You're must be joking! Look around, if you look past the bitten apple, there are plenty of perfectly capable devices out there for under $300. In fact, I see plenty of people who are on the street corners panhandling AND using a smartphone.

If you go for used devices, you can quite easily get an outdated entry level phone for free and a decently useable one for <€30.

You can even get new entry level phones for as cheap as €70.

So it's very much a market where you can spend whatever you want.

A flagship phone is priced like a luxurity toy, because that's exactly what it is.

And an entry level phone is incredibly cheap so that people who have no money can still get one. €70 with 2 years of usage is less than €3/month (realistically though, if you are in this kind of situation, you hold on to a phone for much longer).

Over here, if you are poor enough, you'll even get a free phone plan.

There are plenty of touch screen smartphones out there that cost like $150. The expensive ones are still the norm though because people want status symbols

We can say the same thing about cars or any necessary manufactured good. But in every category, as with phones, cheaper models exist.

I've bought people very nice phones for under $400 multiple times. Recently.

Flagship phones are grossly overpriced. The midrange is super nice and usable these days, though. It's a side advantage of phone tech standardizing so much. And as you said, being a necessity for daily life it's probably okay to spend at least a few hundred on one you're going to use for several years.

Is this going to be another "the US has weird ideas about consumer goods" thread? Because it kinda sounds like one.

Just don't buy crapple

If we could fight over legislations to force swappable batteries and operating systems, most people would just buy used. Like how now laptops, desktops, Raspberry Pi's you can buy used cheap, slap a light fresh OS and go.

All of them aren't. There are cheap touch screen phones. You just don't get ridiculous features at the price point if $50. The Samsung A30 is a pretty cheap android phone.

Just like with everything else there's a gradient of price and quality. You don't have to buy a 1300 dollar iPhone, you could get one for only a couple hundred that would serve any use case you can think of where it would be required.

Just because something is a necessity for daily life doesn't mean it's going to be cheap, it can't just be sold below cost simply because it's critical.

You can get good condition, used, last year flagships on eBay and Swappa all day long. I've literally never bought a brand new phone.

A mate of mine has a keyboard flip phone and it's amazing full qwerty keyboard dude can type wicked quick on that thing compared to touch screens

They’re also full of the most compact and advanced sensors developed to date. It’s amazing what they’re capable of, but I agree they’re just a matter of fact now

Uhh no? They've gotten really cheap nowadays.

$300 gets you a 5G capable phone with a high refresh OLED and a processor fast enough to play resource intensive games like Genshin Impact.

I fucking hate touchscreens. I have been someone who buys devices with physical keyboards whenever I can and the best phone j have owned in more recent years was the blackberry key two, that phone was fucking awesome but it has got to the point now where there are no longer any good options.

I had a unithertz titan until recently but just got tired of things just not quite working as they should on it. There in the unihertz titan slim which is the same form factor as the keytwo so I feel would be physically great but the software side is just going to be more of the same I had with the regular titan.

I wish there was a decent option. I backed the planet computers astroslide as that looked decent but those cunts fucked over backers, delivered a few devices and have now fucked off not fulfilling all backers devices. That is my first and last forray into crowdfunded bullshit.

Someone make a good phone with a physical keyboard for the love of god!!!

You can get a decent smart phone for $0 on a contract here in the US. Same as it was back in days of dumb candy bar and RAZR flip phones.

And like the old days, there are phones you can spend a lot of money on. But these are also a fast portable computer and a killer camera.

IMHO, the pricing makes total sense to me. Hell, before cell phone cameras got good, people commonly spent $400+ on nice point and shoot camera.

You could argue that’s a definition of success for a gadget: when it is ubiquitous and necessary.

Time to get in on some new gadget that will soon be a boring ordinary part of life. Electric Vehicles look like they will but still pretty expensive. My vote is home automation stuff

I remember when the iphone it a grand and people were like. apple is crazy.

I saw deal today at a store:
buy a galaxy fold, get a free 55" tv.

Say your phone is overpriced without saying your phone is overpriced

Yeah, how else can I troll other from the comfor of my toilet? 1 sec gotta wipe....

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Our devices are old hat now. They're part of our life. Even people who don't understand them have a vague idea how they work.

They used to be like magic. Now we are desperate for new magic.

I remember the early days of the smart phone with app store phenomenon, when you had things like a flashlight app, or a lighter app. Simple little toys that might have had some utility, and showed off a small fraction of what the thing could do. It held a lot of promise.

Most of what a smart phone is these days is a camera, a video consumption apparatus, and a doom scrolling machine.