From the amount of utility you derive from a phone, and the life span of phones these days, $429 seems cheap to me. But it’s all relative I suppose.

Yes, meaning that if all you knew about someone is that they have an iOS device, you would not be able to tell what their wealth/income status is (other than maybe they are not in the bottom 10%).

The cheapest Pixel is $499, so it’s not like Apple users are paying more than the market will bear — and even if you get the Walmart discount phone you’re paying more than the savings in service pretty quickly, so this is a pretty democratic competition compared to all of the other ways people buy things they enjoy or signal affluence: people pay many tens of thousands more for premium SUVs, high end clothing costs considerably more than that iPhone, etc. Half the people here have the same phone as actual billionaires, and we don’t spend any time in their circles otherwise.

Your comment history suggests you have a personal identification with Android, which I think is making it hard to evaluate it rationally. I’d suggest considering whether that’s really a lot of money for something people use so much every single day, and whether your position might be one of the goals of the intense PR play Google has been making to get the EU regulators to make them less of an also-ran in the messaging space - they know it depends on convincing the regulators that Android users are being discriminated against, which is why you hear so many stories about that which turn out to be sourced back to Google and the phone companies.

No that's not cheap. If someone thinks that's cheap, they're living in a bubble.