You guys forgot about folding phones which are hitting $2k.
Too expensive? Both yes and no.
Lower end phones, which are good enough, are SUPER cheap and you can often pick up a brand new phone for nothing or close to it, worst case, ask around, most households have at least one stashed in a drawer since most members of a family have one as they are almost disposable at this point (which is insane in itself). On the used market you can get an S8 brand new (still in the box) for $300 and it's barely any different than an S9, which can be had for under $400. More importantly though, most apps run just fine on 5 and 6 year old phones, sure, new features are good, but has any of the new features really changed how you use the phone enough to justify the price? I could easily go back to a Galaxy S5 and be pretty much okay for all that I use my phone for.
On the other hand, top of the line new is just getting stupid and carrier subsidies are at least partly to blame. If everyone paid full price I guarantee you 99% of Iphone owners would be rocking the freebie Android phones and manufacturers would be scaling things back, the average person can't drop $1000 every 2 ears on a new phone. The other reason phones have gone up in price is that in their quest to offer you something newer and better and get that sale is that there's just simply not enough new features to set them apart (hence the S8 and S9 being so similar) and those that do adds significantly more cost. The other reason they are getting stupid expensive is stupid people willing to sell their souls for it. Stop buying this stuff and they will stop pushing it. You do not need the latest and greatest, top of the line just to take pictures of your food for Instagram, you do not need 4k resolution, and you certainly do not need an S10 or iphone just to do Gmail.
"But my phone is slow".
They can throttle due to a weak battery and they also get bogged down by garbage. When was the last time you did a reboot or better yet, a reset? Android in particular likes to be reset every now and then and Iphones throttle based on battery as well as OS bloat. Android may be good with memory management but it's not perfect, also many models are designed with a short lifespan to make sure you buy another in 2 years. Apple lost a TON of sales once they started their cheap battery replacement program which sped up a lot of slow phones, it was so significant that it was mentioned in their quarterly report because profits dropped so much. Also, NEVER, EVER buy the smallest storage capacity Iphone, the OS grows due to security patches (those are updates for Android users, you know, those things you rarely get), while good, they can leave you lacking space. Apple knows this is an issue, but continue to offer those models specifically as a way to hook you and then push you to buying another, larger one where they markup the storage costs and you don't get that sweet, sweet subsidy or carrier discount. There is a bonus though, larger storage models always command a premium second hand.
