iPhone 5 pricing in New Zealand

Today, the iPhone 5 went up for pre-order in New Zealand. Not via Apple, only via carriers right now. The prices are pretty steep, and I wanted to look at whether or not the plans actually offer any value vs other plans on offer.

I didn’t realize how expensive things get until I made a nice spreadsheet to see it all, so it’s good to visualize it this way. A couple of things to note:

• You can’t buy the iPhone on 2degrees, so I assume full handset pricing with their cheap plans
• Some plans don’t have an equivalent so I substituted the closest plan within $10
• Green indicates the best of whatever metric
• This doesn’t factor in early termination fees
• This is based on RRP of the 16GB iPhone 5 (the most popular model)
• Update: I’ve added the maximum Early Termination Charge to the table

I’ve deduced a few things from this:

• It’s expensive to buy an iPhone outright (or in general) and use a similar plan over two years on another network, so contracts seem to be the way to go if you can commit.
• Telecom doesn’t seem to understand how important data or SMS is to iPhone users and only gives a boatload of minutes instead.
• The lower the plan, the cheaper it is to actually buy the phone outright and just go on prepaid (observe the $59 Telecom plan VS 2Degrees’ $59 off-contract)
• Vodafone doesn’t have the iPhone on offer without a plan of $80/mth or more.
• It’s still the case that if you want more than 1GB of data, you’re going to need to spend well over $100. I had hoped this would change soon.

I can’t believe how exorbitant it all actually is over two years, and how little these plans actually change year after year. I could buy a small car for this much money.

Enjoy your new shiny gizmos! :)