I was an original iphone user, and have been hearing about how unrepairable and how battery can't be swapped since then. I'll believe the iphone is unrepairable when I see it.
For those of your who suspect that these types of claims are a lie, they basically are. If you have elderly relatives, they often DO NOT want to upgrade their phone once they've got it working. A great gift is actually to take it into an apple store and pay for the "impossible" battery replacement for them.
It's $49-$69. You get a fresh new battery, all labor as well. OEM parts. My wife also doesn't care about the new phone, this is a nice and pretty cheap way to keep her old one ticking over.
Happy to do a comparison in 6 years on a Huawei vs Apple phone in terms of resale.
One thing to be careful of. I've been burned by used apple phones with second hand batteries in them. Apple now gives you a warning - worth checking for that if you buy used.
This is really the proof point.
This is a combination of apples total system engineering and software update story. You don't need applecare to get updtes on an iphone.
For example, looking at recently sold items on Ebay - Iphone 5S 32GB is going for $100. That's an 8 year old phone.
Take your 8 year old HTC - nothing close to that.