On Monday, September 9, Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) revealed its flagship product’s new version, the iPhone 16, starting at $799. The most accessible version costs approximately 0.014 Bitcoin (BTC) when priced in the leading cryptocurrency.
Interestingly, the iPhone price in BTC is a benchmark the market uses to measure Bitcoin’s purchasing power over the years. Investors can understand the cryptocurrency’s value proposition by comparing how much an iPhone costs in Bitcoin in previous years.
In 2023, CoinGecko published a report looking into this indicator, pricing each iPhone’s starting price at launch in BTC. For that, CoinGecko used Bitcoin’s exchange rate against the U.S. Dollar (USD) on the daily close of each launch.
The iPhone 15 price was 0.031 BTC at that time, over two times more expensive than the iPhone 16. However, the dollar cost was the same as this year’s and the previous one—iPhone 14 in 2022—all priced at $799.
In 2022, buyers paid 0.042 BTC for the most accessible version of the iPhone 14, which is three times more than it will cost to buy the iPhone 16, hypothetically paying with Bitcoin in 2024. Nevertheless, the iPhone 13 in 2021’s bull market cost 0.018 BTC, highlighting the inherent volatility of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.
The cost of an iPhone, in Bitcoin. Source: CoinGecko
Apple’s iPhone 16 prices in 2024 in dollars and BTC
Looking at the following models, the iPhone 16 Plus will start at $899, or 0.0157 BTC. Moreover, the iPhone 16 Pro will cost $999, while the Pro Max will cost $1,199. Priced in Bitcoin, each of these advanced versions will start at 0.175 BTC and 0.021 BTC.
Notably, a person holding Bitcoin since 2022 would be able to buy two iPhone 16 Pro Max for the same BTC amount they would have spent to buy the simpler version of the iPhone 14 in its launching year.
Therefore, buying Bitcoin in 2022 and 2023 would have been a better financial decision than purchasing any of Apple’s products.
Notably, the same pattern has repeated throughout the years since 2011. Back then, the iPhone 4S cost 162 BTC at launch, worth $9.23 million by press time.
The iPhone 5, 5S, iPhone 6, 6S, and iPhone 7 – all cost over one full Bitcoin in the following years, priced at 52 BTC, 5.04 BTC, 1.65 BTC, 2.76 BTC, and 1.07 BTC, respectively.
Bitcoin (BTC) price analysis
As of this writing, Bitcoin trades at $57,010, up 35.07% year-to-date. Despite the overall positive price action, BTC currently ranges in a downtrend, making subsequent lower highs and lower lows.
Bitcoin (BTC) year-to-date price chart. Source: Finbold
For the leading cryptocurrency to keep its leading performance and increasing purchase power over the years, BTC must recover from this short-term downtrend. This is a movement that trading experts and analysts believe could happen at any moment.
Prominent names like Credible Crypto, The ForexX Mindset, and CrypNuevo have shown a bullish bias in the last few days. Finbold reported some of these analyses, consolidating their views in a report on Saturday, September 7.
Nevertheless, Bitcoin is unpredictable, and investors should closely follow related news and macroeconomics to make better financial decisions. So far, it is still early to say whether buying an iPhone 16 or 0.014 BTC will render a better result in a few years.