> 3x is a little hard, and I cant explain to friends why is Apple so expensive either.

How do you explain to them that Huawei's own P30 Pro sells for several times what their Honor 9x sells for? Does Huawei need to explain that to the market too? We've seen high spec midrange phones that sold for a fraction of flagship prices for years but Apple has never attempted to go after that part of the market.

And I imagine if you wanted to you could compile a long list of iphone selling points besides privacy. For example, my wife's nearly two year old iphone 8 has a ST Geekbench score that's 50% higher than the Honor 9x (4228 vs 2832). Maybe that's part of why Gazelle will pay more for her phone today ($289, 64 gb) than the 9x retails for.

The problem is that Apple intentionally crippled the XR so that they could more easily upsell people to the XS.

This punishes users who want to replace their iPhone 7, since Apple simply doesn't make a good phone in that price bracket anymore.

It's worse than that in my opinion, because Apple's prices have the effect of sort of "giving permission" to other flag ships to also jack up prices significantly. The Galaxy S7 edge was retailed at $779 on release. The comparably positioned s10 plus starts at $999. More with more storage space, though I don't recall if the s7 edge had additional internal storage upgrades like that (it did have user expandable storage though)