Do I have to stay on Next?

Why would anyone pay the full price of a phone on installments and then be required to "trade it in"?  It appears that "NEXT" is a suckers play, for those who don't understand math.

Can anyone explain to me how this is a good deal for the customer?

once the phone is paid in full its your period.  I just payed off my m8 that was on next 12 in full then did next 12 to get my nexus 6.

---

@torrent wrote:

Why would anyone pay the full price of a phone on installments and then be required to "trade it in"?  It appears that "NEXT" is a suckers play, for those who don't understand math.

 

Can anyone explain to me how this is a good deal for the customer?

 

 

---

You are only "required to trade it in" if you want to get out of the remaining payments, and get a new phone fater you have completed the minimum payment amount, but before you have paid the full amount.  For the NEXT 12 agreements, you only pay a minimum of 60% of the phone cost then you can trade it in without paying any more to get your new phone.  With Next 18,  you pay a minimum of 75% of the phone cost, then you can trade it in on a new phone without paying any more on the old phone.

You might go this route in order to get a new phone every year, and save yourself a little money.  Under the old way, you purchased your phone at the contract price then to get a new one a year later, you paid the full price for the new phone, then the following year, you went back to purchasing the phone under contract. This meant that for the cheapest iPhone, you would pay $848 for the phones, plus your monthly service fees over 2 years if you wanted a new phone each year.  Using NEXT, you pay about $780 ($32.45 x 24 months) and you get a new phone at the 12 month point, and you also get the $15 or $25/month service discount (assuming you have a Mobile Share plan), so you also save about $360 or $600 over 2 years.  Now, if you have the $25 discount, then over the 2 year period, you are saving about $670 over getting a new contract phone every 2 years and buying your alternate phones at full price.  Now let's assume that you want to keep your old phone when you get a new one (so you are comparing "apples to apples"), so using the NEXT program, you would need to pay off the balance on the first phone, so you would need to pay about $195 after 12 months to pay off the balance, so you would need to pay $390 addition for 2 iphones, so let's take that amount off the savings from using NEXT, and you are now down to only saving $280 over 2 years as compared to the old method and you still keep both phones.  To me, using NEXT would let me get a new phone every year, and still save almost $300 every 2 years assuming I want to keep my old phones when I get a new one, and that savings would go up to almost $700 if I wanted the new phone each year, but didn't care about keeping the old one.  I guess I'm ust a sucker who doesn't understand math, but likes to keep his money rather than give it away...