Everyday · a habit, redirected
You bought the iPhone every year. You could've bought Apple.
About $1,100 a year, every year, on the newest flagship. Here's what buying the company instead might have done.
$1,100 a year on the upgrade, set aside since 2015
$11,642 spent
could have grown into
$25,111
in the S&P 500 · grew 2.16× · +116%
Every cycle the flagship Pro launches around eleven hundred dollars, and every year a lot of people pay it for the newest one. That's roughly eleven hundred dollars a year, on the same calendar, like clockwork. The phone is genuinely good — this isn't a knock on it. The thought experiment is just to take that yearly upgrade budget and imagine it pointed at the market on the same schedule instead.
The quiet irony writes itself: one of the assets in the comparison is Apple itself. You bought the product every year; you could have owned a slice of the company that sells it. Either way the growth came from the asset, not the abstinence — see it head-to-head or run the broad market on the S&P 500 since 2015.
The same $92/mo, across assets
Only assets with data for the whole window — no unearned head starts.
Not your number? Change the spend, the asset, or the year and watch it move.
You'd have
$25,111
from $11,642 set aside — up 116%.
— — — dashed line = total cash you put in
Common questions
- Is this a monthly or a yearly spend?
- Yearly — about $1,100 a year for one flagship upgrade each cycle, since Pro models launch around $1,099 to $1,199. We just spread that annual cost evenly so it flows through the same monthly math as every other scenario.
- Why is Apple in the comparison?
- Because it's the point. You can line the annual upgrade money up against Apple's own stock — owning the company versus buying its newest product every year. As always, the growth is the asset's, not the result of skipping the upgrade.