If you are on a mobile share plan than Next could be better for you, but half of AT&T's customers still have unlimited and it doesn't work for us.
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Apple Store No Longer Sells iPhone With 2-Year Contract on AT&T
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They are simply confusing you. Take AT&T Next 18. Take the full retail price of your phone and divide by 24. This is what you pay monthly.
Now you have two choices. One, pay this monthly cost for 24 months and you own your phone free and clear. Hey, free financing!
Or, after 18 months you can trade-in your phone and upgrade (Next program restarts at this point). Essentially, you are selling your phone to AT&T for the cost of 6 monthly installments. This is, generally, a bad idea since the phone will get more value on the private market, but it is one way AT&T profits from this plan.
HobeSoundDarryl
macrumors G5
Is AT&T doing away with 2 year contracts all together or just for the iPhone?
So much for potentially getting a 6S+ with my subsidy.
might be worth holding onto my jailbroken 6+ for quite some time then
I may not be seeing this correctly, but I think people are missing a key concept here. There's still a phone payment plan for those that can't buy one outright. The differences are that now you can get a new phone for $0 instead of $99 or $199 up front and, when you've paid it off over 12-24 months, that monthly fee stops hitting your bill if you keep using that phone for longer than- say- a 12 or 24-month term.
From that perspective, it looks like a much better way to go. I don't see anything in this that makes it impossible for the cash-challenged buyer to get a new iPhone much like they would in the traditional 2-year contract. They still get a new phone, probably by needing less money up front. They still have a portion of the monthly fee they are paying go toward paying off the "subsidy" for the phone.
What appears to be different is at the end. Instead of the monthly payment staying the same should one keep using that phone beyond the 2-year term (even if they've long since paid off the cost of the phone), somewhere during the 2 years, they will pay for the phone in full and their monthly bill will go down by whatever portion of the bill was allocated to paying for the phone.
Very simply: if service was $50 and paying for the phone $35...
-in the old way (2 year contract), you were set up to pay $85 for as long as you wanted to stick with that phone. If you stuck with it beyond 2 years, you kept paying $85 which converted the $35 that was going toward the phone to added profit for AT&T
-in the new way (no contract), you might still be set up to pay the $85 but once the phone portion of that bill is paid in full, the monthly would drop to $50.
Now, I just made up the $50 and $35 to illustrate the concept but hopefully the illustration does it's job. And this says nothing about the quality of Next service itself from AT&T vs. someone's former 2-year plan benefits.
While I agree that life is too short for this kind of things. However, your situation is limited to your case, you $19 per month is because you are not a heavy user.
A friend of mine like to stream sports, he pulls around 10-12GB a month, if he was on Ting, he'd actually be paying through the nose. Ting is terribly expensive when it comes to data.
Very few people keep a phone more than 2 years these days. A very large percentage upgrade every 2 years or every year. This means most people won't save anything and instead will end up paying more.
Actually you don't lose your unlimited plan on the NEXT program. I did next on my fathers account and it didn't change his data plan
You can do even better buy buying on the used market or even refurbished. You may even save tax
Unlimited plans are a entirely different beast and since they're grandfathered plans, comparing them to today's plans is silly. Your objection is to AT&T ending unlimited plans, not to AT&T Next as a program, which is more transparent and better than the previous contract plans for equivalent amounts of data.
That isn't true. I'm on the Next 12 plan. That means after 18 months I can upgrade without giving up my iPhone. I probably will just pay off what is remaining when the 6S comes out so I can upgrade without giving up my iPhone. I like to give my old one to the wife.
HobeSoundDarryl
macrumors G5
They should set themselves up with a phone portion payoff on a 1-year scale. Then, they can either sell the phone to someone else or trade it in without having any surplus debt to pay for the old phone.
Otherwise, it looks like they can simply upgrade and if they still owed on the old phone, they just pile that cost onto the new bill. If I'm not mistaken, in the 2-year contract, those wanting to upgrade every year had to deal with the very same issue of remaining debt on the old phone in some way.
Yup it looks like you will have to give it up. My wife is in the same boat
Ah thank you! There is a lot of conflicting information being tossed around.
With next, can you choose to pay more than the monthly installments they quote you to pay it off sooner?
What about when you trade in a previous phone? Is that taken off the price and you pay even less monthly?
I got $200 off my iPhone 6 for trading in my 5. I'd be interested in what one would pay monthly after that trade-in or if they're doing away with that.
I got $200 off my iPhone 6 for trading in my 5. I'd be interested in what one would pay monthly after that trade-in or if they're doing away with that.
The people who claim that are unable or unwilling to read. https://m.att.com/shopmobile/wireless/modals/next-faqs.html
Not completely true, if I want to upgrade I have to turn my phone in, and I can't sell it to pay for the cost of the next phone. I have been getting away with upgrading for $50 bucks at most when I can sell my old phone.
Under the next plan, I am giving that money (profit from selling old phone) to ATT.
Great... I guess they finally realized people were always going to need their cell phone service, so there is no need to reward "loyalty" anymore.
Guess I'll call AT&T and tell them I'm moving to another carrier... let's see what they can do then.
Guess I'll call AT&T and tell them I'm moving to another carrier... let's see what they can do then.
It would be silly if 50% of AT&T's business didn't come from them.
NEXT is trash. I've talked to ATT 3 times about switching 2 unlimited devices and 2 other iphones over to this program. Each time it turns out NEXT costs 400.00 more a year. 2-Year contracts is all I'll deal with, if I'm forced to NEXT then i'll let my contracts run out and head elsewhere.
My wife and I bit the bullet last December and purchased two 128 GB 6 Pluses unlocked and contract free. Cost about $2300, but now I am no longer tied to anyone and can re-sell my phone and upgrade whenever I please going forward.
Do you really believe that a phone company would make a change like this that only benefits the customer rather than increases profit to them?
So much this....
It would be nice for carriers to show you up front what your costs would be over a 2 year period.
In any case I pay 130 a month for 3 lines and 15 GB of data. On next. But then again I like buying unlocked phones outright...
There is some fluff and white noise mixed into some comments. For the longest time, when one signed a 2 y ear contract, the cost would be set, at say, $40 per month. That included the subsidy in the cost of the phone. Then att went along and started discounting the monthly fee to $15 which offered the appearance of the sub removal. -$25
While both plans were in place, those on the next plan took inn the same $40-25 line plan while those under contact would carry a $40 line fee.
Now. When you start to add THOSE fees up, the cost will actually be the same over the 24 months. Do the math on these numbers. I have one on next and another on contract on my plan. I see both. And I did these numbers.
While both plans were in place, those on the next plan took inn the same $40-25 line plan while those under contact would carry a $40 line fee.
Now. When you start to add THOSE fees up, the cost will actually be the same over the 24 months. Do the math on these numbers. I have one on next and another on contract on my plan. I see both. And I did these numbers.
Why did you subtract your iPhone 5 from one calculation but not the other? If you're selling the phone, you have to subtract it from both or none.