Lifetime ...
It's hard to justify splashing out on a high-end smartphone when you know that it will need replacing in two or three years time. If the non-replaceable battery hasn't failed then the software will be obsolete, buggy, and unpatched (even if Google have issued a patch for any bugs in Android you can't rely on the OEM to have applied that patch to the firmware for your handset -- that problem's not so bad in the Apple world, if you can live with the view from their walled garden).
The mobile phone has, unfortunately, to be seen as a consumable, disposable, device that needs to be replaced every couple of years, and as such it's not worth paying more than a couple of hundred each time.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
