They are, but they’re completely optional and you don’t need to make any purchases to progress through the entirety of the game content. Plenty of people are pure F2P players.

Star Rail and Genshin are both gacha games that are completely enjoyable as a pure F2P player. The main cast of characters plus a few of the easily obtainable F2P characters are more than enough to get you through all of the story and event content, and they even give you enough of a trickle of jades/primogems through free story and event quest rewards that you can pull a few 5* characters (though you obviously have to be a lot more selective on who you want to pull for than a paid player would have to be).

And they expect these things to last 7 years? Yeah right.

One of the possibilities I semi-unironically expressed was that Google is willing to promise 8 years of software updates because judging by their track record, there won’t be any Pixel 8s left alive after year 5, which means there won’t be any customers to complain when they break that promise.

I don’t know where you’re getting that it has the “performance of an iPhone 7”. The QCM6490 is most analogous to a Snapdragon 782G, which was the fastest Snapdragon 700-series chip before they moved to the Snapdragon 7 Gen X branding. It was released in late 2022.

It’s not a range topper, but it’s still a respectable midranged chip even for 2023.

Fairphone went with an embedded chip rather than a mainstream Snapdragon because Snapdragon chips only get something like three years of support, whereas some of their enterprise products get eight. The QCM6490 will allow the Fairphone 5 to get software updates until 2031.

“Why does everyone want the crowbar?”

“Cuz it’s a FUCKING CROWBAR, are you fucking serious?”

“What are you gonna do with it?”

“Fucking nothing, but I’m gonna own a fucking crowbar now, so that’s the fucking shit!”