It's normal that your battery health drops

Apple, break the laws of physics!

Even the newest watches have 18 hour battery life, so of course one that is almost a decade old would be the same or worse. It's actually amazing that it still lasts a whole day after all this time.

Some more than others. iPhone 7, for example, had some issues with the earpiece and other hardware things. You see much less iPhone 7's out there than 6s's. The model is a factor. 6s is known to be one of the best, most resilient iPhones ever made.

It wouldn't reduce the price. Mass production keeps the price low. Customization, even if it's lesser components, would drive the price up.

Welcome to iOS. Some things don't make sense, and there's nothing you can do about it. Thankfully it's not many things, but it is what it is.

iPhone is Apple's flagship product and they will never get rid of any of the restrictions put in place to push you to having an iPhone. It's also a medium for you to buy apps and services - two major revenue streams for Apple and pretty much the future of the company. So no - it's not likely, and probably impossible that this would ever happen.

I'd invest a bit more and go for a 13PM. Much better phone.

LOL... Nothing is, well, nothing. A nascent company with next to zero customers (relatively speaking). Apple doesn't care about them and the decision to add RCS was definitely not related to this.

If you don't care about the telephoto and 120hz the Plus is a great iPhone. For your longevity question, it's not really clear yet if the non-pros will get less software support, but the worst case scenario is it will get 1 year less than the Pro, that's it.

My advice is to keep the Pro Max if you don't mind the price. It's just better and nicer. It's really not that heavy (especially when compared to 12/13/14 Pro Max).

I honestly heavily doubt Apple are still working on Siri at all. They’ve just accepted it will be garbage, at least for now

Same reason phones don’t have headphone jacks anymore. Or why laptops don’t have DVD drives and floppy disk drives. Or use FireWire. Physical SIM cards are obsolete and the easiest way to completely erase them from our lives is yanking the cord out in one go.

SIM cards are basically a way to “login” to your carrier. that still being a physical item is kind of crazy in 2024. Even eSIM, while being a huge step up, can be further improved. IMO this process should simply be a login and password like everything else.