Tere!

Recently I bought a new iPhone by selling the older one in Estonia. My friends know that I have had an iPhone whilst only friends in my hometown know that actually I have been an iPhone user since I was 14 or 15. 

You may think:

Wow, she must be from a rich family.

But

I saved money by myself and bought an iPod.

When getting in high school, my mam bought a cell phone for me, with which I could only make calls, email or something like so-called SMS nowadays, having no internet.

As a second-year student in high school, my iPod was running out its storage, so I bought an iPod touch. My mam envied my new device so she bought an iPhone for herself. However, since finally (?) she thought that it was pitiful  that I had no internet on the phone, she bought an iPhone 4s for me.

In two years I changed it to iPhone 5s, and due to the fact that in December 2016 I dropped my it in the toilet at the restaurant in Kyoto when drinking with my Irish friend (and I also washed it), I changed the device model again.

Since I already decided to leave Japan at that time, I wanted a phone with the SIM free and I bought one free-SIM iPhone. Nowadays it’s really difficult to live a life without a phone anyway, so I didn’t care about the model that much. Then when I was travelling in Germany with my friend, he found that my iPhone was not 6s that I had thought for a few years but 7 actually. The iPhone already had something wrong so I wanted a new one, and decided to buy it after saving enough amount of money by working as a freelancer.

One day I talked about such a story to my customer support Estonian colleague, who said:

Probably you can sell it at 100€ or something.

Really.

In Japan the system is completely different. Usually we buy SIM-locked phones at the phone carrier shop as those are cheaper and “sell” their older phone accordingly to the payment schedule of carriers that they have used. (It may sound complicated, and it is actually.) In other words, normally they don’t sell older phones at some device or telecommunication shops which are not phone carriers before buying new ones.

Then the colleague told me one store called Mobipunkt.

I contacted them by email in advance, and they said iPhone 7 could be sold at around 130€. However, I expected 100€ because my iPhone’s battery health was bad (81%), and the colouring was a bit faded.

In the end of April I got notified that the salary as a freelancer has been paid so next day I went to Mobipunkt in Linnahall. Nevertheless it was still during the quarantine period owing to COVID-19, as even such a shop seemed to be considered as a telecommunication service, the store was open. (That’s why I could decide to go there.)

When entering the inside of the store, only one staff member was there.

I told him that I wanted to sell the older device and buy a new one. He said the engineer would check the device, which would take five to ten minutes, which the time like I could see around the whole shop. In several minutes, the staff came back and told me the selling price. I agreed to the price and told him the type of model, the storage size and colour of the device that I wanted. He deducted the older device’s selling price from the new device price, which was the final price for me to pay.

I got a backup in the previous night and was ready for everything so basically that mentioned above was all. The price of iPhone 11 was 815€ and I could sell my iPhone 7 at 100€ so I paid 715€. You might want to pay on the installment plan, but I didn’t want to pay for the interest, for which reason I saved money.

I knew that there would be a new model from Apple, and yet I take photos with the camera of my phone, so whether there is a night mode in the camera was quite important. iPhone 11 Pro was too expensive and I really don’t like triple cameras. (It’s so creepy and disgusting.) That’s why I bought iPhone 11.

After the purchase, I went home and restored my backups, and changed the app store because I wanted to use SEB’s mobile banking app. (The app store change is not related to the device change but it was just a good timing for me.)

You might know that the phones available in Japan makes sounds when taking pictures, but this time it doesn’t (as it seems the device was from France?). Anyway, I feel so GOOD.

That’s all about the personally recent happiest story.

Aitäh! 🙂