The iPhone SE is as low end as Apple gets and it also gets reliably updates. It’s in the brand.

Also if you know what to google for you are already in the know. Plenty of people get their cheap phone from Aldi.

I speak my own experience. I owned 3 mid priced android phones over the span of 6 years. The second one got one planned and promised upgrade to the next major android version. This made the phone so slow it was unusable. Each felt not very well built, I didn’t miss them when I abandoned them. None received updates after 2 years.

I now have my third iPhone. The first lasted 4 years before I wanted a bigger one, it was then used up by my son. I carried around the bigger one for 3 years before I decided it’s too large. Now I own a Mini and that’s the best phone I ever had.

Each of the iPhones got major upgrades for years, but instead of slowing it down they added features feeling like I got a new phone.

None of that I experienced in android land. Unless apple makes some major mistakes going forward I don’t see me changing platforms again.

For the first year or two, that's common. Getting feature updates for anything even approaching >5 years is near unthinkable for Android devices however. You only get that with custom ROMs and even there it's only half of the story as they can't provide security updates for vendor blobs which is kind of a big yikes.

The iPhone 8 will get cut off the newest feature updates in the upcoming iOS 17; 6 years after launch. Security updates will likely be available for years to come. For comparison, my OnePlus 5 from 2017 (1 year younger) received its last update (any update whatsoever) in 2020 (3 years ago).

With an Android device, you'd be lucky to get security patches in any regularity at all, much less >3 years after release. That only happens with a couple few vendors who actually care such as Nokia and maybe Google (to a degree).

I am not sure which second paragraph you're referencing as your original comment only contains one.

They only offered that cheap battery replacement after the lawsuit was filed.

Thats not an act of kindness, thats ass covering. They then settled the class action about the secret throttling for $300+ millon.

Not exactly just an "opps, we forget to mention what we were doing for your phones health for years, really guys" situation. In every possible way, they were silently hobbling the performance of old phones, which directly helped their sales of new phones.

The right thing to do was very simple : alert people and offer inexpensive replacements. We know it was very simple because they did it immediately when their duplicity was revealed in a court of law. Now ask youself why they didnt do it for years.