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I've already calculated the average price for my smartphones twice:
- The Average Price Per Month for My Smartphones so Far (2019-10 edition)
- The Average Price Per Month for My Smartphones so Far (2020-11 edition)
You might want to skim over the older article in order to learn about my motivation to do the calculation and also some development here in the past.
Now as I've switched from my beloved Pixel 4a to a Pixel 8, I'm going to post an update with the current figures.
After I've got some feedback, I decided to calculate the inflation-adjusted prices as the time differences increased since my first smartphone in 2009. I did this with that Austrian service in relation to 2024-09, the most current figures at time of this article.
For my new Pixel 8, I calculated two extrapolated numbers. The first one assumes that I'm going to replace it after the three years I do seem to use a smartphone on average. The second one shows the price per month for the case where I would replace the Pixel 8 only after it reached its end of life for update support. Both values are not inflation adjusted as I'd have to assume the inflation until then.
| Smartphone | From | Cost | Years | €/Month | Notes | €-index | € infl.-adj. | €/month |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HTC Magic | [2009-12-04 Fri] | 230 | 1.5 | 13.00 | 2nd hand price | 2010-01 | 348 | 19.68 |
| HTC Desire | [2011-05-26 Thu] | 410 | 2.4 | 14.01 | 2011-01 | 610 | 20.85 | |
| Nexus 5 | [2013-11-01 Fri] | 399 | 3.8 | 8.67 | 2014-01 | 549 | 11.93 | |
| OnePlus 5 | [2017-09-01 Fri] | 200 | 3.2 | 5.23 | company co-funded | 2018-01 | 261 | 6.83 |
| Pixel 4a | [2020-11-07 Sat] | 340 | 3.9 | 7.31 | 2021-01 | 422 | 9.07 | |
| Pixel 8 | [2024-09-22 Sun] | 614 | 2024-09 | |||||
| [2027-09-22 Wed] | 3.0 | 17.06 | replaced after average duration | N/A | N/A | 17.06 | ||
| [2030-10-12 Sat] | 6.1 | 8.45 | replaced at EoL support | N/A | N/A | 8.45 |
With the much higher price of the Pixel 8 in comparison to my previous phones, the price per month increases as well. However, with the inflation-adjustment, it is not as bad as it seemed. I kept the non-adjusted values in the table for comparison.
As you can read in my Pixel 8 article, my original plan was to get a Pixel 9 Pro 512GB. That would have had an enormous impact on the price per month as it would have cost much much more.
I would like to mention that my wife is still using my OnePlus5 running LineageOS. It doesn't get any firmware updates any more, yes. However, the rest is working just fine. Even the battery doesn't show significant levels of decay so far. If you calculate the price per month for that, you get down to slightly over inflation-adjusted 3€ per month. That's sensational. Some devices do seem to be designed for better longevity than others. However, I would not buy another OnePlus device any more for security reasons as well as because of my current fetish for GrapheneOS which only runs on Pixel phones.