This is how much money you'd have made if you bought Apple shares instead of a new iPhone every time it was released

We're now up to the iPhone 15, and if you're an Apple superfan, chances are you've upgraded to a new handset every time it's released.

And we've come a long way since the first iPhone was released in 2007.

The very first model had a button on the bottom (the horror!), no touchscreen and a pretty modest camera. Luckily selfies weren't a big deal back then.

Now, the iPhone 15 - which was announced in September - is full of all the bells and whistles, including a 48 megapixel camera, a practically unsmashable screen and (finally) a USB-C charging port.

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But you might want to look away now if you've spent the last decade or so devoted to your iPhone, because someone has calculated just how rich you'd be if, instead of buying a new iPhone every time it came out, you'd spent the money on Apple stock instead.

As you can probably imagine, the results are pretty eye-watering.

Sumit Behal posts about all things tech on X, and he's the one who crunched the numbers.

He calculated that buying each model on the day it was launched would cost around $17,000 - a pretty wild number when you tot it all up.

If you'd spent that $17,000 on Apple stock, Behal suggested you'd be sitting on a portfolio worth and incredible $367 million. Certainly nothing to sniff at.

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That's because Apple's stock price has increased dramatically since Steve Jobs launched the first iPhone in 2007. Back then, you could buy stock for just over $3. But now? You'll have to cough up over $170.

With this in mind, it would probably shock nobody to learn that Apple was the first company to reach a $3 trillion market value.

While Behal makes a good - if shocking - point with the numbers he's presented, there's one thing he's forgotten: in this day and age, you pretty much need a smartphone to operate. It would be pretty tricky to go without one entirely.

On top of that, others have argued that if everyone did this, then the Apple stock wouldn't be anywhere near as high as it has ended up today because nobody would be buying iPhones, thus rendering the whole idea useless.

Then again, if people were spending the same amount on Apple stock as they were on iPhones then the price would probably be pretty darn high.

But if you do somehow have the ability to go back in time, set the dial back to 2007 - and buy up as many of those $3 Apple shares as you can. Oh, and feel free to tell Steve Jobs about the Face ID setting, so he can get cracking on developing that tech even sooner. But maybe don't mention selfies to him just yet, we're not sure 2007 could handle it.