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> These have much better cameras

They say that literally every year and I never notice.

I have an iPhone X (2017). My partner has an iPhone 12 (2020). The difference is very noticeable across those three years.

I think often a single year's improvements are negligible but real, so any given two year's improvements are much more noticeable.

The best way to really tell the difference, in my view, is to watch YouTube videos or see comparisons of photographs. I find that a lot of written articles or comments on forums really hype up the difference (along the lines of "get the new phone, it has a better camera"), when in practice, it's not that noticeable.

For example, this YouTube video from a quick YouTube search shows fairly insignificant differences between the iPhone 11 and 13 non-Pro models: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjosGytrIJI

Back then I found that 11 had a noticable leap forward in terms of image quality, and in later version, I don't detect such an increment in quality.

As an example, I looked at this low-light photo comparison of the basic 11 and the 13 pro max:

https://www.gsmarena.com/piccmp.php3?idType=5&idPhone1=11089...

Sometimes the later model's image looks a bit better, sometimes it's indistinguishable. Meanwhile the 13 pro max costs more than twice as much in my country.

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