I think a lot of people pay their phones off with a contract over several years.

Signing up for a new phone contract, you start looking at a $600 phone. Thats $25 a month plus $15 for your calls and data, so $40 a month. Then you see the next phone next to it thats only $1200, it's so much better, and you're only paying $65 a month for it.

And then they flash this one in front of you, only $67 a month (just ignore the fact it's now over 3 years instead of 2)! 5 minutes later, you are in.

Enough people that even great Apple got FOMO after this market.

I did buy flagships few times and to be honest I did not regret them.

I kept them longer and I was able to do more... but that was few years ago when phones were getting more powerful for a reason.

Cameras were getting more megapixels to get on par with non digital photography (arguably, if you are not an artist at least) and everything needed to come along, memory, storage, processing and of course screen resolution.

... but again once that was done, which varies for everyone but still, and that is the key part of the argument, reaches a plateau of usefulness for the average user, then everything "more" was really a technical specification d*ck measuring contest. Unless you have superhuman vision, current screens are "good enough" to check your family photos and your work email.

Long story short I went from flaghships to 2nd hand few generations olds Pixel 8 (cheapest I could try GrapheneOS on) and I don't regret that decision at all.

TL;DR: I did, I don't anymore.

PS: before someone argues I don't know what I'm missing as I'm probably not using my phone for much, I do quite a lot on my phone including programming on it (directly on it, not via ssh), streaming videos on video projectors, running qemu for other architectures, etc. I'm not a casual user.

$1900 for green bubbles is crazy. My wife's iPhone 6 still trumps this.