The recent announcement of the iPhone 5 was immediately followed by an accompanying rush to be the first to own the new product.

Is it really worth it, especially on a student budget, to be buying into the hype and shelling out hundreds of dollars on something that is only fractionally better than the thing you probably already have?

Companies are constantly coming out with the next big thing, and more often than not, the product is only marginally better than the last one they released.

Since the release of the first iPhone, Apple has released a new version every year. On top of that, Apple has tons of other products that they are upgrading yearly as well. It is financial suicide to try to keep up with all of them.

It is not only pointless to try to keep up with every product or upgrade that is released by these companies, it is also extremely expensive.

The new iPhone 5, for example, has an entirely different connector system than the iPhones that preceded it, so everyone upgrading will have to shell out even more money buying all new chargers and docking stations for it as well. A new iPhone starts at $699 for the 16GB model – coupled with a $100 dock and a $40 charger, you’re getting close to $1,000 when you could have spent $0 for keeping your current phone.

Apple boasts that the iPhone 5 has a faster processor and improvement display screen among other things, but those features don’t really make it worth it. That’s not the kind of better that warrants hundreds of dollars being spent.

With how broke students are always claiming to be, you’d think that they would try to save those hundreds of dollars rather than waste them trying to keep up with the latest trend.

But they’re not. In fact, the number of people buying into latest and greatest product trend only seems to be increasing, despite our current economic status.

According to a press release by Apple on Sept. 17, they had over two million preorders for the iPhone 5 in the first 24 hours.

The day after preordering was announced, the waiting list for receiving a new iPhone 5 was somewhere in the range of three weeks and it only got longer as days went by.

All of these people are basically freaking out and throwing their money at Apple to make sure they are still on top of the trends, when we all know that another iPhone will be coming out next year anyway.

Why throw away your old perfectly fine iPhone, or whatever “good enough” product you have, just to buy something that’s going to be considered “obsolete” in a year?

Sure, the latest and greatest gadget may have a few new tricks compared to the last one, but are those little upgrades worth the hundreds of dollars you’re spending to get an entirely new thing when your old product was perfectly fine? Save your money, and make do with what you’ve got.