Unless you have an iPhone or something super exclusive like a phone from Vertu that is not true, and even iPhones deprecate much faster than brand name test equipment. Most cell phones have lost any noticeable market value within 2 or 3 years, some models may extend that to 5 years, but that's it. A 15 year old scope like say a HP 54542C (4Ch 500MHz 2GSa/s) which, when new, was probably around $20k mark, still goes for $1500+. It's the same for most other test equipment, often enough even stuff from the 60's/70's still fetches remarkable prices.
20k-1500=14500 which is about $1000 a year. I wouldn't call that keeping its value. A car depreciates at about the same rate.
Hmm..my math says that 20000 minus 1500 is more along the lines of 18500, but never mind.
So clearly by your logic, buying a house (which costs you more than a grand a months just to pay it off over 20 years) is never good value because you can get other things like cars, rubber boats, cell phones for a lot less, right?
Well, unfortunately that's not how it works. There's a reason why in finance depreciation is usually calculated in percentage of an item's purchase price over a defined period. Looking at your $600 cell phone which after four years is worth say $50 (which is approx. 8.3% of its purchase price), you end up loosing $550 (or approx. 91.7% of its purchase price) over 4 years or, annually (at linear progression) roughly $137.50 or approx. 22.92%. So in short, your precious little phone loses almost a quarter of its purchase price a year.
Let's look at the scope: $20k when new and still selling at $1500 after 15 years. That means that, over 15 years (a usage time which btw far extends the one of your average cell phone!), at linear progression it lost $18500 92.5% of it's value. That sounds like a lot but actually the annual progression is just around 6.2% of its original purchase price.
And out in the world, an item that in average only looses 6.2% of value a year is considered to be much more value retaining than an item that looses 22.92% a year.
Of course this is a very simplified view, and there are a wide range of progression methods (most items depreciate in a non-linear way), but it covers the essentials. Just because even a small progression means a large amount of money for an originally very expensive item doesn't mean it is not holding value well. The absolute amount however comes into play when you have to consider if getting a $20k scope is worth it for the job. You take the purchase price, estimate the remaining value at the end of the usage period (which for T&M equipment usually is somewhere between 5 to 7 years), and calculate the annual progression. If the calculation then shows that the scope costs you more than it actually 'earns' for the job, it's not worth it.
Besides, in some countries there is a big market for second hand phones because people simply can't afford new ones.
Sure, like for almost any other items that do not degrade, disintegrate, explode or become otherwise useless after a short amount of time. But that doesn't change the fact that cell phones hold their value rather badly (the market offerings is much larger than the demand, something that is not generally true for T&M kit).
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