In 2017 my employer gave me £1150 to buy my own iPhone X for work. I knew I would not be working there forever and decided to start saving £10 per month in monthly saver accounts, 2 years later I left the company and they didn’t want the phone back as it was too old. Yay!
I continued saving every month in accounts ranging from ~4-8% interest and my most recent monthly saver just matured and my fund has reached £1121.64
I’ve also been really savvy with my mobile plans over the last 5 years, my current monthly charge is £6 but has been as low as £3, and has absolutely been less than £5 on average. So my mobile phone costs have been on average £15pm.
The iPhoneX is not getting software/security updates anymore, but there is nothing really worth having in this years upgrade:
- 120hz vs. 120hz with ProMotion
- MagSafe - meh!
- 12MP vs. 48MP camera with better low light
- 4G vs. 5G - but HD video streaming works perfectly on 4G.
Do I keep saving and ignore the upgrade again? Or am I silly for running a phone with no security updates because I’m not that interested in a better camera?
Either way I thought my little-by-little saving to get something nice and a little extravagant was worth sharing. The number of people with £50-£60 phone contracts is crazy.
first off, there is no spyware shipped with iOS, iOS is the spyware. aside from apple being repeatedly caught lying about the extent of its spying, the convoluted and cumbersome iCloud decoupling with the unencrypted backups and the fact that you have a covert peer-to-peer network running on your own hardware that you can’t turn off or opt out of should be more than enough to give those fucks zero benefit of doubt.
second, if you’ve been on iOS since the iPhone X days, you have no idea what’s possible on this side of the fence. that’s why I’m suggesting getting a cheap, yet capable, used phone and figuring out things without breaking the budget. you could get a flagship pixel or whatnot for the same purpose, but this is the beauty of android - a $50 phone runs the same software as a $1000 one.
I assure you, you’re plenty safe and secure with a regular, supported lineageOS build, unless you’re pursued by nation-state actors and such. the postmarketOS and friends note was to illustrate the plethora of options you got with the same piece of hardware; none of them are ready for prime time.
I’ve not seen any credible reporting of Apple using or selling user data, do you have any links to real investigative journalism into this?
Regarding iCloud decoupling I have a VM running iTunes which backs up my phone once a week, I’ve no complaints with that process and it saves the iCloud monthly charges.