You should just buy what you can afford in cash without sacrificing your day to day. No phones are worth high price tags, the industry stagnated and is nothing but paying for buzzwords now
Yup that's what I've also been thinking. I just have to upgrade because my current phone doesn't support 5g and a Black Friday like festival sale is around the corner at where I live. Had made up my mind to buy S23 but they didn't slash prices enough this year because of the launch of FE, which is a big turn off.
Generally a good idea with everything tech. It tends to get better and cheaper. So 100% don't buy features you don't need.
the industry stagnated and is nothing but paying for buzzwords now
I disagree, while it may be somewhat true on innovation, there are significant incremental improvements from generation to generation. Both in more powerful and efficient SOC in both CPU and GPU. Better Cameras, and better screens that have better nits and efficiency, and also some software features.
I'm especially impressed by SOC improvements, considering the expense has become insane to use the better production processes. The complexity of it is so extreme. The collective effort to put a new SOC product to production is estimated at about 50000 people. Just one EUV light needed to make a 4nm SOC cost about $100 million! Still they continue to progress the technology, despite the mind boggling difficulties.
The same goes for cameras, they improve significantly each year. An ordinary phone today can do what would take 1000s of dollars of equipment before digital photography. And digital photography started out being pretty bad, with the only advantage being you didn't need film. And it's still improving.
Flip phones might not be completely new, but they are improving and getting cheaper, that's at least one form of innovation. So the industry isn't entirely dead yet.
Tbh there's some festival around the corner during which the prices are meant to be at the lowest but right before it Samsung came up with this pooper FE and ruined my plans, else S23 was meant to go at the price that FE would be sold at as they'd deliberately not slash its price much now cuz that might hamper the sales of FE.
My wife and I switched to the Pixel after being with the galaxy lineup since 2011. I've not missed a single bit of Samsung bloat and the experience has been phenomenal. Our cameras with the Samsung devices always seemed to artificially degrade near the release of their next model. You could always try them out and compare. That's the beauty of return policies.
It's the 7 Pro. The battery has no problem lasting all day but will definitely need to be charged at night. I use my phone for business and personal, so calls and emails all day.