I don't get the kind of phone calls that the OP described. We did upgrade from our older flip phones to smart phones when the cost of the service dropped to an affordable (i.e. justifiable) level. Our phones cost us $300 each (OnePlus N10) at the time we purchased them, and the plan costs $35 per month per phone for unlimited everything with 5G, and it includes Netflix which we seldom use.
As usual, I appreciate imwjl's informative posts. I am retired from engineering, so I have a sense (gist) of what he is talking about, though not always the specifics.
When one retires from a technology career, s/he begins to realize that technology is like a conveyor belt. When you are standing still (i.e. retired and off the conveyor belt of technology), you can see where you were on that conveyor belt getting farther and farther away.
Reading about technology is NOT the same as being in the middle of it, developing it for future use by business and consumers. imwjl is still in the middle of it and I am not anymore. When I was in the middle of it, the stuff I worked on would typically become commonplace 10 years or so later. Two really obvious and now common technologies that this was true for me as an engineer were the internet and later, the cloud. Other projects involved either the military or scientists and will probably never be commonly visible. The medical projects I worked on when contract engineering in retirement before COVID are yet to come through FDA.
Tony