I wont spend more than $250 on a new smartphone

I won’t spend more than $250 on a phone. I know what you’re thinking: that doesn’t sound like a lot of money considering how expensive some phones are these days. (And by these days, I mean yesterday, and by expensive, I mean the Pixel Fold’s eye-watering $1,800 price tag.)

But yesterday, I also ordered a new Pixel 7A and, after two years of rebates on Google Fi, it will come out to a clean $250. That’s the same $250 I spent on the Pixel 6A last year, which I will hand over to my partner to replace the Pixel 4A 5G that I bought in 2020, which also cost me… you guessed it, $250.

It’s not that I have always lived by this rule. I bought my first iPhone in 2008, the iPhone 3G, whose 16GB variant cost me $299 on a two-year contract. Before...

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