EDIT: Apparently the conjecture below is totally wrong, as “iPhone 8 and 8 Plus are hits as Apple sells 46.7 million smartphones in Q4.”

Allegedly: “U.S. buyers favor iPhone 7 over 8: research.” We’ll see whether it’s true when the actual numbers come in, but I’ve been on the new-iPhone-every-two-years treadmill for a while, and when I looked at the new iPhones… I passed. The good one with 256GB of hard drive space ends up around $1,200 after tax. The iPhone 8 itself looks like a marginal improvement over the 7 and still costs $800 – $900.

There are some year-over-year improvements, and tech sites go into granular detail about what those improvements are, but the big ones (like the double camera lens) are on the iPhone X. The iPhone 6s I have is good enough and has a headphone port—an important advantage for me. I replaced the battery for $60 and will punt for another year. Perhaps next year the OLED and dual-camera models will be standard and cheaper then. For now, this looks like a great year to wait. Or buy a used iPhone 6s or 7.

Perhaps this is an unusual cost-benefit analysis, and it does seem like other people use their phones a lot more than I do.