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You can get an iPhone 4 for around $50. Seems like a perfectly adequate smartphone to me.

Can you still buy them newly produced, or is that the cost for old inventory? I believe it's the latter, which is an artificially low cost- it doesn't reflect the cost of manufacturing, but rather is the highest price that the market will pay for an outdated phone that phone companies already have in inventory.

Not to mention, Apple products past three generations are unusable. My old iPhone 4S phone is so slow that it's practically unusable.

Why is that? I booted up an old iPod touch that was based on the iPhone 4 and that thing is unusable. I would have thought it would degrade gracefully and still run as performant as it did with the old software on it but it runs so slow it's unusable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence

Probably not even new old-stock iPhones, but actually used ones.

I wonder if e-cycling old high-end devices by refurbishing them and selling them to low-income markets isn't a better choice than ramping up manufacturing on necessarily crappy phones.

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