regarding owning an iPhone.

My iPhone 4

When the iPhone first came out in 2007, it was all the hype. I was no exception attracted to this device too but with price tag of over RM2,000 a unit for a base model, I just couldn't afford this especially when it was the time I just entered the work force. So, instead of getting an iPhone, I got myself an iPod base model for about RM1,100 that looked and functioned very similar to an iPhone, except no calls can be made. The user experience is almost similar to that of the real iPhone. Performance was fluid and personally, I found it very user-friendly with great functions and it only made me to want to get the real iPhone even more. In 2011, I got myself an iPad 2. Eventually I synchronized all my data to my 2 devices and was feeling a bit, lacking of one more Apple product that I hadn't gotten, the iPhone, but because of the hefty price tag, I never felt it was worth the money until October 2012. I finally took the plunge, to get myself an iPhone 4, second hand, for RM900.

You must be dying asking me why not just get a brand new iPhone 5 (came out in September 2012) instead. For me personally, I just cannot get past the logic of spending over RM2,000 for a phone especially IT devices that gets obsolete very fast. Exception may be applied to iPhone compared to other Android phones though.

My HTC Butterfly

Today, I have just sold my iPhone 4, for RM480 (heard it will be resold at RM750 by a friend). That's how slow the value of iPhone depreciate, and the good reason investing in Apple products, haha! Back to my story on why the hell I wanted to sell it since I was so dying for an iPhone? Blame the fucking blood sucking Apple! (I'm starting to lose my coolness every time I talk about this). IOS 7, their latest iPhone operating system ruined it all. My iPhone 4 became so sluggish that it freezed quite often and for me, became very unusable. Luckily I did not upgrade my iPod. I upgraded my iPad 2 to IOS 7 too but fortunately, it's only a bit slower but still usable.

I decided I had enough and sold the iPhone 4 before it still has some more value to recover some of my cost to purchase a new phone. My new phone is a very unknown phone in Malaysia market, the HTC butterfly or droid in US market. It costed my RM1,300 but with spec higher than the current iPhone (1.5 quad-core and 2GB of RAM) which cost in the range of RM2,000 today. For the time being, I am quite satisfied with the money I paid for the performance I get from this phone. Will blog about this phone some other time.

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