[saddestcatever]

True. I think the economics of how cheap smartphones have gotten is shocking.

Especially since you can acquire "barely working" phones. Broken camera? Not a problem. Broken audio jack? No worries. Cracked screen? Meh. No battery life? Doesn't matter one bit.

I imagine it's pretty easy to acquire hundreds of barely working phone for cheap if you don't care about using them as a traditional mobile device.

[banana_giraffe]

And once you start looking to acquire hundreds of phones, you can buy a lot of old phones on ebay or the like for something like $1 a phone or less. Most probably won't work, but at scale, you'll end up with enough that are good enough for something like a click farm.

[Scoundreller]

Or buy working devices and harvest the unneeded parts for resale.

Can buy a used MacBook Air, sell the lcd assembly and keyboard/trackpad and already recover a big chunk of the cost. (If you needed an Apple device).