The Apple iPhone 15 is one of the most affordable iPhones ever once you adjust for inflation, but we were curious if the same was true of the latest Galaxy S offerings from Samsung.
The chart below compares the inflation-adjusted starting price of the base model iPhone and Galaxy S phones as well as the largest, premium (most pro?) offerings from each manufacturer.
The picture might be a bit surprising for people who aren't familiar with Android offerings. When Samsung launched the first Galaxy S in 2010, it was much more affordable than the iPhone 4, which was on the market at the same time. After that, the base model Galaxy S more or less matched the base iPhone price for several years. But with the S10 and S20 lines, Samsung took a different approach and priced their base Galaxy S and premium models significantly higher than the comparable iPhones. Recently Samsung has changed course, and the latest Galaxy S23 offerings are priced the same as equivalent offerings from Apple.
For the purposes of readability, we limited this chart just to the base model and large premium offerings from both manufacturers. Here are our posts with the complete inflation-adjusted price history of the iPhone and Galaxy S.
We looked at the U.S. retail price for phones without a carrier subsidy. Samsung Galaxy S pricing draws heavily from Android Authority's excellent price history article. In all cases, we looked at the lowest cost version of each phone, without any memory upgrades.
Inflation adjustments are made using the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator comparing July of the launch year to July 2023, the last month for which data is available.
Comparison bar chart was made using Venngage.
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