They've got some Motorola thing that was an upgrade over whatever Samsung A series they had before. Both newer phones than mine, I'm plugging along on my dad's old hand me down samsung galaxy s7 edge. It's slow as shit but their phone is even slower! It really seems like every advantage in computational improvement in every internet connected device just gets eaten up by more tracking bullshit and more unoptimized apps and it ends up being clunky and shit again
I need to get SOMETHING because the fucking NERDS who run everything have decided my device is too old to run their bullshit apps. Like I had 10 texts from a pharmacy yesterday telling me to use their app for everything. Ah, but guess what i can't do
If i spend hundreds of precious dollars on something i intend to have another 10 year long usage lifespan and it's even worse performance wise than what i got now im gonna scream. And post annoying complaints about how my own lack of consumer savvy fucked me
With all due respect, a lot of this is bullshit that may have been true a decade ago. Last year's Pixel 9a for instance, the budget option, runs the same exact processor as the Pixel 9. Both can run custom firmware (I'm typing this post on my 9a on GrapheneOS).
You tend to get additional cameras, higher built quality (glass, frame) on the flagships, but Samsung and Google's budget/midrange lines have been far from "designed to be terrible pieces of shit" as you're claiming for ages. In some cases they're actually the better option, as budget phones kept cut features like the headphone jack and SD card slots around in some cases, while they've long been abandoned on flagships.
You can compare the specs for the two phones I mentioned here: https://www.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone1=13219&idPhone2=13478
Okay, nice! I stand corrected on the A series pixels!
I stand by my analysis of the Samsung budget devices. I regularly see the MediaTek A06 and A07 devices go out and they are absolutely Straight To Landfill garbage that should genuinely be illegal to manufacture.
The presence of a headphone jack or an SD card do not make a device viable to hold onto for 10+ years, a powerful CPU and GPU do.
The flagship models also usually have more RAM, which for most people the budget phone should be enough, but if you're doing emulation/VMs or something like that it can be helpful