In my case I wanted a damn SD card slot. And more than 2 years of security updates.

Motorola has well priced excellent phones with minimal bloat.

From first hand experience, I can confirm that AppCloud is installed on certain carrier versions of S series phone as well.

No there are lots of Chinese phones with minimal bloatware, like the nothing phone cmf 1, sure they only come with 2 years of updates but what you gonna do at that price...

If you're in the middle east, I'm sure you'd rather be spied on by China.

Do you imagine that shit? You're a nuclear scientist, working on a program for generating electricity, your country is open to being audited and complies with the restrictions and has no weapon's program, one day you come home and then a fucking rocket comes right inside your appartment and kils you and your whole family.

Ain't that a bitch? I get Khamas was hiding there too... And since they have all that precise rockets that can take a single appartment down, why did they reduce Gaza to rubble?

The ramifications of this make me sick: evil not only wins but also writes history... And yeah the midwits here will unironically look you in the eye and explain how killing children is ok because of this of that... You being able to explain horrors doesn't make you smart or pragmatic, it makes you have no self respect and makes your personal boundaries weak, and the same mind that finds arguments to cope with the horror his tax money funds will find arguments to cope with a lot more until it's his turn on the grinder and by then it'll be too late.

Looking around, you can get an A series or unlocked iPhone 13 new from a prepaid mvno for $0.

A refurbished iPhone 13 is $300 on amazon, which is close to the cheapest M ($250). I can’t find new 13’s for sale except via budget carriers.

(Sent from my 12 mini which is better than all that followed it: $200-ish for excellent condition, refurbished.)

Wut? Besides that you can uninstall whatever you don't want or even replace the operating system with a bare android or whatever else you want, you're forgetting about Fairphone, Murena, and probably others. I had an apple phone for work once and it's not like it doesn't come with a lot of bloat preinstalled and tries to get your permission to snitch on where you are and what you do. It has toggles for some of the things but you can only do what apple lets you do. Also consider daily use, where you will install third party software to get stuff done: you're not better off with the necessarily commercial software from apple's store than with pretty much anything you can get on f-droid and other open source stores

Recommending Apple for privacy only makes sense for those who don't actually care and just want the feel-good premium brand

The trick is to define "bloatware". Is that known knowns (stuff that's visible), known unknowns (stuff that's added that's not visible), and/or unknown unknowns (stuff added we are pretty sure is there but can't prove)? Apple adds all kinds of carrier-specific crap on every phone, but it's not readily discoverable. Android mfgrs must also because of carrier contracts and country-specific regulatory approval requirements. There's likely little means of escaping this without a BYOD non-Android, non-overseas, non-Apple phone that may or may not exist. Surely there is an obvious, viable alternative somewhere I'm missing that I hope exists.

OnePlus has a phenomenal software experience

That's incorrect. Zenphone is a bliss.

I like the Samsung apps on my Galaxy.

Open an email from any email client and give it a try.

Every vendor waits a month before sending out security patches, including Google. I've never understood this (with Linux desktops as my context) but so if you have a risk profile where the OS needs more frequent updates but still want to use Android, you need to take extra hardening steps such as limiting what you expose the OS to (from the outside (firewall, turn off unnecessary connections like Bluetooth) and inside (potentially malicious apps))

GrapheneOS if you can live without Google Wallet and hardened Google Pixel (the only secure Android device family to date).