So if you're thinking about getting an iPhone 4S, you may be thinking that actually signing up to a 24-month contract with an operator just looks too expensive.
It turns out that's not the case: once you calculate how much the contract costs if you add on the pure cost of the phone (which can be found on the online Apple store), you can find some deals that are cheaper than buying the phone outright and then having a SIM-only contract. (We've used GiffGaff as the SIM-only example, using its £15 per month tariff. This is a cheaper tariff than any of the mobile operator is presently offering.)
It turns out, for example, that for any of the models of phone, over the life of the contract it's cheaper to go with O2 or Orange than just to buy the phone and have the SIM-only contract. Note however that you might not get the same details: GiffGaff says it offers unlimited web, where the other two do not.
The entire phone contract field is a thicket, in fact. The prices offered here are generally for people who are getting a contract for the first time, or upgrading from a feature phone to a smartphone (and so need data) for the first time. If you already have a smartphone (including an old iPhone) or you're on a contract of some sort, you may be able to negotiate a better deal. You should also check what it is that the "minutes" deals offer - some will offer free landline calls, some will have cheaper mobile rates than others, and so on. Have a look at your existing pattern of calls, texting and data usage (if any) to see which best suits you.
These spreadsheets are not comprehensive, because the possible combinations involved are enormous. For O2 (which announced prices late on Friday) we have assumed the normal contract plus the £5 per month data "bolt on" which gives you 500MB, and thus makes it generally comparable with the other offerings.
Not all the contracts are exactly £20, £25 etc per month, but where they vary, we have calculated the TCO using the exact contract price. Prices have been rounded up to the nearest pound in all cases.
From our calculations, the best deals generally come from Three. The most expensive ones - generally (but not always) - are with Vodafone.
But here are the pictures which compare the costs of the phones. The cheapest phone and contract overall: Three, for the 16GB iPhone 4S, which costs a total (over the 24 months) of £849; that's for a phone which costs £499 unlocked, on a contract of £30 per month (which works out to an effective saving of £370 on the total cost. To get the same from buying just the unlocked phone, you'd need to be on a contract costing £14.60 per month.
Generally, Three comes out cheapest in many of the contract plans if you're looking at large data or phone use, though O2 and Orange also work out cheaper. On multiple occasions, at least one (and often two or three) of O2, Three and Orange works out cheaper than a SIM-only contract. Note though - I'll emphasis again - this doesn't say anything about minutes, texts or data (which are very hard to compare directly in this sort of analysis).
Note also that the graphs use a false origin, starting at £700.
Here's the graph for the 16GB iPhone 4S:
iPhone 4S 16GB total cost of ownership, 24 months. Click for larger version. And now here it is for the 32GB model:
iPhone 4S 32GB total cost of ownership, 24 months. Click for larger version. Finally, for the 64GB model:
iPhone 4S 64GB total cost of ownership, 24 months. Click for larger version. And because it's more complex than it seems - and you need to make careful comparisons between the different offerings based on what you need in terms of minutes, texts and data. (The data is very important on a smartphone, of course. For most people, 500MB is plenty in a month.)
Here's the data we used to calculate the TCO graphs.
And here's the minutes, texts and web information.
| Minutes | O2 | 100 | 200 | 300 | 600 | 900 | 1,200 | U | |
| Orange | 50 | 125 | 200 | U | U | U | U | ||
| Vodafone | 100 | 300 | 600 | 900 | 1,200 | 3,000 | |||
| T-Mobile | 100 | 300 | 600 | 900 | 1,200 | U | |||
| Three | 300 | 500 | 2,000 | 900 | |||||
| GiffGaff | 400 | ||||||||
| Texts | O2 | U | U | U | U | U | U | ||
| Orange | 50 | 125 | 200 | U | U | U | U | ||
| Vodafone | 500 | U | U | U | U | U | |||
| T-Mobile | 100 | 300 | 500 | 500 | 500 | 500 | |||
| Three |
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