My argument is that $700 should not be the cost of a "low end product".

Look, I get it, Apple exists to extract as much possible money out of people as they can while offering the absolute bare minimum, and are willing to gimp their devices so people can't really take advantage of them fully in order to pressure people to either bite the bullet and deal with the paltry storage or pay the insane markup so they can actually use their shiny 4K-capable cameras (or go with another manufacturer if they can forgo the shiny Apple logo). But Apple are literally the only ones ballsy enough to do this with their flagship phones.

From a business perspective I get it, and I understand that people like you are either super-fanboys or shareholders so you'll argue against this because it might cost Apple another $1.40 to double the storage and persuade them into their overpriced broken cloud services, which in the minds of people like you means Apple should then rightfully charge $100 extra for this tiny bit of extra wiggle room, and use base model storage standards from nearing half a decade now. Yes, perhaps if Apple were to actually get with the times then they would only make a metric fuck-ton of profit off each sale rather than a little bit more than a metric fuck-ton of profit. The ONLY reason they can get away with this is because people are attracted to that logo like gnats attracted to a bug zapper, so there's no reason for Apple to stop shafting their customers, I get it.

Also, this survey suggests that 42% of 16GB iPhone users run out of storage space once a month. Don't worry, I also understand that this means grandma should ignore the 'Apple is friendly for the non-techies' mantra and do all her research so she can try to make sense of all the gigabobs and megawhatzits in order to not be shafted by the one company willing to sell her a comically gimped device for an insane price while wearing a broad smile on their face.

But despite understanding all this, I still think it's bullshit.