My mate has one, bought it brand new about 6 weeks ago, it cost him 300 quid ***including*** a humongous 10,000 mAh battery pack complete with new back and rugged case… go in developer, turn off all animations, it’s just as fast in real life as a Note 8…..

I bought a basic lenovo laptop a few years back, swapped in an SSD boot drive and upped it to 8GB memory. All in, it was max 700 quid. My GF needed a laptop for work, so I helped her shop for one. Granted, we’re in a different country, but we ended up paying more for a lower spec after shopping around a fair amount.

Ditto for phones. We had to replace smartphones while traveling, and I wanted a simple smartphone that runs android and google maps, without a need for much else. I’m always looking for the knee in the curve, but a lot of the phones were hundreds of quid for what seemed like not much added value. What’s on offer is often worse than what I had years ago.

Convenience, robustness, and performance is down while cost is up.