You can get a totally workable used iPhone cheap, because they keep working for so long.
It's not like you need a lot of horsepower for texting. My kids take a beat up 8-year-old iPhone 6 out when they go to sleepovers and things. It still works fine.
You've been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly, including elsewhere in this thread. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Dystopia = everyone must buy an iphone as solution to the problem instead of just using an app that's not restricted to iphones
Two options: - everyone installs an app that can deal with multiple vendors (like 90% of the messengers) - everyone that is not having a phone of vendor x gets a new phone from vendor x and throws away the old one (or keeps both lol)
The former is almost for free and the latter costs hundreds of dollars .
It's so much worse that you cannot even make out this difference