After one year of usage, their devices tend to slow down and are prone to have hardware failures.
Exactly. I bought Galaxy S8, which became too much slow within 1 yr.
Right. It's an widespread issue with Samsung phones. We can see 100s of such complaints in consumer forums and social media. Because of these issues, I usually never recommend Samsung phones to any of my family or my customers.
Please exclude brands like realme, moto or Xiaomi
Actually these brands do better than Samsung phones in terms of durability. I have bought a lot of phones from these brands for my family and customers and never received a complaint so far. Even myself have used Redmi Note 4 for 3 years, and using Poco X2 for past 2 years and never had any hardware issues. On the other hand, my dad's Samsung phone (he is one of those who believes Samsung rocks 😜) has seen service centre multiple times.
It's true, 5-10 years ago, that these brands do not offer good specs as Samsung or other top brands (like LG, Sony during those days). But the scenario have changed now. Every brand use same/similar SoC, same RAM, similar camera setup etc. It runs down to the camera sensor and the display panel which decides the price point of that device. And the brand names add additional value and cost to it.
imo we just need to look at the specs what we need, service centre availability in our area. Brand should be the last thing we look at. But end of the day, it's our purchase, our money so we have the right to pick any brand we prefer.
Taking your replies on this thread into consideration, iPhones seems to be the right choice. Google Pixel 6A also seems to have issues out of the box, but expected to be fixed.