How long must you work to buy an iPhone 13 Pro?

According to online retailer Picodi the average New Zealander has to work 8.4 days to afford an Apple iPhone 13 Pro.

This is 0.6 days less than it took a year ago to buy an equivalent iPhone 12.

New Zealanders have it easy compared to people in Turkey. There the average worker needs to toil for 92.5 days to buy a new iPhone. It takes the average Pom 10.8 days.

Things are easier in Australia. There it takes 6.4 days. In the United States it takes a mere 5.9 days. The Swiss have it best of all. They only have to show up at the workplace for 4.4 days to earn enough for a new iPhone.

It’s all relative

Younger readers have no idea how these matters have progressed over the years.

In 1987 when I was working for The Dominion in Wellington, I calculated that it would take a Wellington bus driver over three months to afford a PC. It would take them more than four months to buy a Mac.

Knowing how long it takes to buy an iPhone is useful when it comes to making a buying decision.

Buying decisions

Let’s say you are tossing up the merits of an iPhone 13 Pro and an Android phone that costs half the price. You know it would take 6.4 days to buy the iPhone.

Simple maths tells you the Android would mean 3.2 days of your labour.

You may also know you can do things a little more efficiently on the iPhone. This might not work for everyone, but stay with me, the thought experiment is useful whatever your circumstances.

That spanking new iPhone 13 Pro should be good for three years. You can expect to keep a modern phone for at least three years, more if you are careful. So, in round numbers, you have to work one day for each of those iPhone owning years.

Assuming you use the phone every day, you’d come out ahead if the iPhone saved you four minutes a day. That is, one day divided by 365.

This is all before you take the resale value of the two phones into account. After three years an iPhone would lose less value than an Android.