But that's totally the opposite of the common (and maybe false) narrative that Apple is pushing users to upgrade faster than their counterparts.

Performance of the cheapest iPhone available today is greater than the most expensive android phone, so this is a moot point. You need to upgrade the Android hardware just to maintain parity.

CPU performance, sure. But there are other things like power consumption, cameras, LTE performance and band support, etc that are also a factor.

Personally, I dont think CPU performance has been an important factor for years on midrange and higher phones, but that's a matter of opinion.

CPU performance directly impacts performance of those other elements.

The iPhone 5s got six years of OS and security updates.

The six got cut off after "only" five years because it didn't have enough RAM to run the current version of iOS.

Now the original SE and 6s will also receive that sixth year of support.

If you bought that original iPhone SE, that works out to $67 per supported year.

Apple released updates to iOS devices back to the 2011 iPhone 4s last year.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/07/22/apple-issues-ios-...

I find it surprising that the 5S has had 6 more updates since it was dropped from support when iOS 13 was released. The last was just over a month ago. I hope that this is a sign that Apple will continue to provide security updates even after they no longer provide feature updates. Of course, the upgrade to the 1st gen SE is the obvious path for those who had a 5S so continued upgrades aren't so important, but it might be relevant with the 1st gen SE if Apple don't release a smaller iPhone 12.