> How can one justify paying 3x the cost if not just to continue keeping myself tied into Apple?
It's not rocket science. The experience you get using an iPhone vs a cheap Android for 5 years is not even close to comparable, and while you do pay a ridiculous premium for an iPhone, there are obvious reasons why someone would want to.
And this is coming from a long time Pixel user.
I hate to see that I am starting to sound like an activist, but I also hate to see how even the supposedly smarter-than-average people in tech lose all sense of perspective when they see shiny overpriced trinkets.
Why should we care if "the experience is not even close to comparable", if it is brought by a trillion dollar corporation who denies people even the most basic rights and fights as dirty as it can to keep its unfair advantages?
(And please notice that the above paragraph also applies to Google and Samsung, so please don't make it sound that I am arguing for team Android here)
It cost me about €600, and I also enjoy knowing that I've generated that much less e-waste compared to my prior Android life, where I had to discard phones every 2 or 3 years.
Second, I'd love to be proven wrong, but I can bet good money that if we look at a distribution of activated iphones per model, we will see that most users probably stay a lot less than 6-7 years.
Third, it's not about iPhone vs Android. It's the fact that we are discussing things like "getting security updates" when in fact we should be asking ourselves "why aren't we free to install whatever system we want on our own device?" I don't really care so much about the fact your phone cost 600 or 6000€, what bugs me to no end is that we are effectively paying trillion-dollar corporations to let them remove our freedoms.
Not every iPhone is over $800.
$500 in 2019 is $597 now.
450 Euro in 2019 is 533 Euro now.
That's enough to buy an iPhone 13 and skip the SE model entirely.
- Most people change phones every 2 to 3 years.
- iPhone SE/mini accounts for less than 25% of the units sold.
If you manage to make do with the cheaper version of iPhones, ok. But your case (and mine) are outliers, and even in that case Apple's products are not better from an ethical/environmental/fair trade point of view.
I don't know where I am losing you...
and you don't have to pay 3x the cost if you don't want, buy last year's model refurbished.