My iPhone 7 Purchase Experience with AT&T Wireless

First off, a disclosure: I’m a long-time AT&T Wireless customer and am also a long-time Apple fan, having had iPhones since the very first one was released into the market. In fact, I switched from Verizon to AT&T about six months before the iPhone 1 came out, and remember I had a Blackberry Pearl, which was itself a dramatic improvement from the clunky Motorola flip-phone. Imagine, an actual keyboard! A trackball! A color screen and Internet capabilities.

Then Apple released the iPhone 1 and redefined what a mobile device could do and how the experience of using a mobile device could be like having a tiny tablet rather than a 1960’s clunker that just kept shrinking and shrinking.  Heck, prior to the iPhone, the idea of going to the phone manufacturer to buy a phone was plain weird.

I’ve never done the overnight line but I have definitely spent hours in line, waiting for the chance to walk in the Apple Store and pick out the device of my choice. Peculiar, really, for a commodity gadget, but I’ve definitely enjoyed almost a decade of iPhone development and evolution, both in the operating system and the increasingly sophisticated hardware.

When Apple announced the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus, I wanted one. Far more water resistant and with a different built-in taptic system, a better camera, and, yes, the brave new world of no audio jack. All good. Even with my pristine iPhone 6s that was barely a year old. It’s okay: When you’re in the tech business, you really do need to keep up, even when sometimes the cutting edge can leave a few droplets of blood on the floor. 🙂

So I needed to figure out how to acquire the specific iPhone 7 configuration I wanted (Black, 128GB, not the 7 Plus) and how to maximize the value of my iPhone 6s in the market. Sell the old one, buy a new one, and the chain can continue, year after year, unabated, as I get points for being a good consumer. That’s how it works, right?

Gazelle is well known as a company that purchases used devices and equipment, so I started there, pricing out the cash value of my pristine iPhone 6s:

$272? Seems pretty low for a phone that goes for $500 or more on eBay in good condition. Turns out that AT&T Wireless has a Trade-in Program too, however, so I checked there:

$300? Better. $28 better than Gazelle, in fact, and that’s significant, a 10% better offer. Still, like selling a used car to the dealer versus through a third party, selling a used iPhone, whether in beautiful condition or not, is going to be yield less samolians if you go through a company.

Instead, I researched used iPhone 6s prices on eBay and determined that $450 for the device would be a pretty sweet deal. No Craigslist for me, though. I just posted about it on Facebook:

I have a lot of friends and followers on Facebook — you can follow me too: Dave Taylor on Facebook — and within thirty minutes I had a solid offer from a friend. Ten minutes later a second friend reached out with interest, but he’d missed the window of opportunity.

Nice. So with just a little work I went from $272 from Gazelle to $450 from a private party, a friend to whom I could also in good conscience send a few cases as a perk too!

Now the big job: Buying the new iPhone 7.

Lining up overnight, or even that morning, is not for me. I also don’t like the risk that I could line up and then the configuration I seek not be available in the store anyway (the iPhone 7 Plus and iPhone 7 in jet black were both sold out by sales day). Fortunately you can purchase an iPhone online, either through Apple.com or AT&T.

But AT&T Wireless has a couple of really interesting purchase plans that make the entire affair far more interesting than just entering a credit card number and being charged $750 or more: AT&T Next and AT&T Next Every Year. The former is a 30 month payment plan that lets you acquire a new phone with as little as zero down, and the latter is the same, but with a 24-month window.

Ah, but the nuances are where the program is so cool: If you’re willing to trade in your phone and you’ve paid a minimum of 50% of the original purchase, price you can upgrade to a new phone at any time. Which means that if you’ve paid even 51% of the cost of your phone by the time the next generation model comes out (the iPhone 8 / Anniversary edition in Sept 2017), there’s no remainder to pay off, no contract to pay out of, just a newer phone at the end of the the tunnel, year after year. Nice!

Note: Apple has a similar program too, the iPhone Upgrade Program, with minimum monthly payments of $32/mo.

AT&T Wireless won the coin toss, so I went to AT&T’s Upgrade page the night of the pre-order window opening and waited until the countdown timer ran down:

This is one time I’m glad I don’t live in Boston or New York: 12pm Pacific = 3am their time. 1am was late enough… 🙂

And at 1am precisely, the countdown page vanished and I quickly moved into Express Checkout with a 128GB black iPhone 7 in my digital shopping cart:

Notice the pricing options: AT&T Next offers an upgrade every two years, and AT&T Next Ever Year offers an upgrade every year with a 24-month agreement. I fiddled around a bit on down payments so I could have a nice even number for my monthly and settled on a $270 down payment. The result: $20/mo added to my AT&T bill.

Not too bad at all. A click and…

Though the countdown timer was relative to Pacific time, the orders were placed relative to Eastern time, so you can see my order was placed at 3:02am Eastern / 1:02am Mountain / 12:02am Pacific. Speedy, eh?

The hard part was then waiting a week for the phone, but just before noon on Sept 16, the FedEx truck pulled up and delivered a package from “AI” (Apple Inc.) which I opened to find:

Yeah, I was pretty psyched. A fair statement!

I plugged the new phone into my MacBook Pro and iTunes took over:

Some hours later (I had a bit of a hiccup with the initial restore from backup process, a problem Apple fixed by that evening after multiple people reported the issue) I had a fully functional iPhone 7, black, 128GB, with all my music, apps and data ready to go. And oh, is it a beautiful new device with its stunning, crystal clear screen and unimaginably thin design.

All in all, other than having to stay up late to get my order in at the right moment (I watched bad horror films to keep me awake) the entire process was extraordinarily easy and painless, thanks to the team at AT&T Wireless and my wonderful circle of Facebook friends.

Now, how about you? Didja get a new iPhone 7 and if so, what was your experience with the transaction?