Why it’s a bad time to buy an iPhone

New iPhones usually come out in September. This year, there are plenty of reasons to wait. WATCH

There are three things to remember when iPhone shopping:

1) The next iPhone will always be better than the current one.

2) No matter the season, Apple will always try to sell you an iPhone.

3) The next iPhones usually come out in September, at which point prices on at least some current iPhones will drop.

Add it all up and you get my patented iPhone No-Buy Rule (TM): Do not buy an iPhone once June rolls around. Wait for the new one.

This year, there are plenty of reasons to wait. The iPhone 6s, while a very good phone, failed to address some of the biggest complaints we have about our smartphones — most notably battery life. In the meantime, Samsung released the Galaxy S7, the best phone hardware you can buy right now. It’s got the camera to beat and can survive a dunk in the pool.

The next iPhone, however, could return Apple to the best-smartphone throne. According to my WSJ colleagues, it will look a lot like the current iPhone and (brace yourselves) completely lose the headphone port. But it’s likely to be thinner and more water resistant, with substantial camera improvements.

There’s another big reason to hold out: You’ll likely keep your next phone for a while. As the introduction of must-have features slows and carriers move away from two-year upgrades, people are hanging onto their devices longer. Now 12 per cent of iPhone owners have them for more than three years, up from 5 per cent two years ago, according to Consumer Intelligence Research Partners.

So choose your timing carefully, hold out for features that matter most to you — and do what you can to keep your old phone running.

What You’re Waiting for

Other than Apple’s top brass, no one knows for sure what the next iPhone will look like. Based on my colleagues’ reporting and some of my own, however, we can put together a lot of the puzzle, with a few key pieces still missing. An Apple spokesman declined to comment on any of the following.

The iPhone upgrade cycle has become as predictable as a Starbucks latte. One year, there’s a fresh design. The next year, the “S” year, it’s the same design with key upgrades like a fingerprint sensor or 3D Touch screen. This year, Apple is expected to break with that tick-tock tradition: The design won’t be a radical departure from the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6s.

Why now? I presume it’s because Apple knows we are upgrading less. Neil Cybart, an Apple analyst, agrees. “As we move away from frequent upgrades, each new model now is going to have two to three main selling points,” he says. (Apple did introduce an upgrade program last year, but it isn’t economically feasible for everyone.)

In the case of this year’s model, two of those points seem to be improved water resistance and a thinner design. For that, we’ll have to give up a port we’ve lived with since we popped tapes into Walkmans — the 3.5mm headphone jack. Instead, you’ll use a wireless headset or Apple earbuds that plug into the Lighting charging port.

My initial reaction, like others’, was complete outrage at Apple for making my beloved headphones as obsolete as my VHS tapes. But then I tried a little experiment: For the past five days, I have been living with a piece of tape over my iPhone’s headphone port, and I have yet to reach for the Xanax.

I work out with a pair of Bluetooth headphones and, at the suggestion of my colleague Geoff Fowler, I recently purchased Bose’s new noise-cancelling QC35 headset for work and travel. Yes, it’s annoying to have to charge them and deal with periodic pairing issues, but it’s also annoying to get tangled up like a marionette.

Whether this spells minor disturbance or major disaster is going to depend on your needs: Even if the next iPhone comes with a pair of Lightning headphones, you’ll still have to carry an old pair or an adaptor to plug into aeroplane entertainment systems and gym TVs. For all the people who have nice old headphones they want to plug into their new iPhone, Apple would probably sell a dongle of some sort. Bad news for you; great news for the dongle business.

Comparison: Samsung's Galaxy S6 smartphone, Apple's iPhone 6, and Samsung's Galaxy S6 Edge.

There’s evidence that the next iPhone will be substantially improved in areas where the iPhone 6s wasn’t. The larger Plus-model 5.5-inch iPhone is expected to have twin camera lenses to improve overall photo quality and add depth-of-field effects. While the Journal hasn’t confirmed it, this would make sense, given acquisitions Apple has made over the past few years. Two Israeli firms in particular, PrimeSense and LinX, specialise in three-dimensional imaging using multiple sensors. The regular 4.7-inch iPhone is expected to get a single camera with a better sensor. The software that will ship on the next iPhone, iOS 10, includes enhanced photo organisation.

The new iPhones are expected to have more storage for those photos. Instead of 16GB as a starting point for the entry-level iPhone, the new starting point will be 32GB, according to a person familiar with Apple’s iPhone plans. Hallelujah! I’ve long said that keeping the 16GB iPhone was just a ploy for Apple to get people to buy the 64GB model — for $100 extra.

The biggest remaining question? Battery life. I don’t care if the next iPhone is thin enough to pick a lock if I have to wrap it in a bulky battery case, even Apple’s own. Apple’s recent iPhone SE — which is safe to buy right now if you are looking for a smaller phone — lasts at least two hours longer than the iPhone 6s.

How to Withstand the Wait

If you’re itching to buy a new phone, it’s probably because your current phone is on its last legs. According to Gallup, 47 per cent of Americans upgrade only when their phone stops working or becomes obsolete.

As Tom Petty said, the waiting is the hardest part. If only he had these tips for extending the life of an iPhone:

* Fix that cracked screen. Shop around for the lowest screen-replacement price. Apple said it would fix my wife’s cracked iPhone 6 screen for $US130. On iCracked it was $140. And if you trade in or sell the phone later, you’ll get some of that money back. On Gazelle, an iPhone reseller, the iPhone 6 with a broken screen fetched about $US100 less.

* Buy a back-up battery. Fast battery drain is a sign of an ageing iPhone. You can try tricks like lowering screen brightness and enabling Low Power Mode to eke out more time, or pay Apple $US80 to replace the battery. If you don’t want to spend that much, go for a cheap battery case like the $US40 Anker Ultra Slim Battery; for an iPhone 5 or 5s, get a $US34 Lenmar case.

* Clear some space. Backing up old photos and videos to the cloud will help keep your overstuffed phone from running like your grandpa’s old Pontiac. Google Photos lets you upload files for free. Also, go into Settings, select Storage and then Manage Storage to spot the most bloated apps. If web-browsing is slow, clear the cache by selecting Settings, Safari and then Clear History and Website Data.

In the end, you may decide you don’t even want the iPhone 7 — or whatever Apple calls it. (I nominate “iPhone Air Pro.”) Maybe you’ve resuscitated your old phone and it’s now back in your good graces. Maybe you love headphone jacks more than progress and would prefer saving $US100 on an iPhone 6s. Or maybe Apple actually can’t outdo Samsung, and you opt for the Galaxy S7.

You may even decide to wait until 2017, when the 10th-anniversary iPhone is slated for a major design overhaul. Apple design chief Jony Ive is said to be aiming for it to look like a single piece of glass, no home button at all. Just remember my first iron-clad law of iPhone shopping: The next iPhone will always be better than the current one.

Wall Street Journal