This is like trying to argue that your Toyota Corolla is a superior car when compared to a Mercedes. It's a very narrow utilitarian way of thinking that only appeals to ascetics.
A $250 phone is a high end phone from 2 years ago, and for most people that is more than enough. There are no low end iPhones, and apple is pretty good at making people think they need a Ferrari when all they want is to go from point a to point b in a decent way.
I don’t think you can use that argument yet. I’m not sure we’ve quite reached the tipping point where all phones are so fast, that you need some special use case to notice performance differences.
My iPhone SE is only 2 years old and there are websites that give it trouble still.
As opposed to my 6 year old Air where I can’t tell the difference in performance with my work laptop unless I’m running multiple docker instances or transcoding some video.
Maybe the A12 is the tipping point. 7 years from now, all phones will be at least this fast.
I have a Motorola g6 plus, which, together with uBlock origin browse the web just fine, and I only block the worst offenders.
The only thing I notice is that my tuner (Tunable) starts about the same speed as it does on my friends old iPhone 5. There is some touch input latency, but I'm not so easily bothered.
When it comes to consumer electronics I have come to the conclusion it makes more sense to pay more for the best available now (an iPhone) and holding for longer, rather than try to pinch pennies by buying yesteryear's technology. It's the only way to get acceptable usable life out of them.
Apple has been making hardware with sub par durability for quite some time. The only things they made more durable have all been at the expense of repairability. The whole bendgate thing? Yup, apple actually went against best practice and stopped using proper underfill. The result? The touch-ic chip came off. Who would have guessed that a bendy phone without underfill would have flexion damage? Everybody. Even apple themselves, in official, leaked documents.
Apple has been extremely successful at denying problems up until there is a class action lawsuit. Then they silently release a pretty hostile repair program with the words "a small percentage of iDevices ...".
I used to be the biggest apple fanboy, but after having not one, but two macbooks fail on me was more than I was willing to stand. The last time I had to chose: leave the device to them in an official repair programme and have it wiped OR saving the data on it and void any apple repair programme (they later changed this
policy though). Why? Because some sort of catch-22 where they would not do data recovery on a device with a faulty logic board (onto which they had soldered the SSD!) and the fix was a new logic board with a new SSD with the old logic board and SSD sent away for refurbishment. Think different!
