And you can get iPhone 14s for $99 on occasion as long as you commit to prepaid service from Total Wireless/Trac Fone for 3 months (so about $180 - so your total price for the phone and 3 months of service is about $300) or you can use carrier trade-in deals to get hundreds of dollars off an iPhone 17, as long as you stay on a postpaid plan and take the credit over 3 years.
Yes, there are way more options to get sub $500 Android phones, but pretending like an iPhone is too expensive for most Americans when carrier deals are often as good or better for iPhone options (to say nothing of the older phones being sold by Total Wireless and the like) and when more people in the United States use iPhone vs Android is a little bit silly.
We just got $1130 from Verizon for my husband's old iPhone 14 Plus towards his new iPhone 17 Pro (I get a new phone every year so I’m just on the Apple Upgrade plan or I buy it outright each year, whereas he gets a new phone every 3 years or so), making it essentially free (we had to change the plan he was on but it cost the same as the old plan) and if he’d wanted a regular iPhone 17, he could’ve dropped down to a cheaper phone plan too. A 16e would’ve been even less than that.
Yes, there are way more options to get sub $500 Android phones, but pretending like an iPhone is too expensive for most Americans when carrier deals are often as good or better for iPhone options (to say nothing of the older phones being sold by Total Wireless and the like) and when more people in the United States use iPhone vs Android is a little bit silly.
We just got $1130 from Verizon for my husband's old iPhone 14 Plus towards his new iPhone 17 Pro (I get a new phone every year so I’m just on the Apple Upgrade plan or I buy it outright each year, whereas he gets a new phone every 3 years or so), making it essentially free (we had to change the plan he was on but it cost the same as the old plan) and if he’d wanted a regular iPhone 17, he could’ve dropped down to a cheaper phone plan too. A 16e would’ve been even less than that.