iPhone prices and average salaries in South Africa

Buying the latest iPhone when it launches in South Africa in 2022 will cost more than 80% of the average employee’s monthly salary.

The first iPhone, unveiled by former Apple CEO Steve Jobs in 2007, featured a groundbreaking smartphone design that remains the standard to this day.

The company isn’t the first to use a touchscreen rather than a physical keyboard, but its implementation of multi-touch technology and competent software was the best user experience ever.

Since then, all of the world’s major smartphone makers have adopted this design as a starting point.

Even BlackBerry has abandoned its iconic keyboard with full touch bar design in its first flagship smartphone to run the BlackBerry 10 operating system.

The first iPhone officially sold in South Africa was the iPhone 3G in 2008, the second generation of this device.

It had a 3.5-inch 320 x 480 TFT LCD, a single 2MP rear camera, 8GB or 12GB of storage, a 1,220mAh battery, and 3G network connectivity.

The 8GB version is the cheapest model available in South Africa, Starting price tag of R6,389 Prepaid from Vodacom.

Back in September 2022, Apple launched its latest flagship smartphone series, the iPhone 14.

The most affordable base iPhone 14 in the lineup features a 6.1-inch 1,170 x 2,532 OLED screen, dual 12MP rear and 12MP selfie cameras, 128GB to 512GB of storage, and a 3,279mAh battery.

The iStore launch price for the 128GB model is R20,599, which is R14,210 higher than the iPhone 3G’s starting price.

That’s a 322% increase over 14 years, well above the nearly 100% inflation rate over the same period.

To get a sense of how affordable South Africa’s latest iPhone models are compared to their predecessors, we compared the price of new iPhones each year to the average salary in the country.

Apple’s more affordable SE and 5C options competed in completely different categories, so we left them out of the comparison.

We used the launch prices of the most affordable flagship iPhone models released each year, from the iPhone 3G in 2008 to the iPhone 14 in 2022.

For the average salary in South Africa, Statistics South Africa Quarterly Employment Statistics (QES) Get the average income of non-agricultural workers in the formal sector.

Since most iPhone flagship launches occur in September, we used the third quarter of each year.

These show average salaries for August each year, the month closest to the launch date.

The iPhone 3G, the first iPhone in South Africa, cost about 67% of the average monthly income of non-farm workers.

That percentage drops significantly with the launch of the iPhone 3GS the following year, to about half the average salary.

In the years that followed, new iPhones cost around 60-80% of the average South African salary at launch.

iPhone 14 shocker

However, the iPhone 14’s R20,599 price is about 83% of the average monthly income (R24,831 as of August 2022), making it the most expensive of the iPhones.

What makes this even worse is the fact that it’s up from 62% for the cheapest iPhone 13 the year before.

There are two big factors behind this 21% jump.

For starters, Apple has ditched the cheaper Mini models it offered at the entry level of the iPhone 12 and iPhone 13.

The iPhone 13 Mini launched with a US price of $599 (then R9,068, excluding VAT), while the most affordable iPhone 14 had a starting price of $799 (then R13,799, excluding VAT). excluding value tax).

Therefore, it is not surprising that South African prices will be much higher unless the rand appreciates significantly. Unfortunately the opposite happened.

With the iPhone 13 announcement on September 14, 2021, Rand traded at R15.14 by the end of the market.

When the iPhone 14 was announced on September 7, 2022, it closed at R17.27 against the dollar, down about 14%.

The table below compares the South African launch prices of the flagship iPhones from 2008 to 2022 as a percentage of the average salary in those years.