Trading in my old iPhone 5s got me a $150 Apple Store gift card. (And apparently Apple got $40 million in gold. Though I guess not just from my iPhone.)
The Apple Store has a limited product selection, so I’m not sure what to do with my $150. I’ve thought about applying $100 to getting AppleCare+ for my new phone. But I’m not a big fan of AppleCare; I’ve never been in a position in the past where I needed service on an Apple product, and AppleCare would have paid for it, if I had it. When stuff goes wrong, it’s usually either before the standard warranty expires, or well after the extended warranty would have expired.
I also thought maybe I could buy a year of Office 365 to extend my subscription, but they only sell the “personal” single-machine version, not the Home version that I use.
So I’m also thinking about maybe buying an Apple Watch. The watch has been out for about a year now, and there have been a few articles looking at how it’s done over that first year, including this one from the NY Times and another on Hodinkee. There was also an interesting thread on Reddit recently.
My $150 would get me halfway to the $300 price for an Apple Watch, so that makes the watch seem a bit more reasonable to me. I still like my Swatch Sistem51, but an Apple Watch might be kind of fun.
(Update: Apple probably didn’t get $40 million in gold from recycled iPhones.)