I’ve seen some very rich people use some shockingly old hardware. It’s not about penny pinching, many don’t think about upgrading regularly largely because upgrading tends to be an annoying process.

Like, you know, calling, navigation, discount codes or news.

Not latest iPhone = poor, right?

Depends.... Social networks, bank apps, chat apps, casual games, productivity apps, music/video players,... basically everything except new games still should work, even on shitty phones.

If it involves spending money and your business model isn’t to make pennies at massive scale, it makes no sense to optimize for those who actively reduce costs. I don’t remember the exact percentages, but there’s a quip that Apple has something like 90% of the profit with under 30% market share.

Tons of Apple users are still on old phones like iPhone 8 or even 6S. Those are still counted in the 30% market share but they have slow phones.

So, throw away literally billions of users worldwide? Outside of USA, apple has a very, very small market share, and cheap (weak) android phones are the norm.

For example, Facebook ("lite") and google ("go") already optimize their apps to those markets. Why not eg McDonalds?

Some businesses optimize for profit and not userbase or mindshare.

Not every business earns its revenue by casting the widest net possible. Focus on users who are known to have the discretionary funds to buy new iPhones and then you’ve also focused on users who aren’t as likely to penny-pinch when deciding whether to pay for your products.

Apple had over 100 percent of the profit in the phone market for a quarter a few years ago. Every android handset maker lost money.