Your comment seems out of date. There's no $200-300 iPhone anymore. iPhone 16e is the cheapest model I think? That's $600usd? But there are in fact $200-300 Moto phones still and new ones every year, with decent specs for the price and fairly close to stock Android OS. No, they dont have 6 or 7 year of OS upgrades, but that was never a realistic option in the budget Android phone market anyway. It would be unfair and inaccurate to Moto "abandoned" that low end market.
The Samsung A5x line usually goes towards 300 dollar/euro pretty quickly and e.g. the A56 get 6 years of updates. The Pixel 8a is currently 369 Euro in my country and has a long update cycle.
Just for reference, last year my friend bought a new Xiaomi 13T for $35 more (so +13%), which destroys this phone by every metric except synthetic CPU benchmarks. Apple really is heavily overpriced.
The catch being that's a phone from 2022. Sure, if that's acceptable. I was just referring to current models rather than models from multiple years ago
It outperforms samsung A5x series handily, has better battery life, better carrier support, has full warranty from apple, including same-day in-store service. Who cares what year it is from?