iPhone prices vs average salary in South Africa – MyBroadband

Buying the latest iPhone at launch in South Africa in 2022 would have cost over 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 has remained the standard until this day.

While it wasn’t the first to opt for a touchscreen over a physical keyboard, its implementation of multi-touch technology and capable software was the best yet in terms of user experience.

In the years that followed, all of the world’s major smartphone makers would come to adopt this design as their point of departure.

Even BlackBerry would abandon its iconic keyboard for a full touch bar design on its first flagship smartphone running the BlackBerry 10 operating system.

The first iPhone officially available in South Africa was 2008’s iPhone 3G, the second generation of the device.

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

The 8GB version was the cheapest model available in South Africa and had a starting price tag of R6,389 on prepaid from Vodacom.

Fast forward to September 2022, when Apple launched its most recent flagship smartphone range — the iPhone 14.

The most affordable variant in this line-up, the base iPhone 14, boasts a 6.1-inch 1,170 x 2,532 OLED screen, dual 12MP rear camera and 12MP selfie camera, storage between 128GB and 512GB, and a 3,279mAh battery.

The iStore’s launch price for the 128GB model was R20,599 — R14,210 more than the iPhone 3G’s starting price.

That works out to a 322% increase over 14 years, well above the rate of inflation of around 100% over the same period.

To understand how affordable the latest iPhone model in South Africa is compared to its predecessors, we compared the prices of new iPhones each year with the average salary in the country.

We excluded Apple’s more affordable SE and 5C options from our comparison as they competed in an altogether different category.

We used the launch pricing of the most affordable flagship iPhone model launched every year — from the iPhone 3G in 2008 to the iPhone 14 in 2022.

For the average salary in South Africa, we consulted Statistics South Africa’s Quarterly Employment Statistics (QES) to get the average earnings of non-agricultural workers in the formal sector.

Most iPhone flagship launches take place in September, so we used the third quarter’s surveys for every year.

These provided average salaries for August each year, the closest month to the launch dates.

The price of the first iPhone in South Africa — the iPhone 3G — was around 67% of the average monthly earnings of employees in the non-agricultural business sector.

That proportion would decrease significantly with the following year’s launch of the iPhone 3GS, which cost around half the average salary.

In the following years, each new iPhone cost roughly 60–80% of the average South African salary at launch.

iPhone 14 shocker

But the iPhone 14’s R20,599 price tag means it costs around 83% of the average monthly salary (R24,831 in August 2022) — the most of any iPhone.

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

There are two major factors behind this 21 percentage point jump.

Firstly, Apple dropped the cheaper Mini model it offered at the entry-level of the iPhone 12 and iPhone 13 range.

The iPhone 13 Mini launched at a US price of $599 (R9,068 at the time, excluding VAT), while the most affordable iPhone 14 carried a starting price tag of $799 (R13,799 at the time, excluding VAT).

Therefore, it would only be logical that its South African pricing would be much higher, unless the rand saw a remarkable increase in value. Unfortunately, the opposite happened.

At the iPhone 13’s announcement on 14 September 2021, the rand traded at R15.14 to the dollar by market close.

When the iPhone 14 was unveiled on 7 September 2022, it closed at R17.27 to the greenback, weakening by about 14%.

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