Cannot justify yet as it is, but with magic cue and A.I. stuff, the user experience is starting to differentiate and branch off already.
I'm sure apple is the more polished hardware and software experience on a phone still, but I'm sure internally and externally they are taking on A LOT of heat for losing the A.I. race as like it or not, that is the future of personal computing.
And google can continue to push Gemini features to their phone which will have a real impact on QOL and UX, because their hardware is exactly optimized for their Gemini LLM workflow instead of other benchmarks.
Of course at the end of the day, do not buy a phone based on promised features, but these kind of things you can only feel as a user.
If you go on reddit and online forums a lot of Apple fanboys are actually complaining about the iphone 17 series very boring as usual *cough A.I. cough*.