My iPhone 7 lasted 7 years before I replaced it a few months ago (with a used but immaculate 12 Pro)

The only reason I replaced it was it needed a new battery, and the screen was cracked in a corner so it would also need a new display - removing the display to fit the new battery would have caused the display to break into several pieces. If the screen had not been cracked I would have just got a new battery and continued using for another 1-2 years.

It never felt slow. And because it had the solid-state home button, that never wore out

when others seem to go through phones every couple of years

Those people either :

• want a new shiny phone
• were offered an upgrade by their network and thought the new phone was “free”, not realising that once a phone is paid off you can save a lot of money by moving to a SIM-only plan
• dropped/broke their phone
• didn’t realise you can fit a new battery to a phone and give it a new lease of life

When I got my first iPhone (3G, 2008) the only other realistically viable options here in the U.K. were:

• The very first HTC Android phone, and the platform was so new that nobody knew how that would go or what apps would be available
• BlackBerry Storm, a terrible device with a truly awful “clicky” touchscreen and no WiFi. According to Wikipedia “In a 2015 book, Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry, the authors argued that the Storm was the single biggest disaster in smartphone history.”
• A variety of “smartphones” that had plastic keyboards, like the 4 that Jobs used as examples in the original iPhone Keynote as why you don’t want a hardware keyboard.

So yeah, I chose iPhone.

I have a Roku stick that supports Airplay, and I can mirror my iPhone and iPad to the TV using that, costs a lot less than an Apple TV box