[sp527]

This argument has so many holes you could drive a Cybertruck through it.

There are ample used phone markets selling iPhones and top-of-the-line Android devices (e.g. Back Market). No one needs to be on the latest and greatest. I still use an iPhone 13 and I have friends on phones as old as iPhone 11. None of us are part of the "American lower class". Smartphones are a highly mature technology and the improvements being made year on year are now vanishingly incremental, at best.

Further, there is no shortage of financing models available to American consumers. If anything, Buy Now Pay Later might be *too* available as an option.