Touchscreen smartphones aren't even fun or novel anymore, they're just necessities for daily life
yet they're still priced and treated culturally like luxury toys
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If you go for used devices, you can quite easily get an outdated entry level phone for free and a decently useable one for <€30.
You can even get new entry level phones for as cheap as €70.
So it's very much a market where you can spend whatever you want.
A flagship phone is priced like a luxurity toy, because that's exactly what it is.
And an entry level phone is incredibly cheap so that people who have no money can still get one. €70 with 2 years of usage is less than €3/month (realistically though, if you are in this kind of situation, you hold on to a phone for much longer).
Over here, if you are poor enough, you'll even get a free phone plan.
I think it's actually kinda crazy what kind of new phone you can get for 200 dollars. My last phone was a 200 dollar phone that did everything my old flagship phone did. Obviously there are differences if you look deep. I talked to my friend who just bought a 1200 dollar samsung phone and said he "needs" a phone like that, because of the camera. I don't know what that means, because he sells bread at a bakery. His camera was obviously better, but he never goes deep into his settings, like all he does is auto focus and click the button. We went on a bike ride and i'm not a picture kinda guy, i use my camara pretty much only for work related stuff and it doesn't matter how good it is. And i showed someone a picture i took and the guy said: wow that must be a really good canera. Which kinda upset samsung guy.
I don't know anyone who uses their 1000 dollar phone to even a fraction of it's capability. Now i own a nothing phone which is priced somewhere in the middle, and i like it a lot, but i wouldn't say it's much better than my 200 dollar phone.
I was selling phones back when most people thought that Internet on a cell phone was a crazy idea. Phones were advancing by leaps and bounds. The difference between a 1MP and 5MP camera was amazing.(mostly) Every year, the new version had features that last year's wouldn't dream of.
Now, I'm running a five year old flagship Android, because there still won't be much of a difference when I finally do upgrade.
That was insane. I remember reading that 1mp cameras on phones are just years away. I was pretty excited and couldn't believe it. Not two months later they released the first 1mp phone. And that was just the beginning.
The only reason i buy new phones is because it gets really dusty and abused because of work and stuff. So speakers give up, too many cracks to handle and charging port malfunction. It's nice to have a new battery as well. But these super high resolution panels with ridiculous framerates are pretty pointless. I sometimes watch halfeay through a YouTube video and don't realize that it's 480p. And i'm pretty picky with my computer monitor. I want my 2k and my 165fps.
That was a crazy time.
I still have my HTC Universal, which was an absolute flagship in 2005.
My next phone was a Motorola Droid 3, a mit-ranger from 2011.
If you put both of them side by side, these phones could be from different planets.
If he doesn't use any camera settings getting a high end phone will ofcourse give the best results for someone that just wants to point and shoot.
But I've definitely seen similar reactions to pictures I took on my Poco F1 once I had a custom Gcam app well tuned. In good conditions it was close to the best phones of the time.