I suppose it’s just a byproduct of the cellphone boom and how fast things changed. Almost feels locked in by default to upgrade if you started out with a brick phone, flip, camera, then finally smart, and smart phones advanced pretty well for a while, but feels like they’re all the same now, incremental upgrades. But here I’m am still stuck on this ride.
Originally iPhone was not subsidized by the carrier, I paid nearly $1,000 for mine. I also was not aware of Mac rumors and the 3g came out a couple months later.