They make 90% of the money in the mobile market place.

Yeah that's a bit intense hey? I will wait 2 years minimum, normally 3 though to get a new one. 

And when I get my "new" one I usually just sign a new contract when ready and get whatever phone is a gen or 2 behind and get it for nothing or very little up front.

I feel like a peasant for owning an Android.

Hype...

At least many people in my country buy i-phone,to flaunt it,since it's an extremely famous product,and many celebrities own it,so some people feel special if they have it''looooooook I have an i-phone,you poor guy with no i-phone''...

I laugh at them,because hardware-wise my fairly cheaper phone is way better than i-phone,since it has higher specs(higher specs doesn't mean always better phone,and you can have a phone with lower specs which can be more efficacious,my windows phones taught me,unless the discrepancy is big)i-phone can boast for it's great os and apps but the oxymoron is that many owners of it,come and vaunt about it's camera,which pales in comparison even with quite older phones...

Hmmm, I thought that smartphone market growth is slowing down, with some signs of contraction seen in China.  It's a little hard to measure deltas with any accuracy since Apple is still the only phone maker that accurately reports actual unit sales, and the data for other companies relies on analyst guesstimates.

As for slight upwards trajectory, it depends on what you mean by "slight":

http://media2.giga.de/2015/09/statistic_id263401_apple-iphone-unit-sales-worldwide-2007-2015-by-quarter-rcm992x0.png

Grouping these by Q4-Q3 which is the current release cycle (thus dropping the initial launch quarter), we get the following annual totals:

36% year-over-year growth seems pretty substantial in a market that is supposedly growing only in the low double-digits or single digits.  Are you sure they are losing marketshare?

No, they are not. People are constantly saying Apple is losing market share and doomed and whatever. They actually gained market share last year with the iPhone 6 (they equaled Samsung in sales for the first time in years) and it looks like total sales will increase again this year. Next year sales will increase a lot, with a redesigned iphone. 

Ugh. Apparently there's at least 13 million people out there who are so entranced by Apple's... "product" that they would spend hundreds of dollars on a new version of a phone they bought last year.

Wow, a person with an Iwata avatar says iPhones are selling on hype? You are disrespecting everything Iwata did in his time as Nintendo president with that comment. I've said that roughly a dozen times on this forum but here we go again: Apple is successful because they use Clayton Christensens research about disruptive products as the base for their product design. Steve Jobs called The Innovator's Dilemma "the most influential book I've read in my life". It's exactly the same strategy Iwata used when they designed the Wii. 

And the rest you wrote is definitely nonsense (sorry to be so direct). The iPhone's speed and camera is always up there with flagship Android phones. Generelly, top of the line smartphones perform almost identical each year. Whether you buy a Galaxy S6 or an iPhone 6s, both are amazing phones and neither of them is popular because of hype. 

Apparently you don't (want to?) understand that the majority of these buyers haven't bought an iPhone 6 or 6+ last year.

Bashing the iPhone's specs and accusing its buyers of being sheep for buying an underpowered phone is an ironic recurring theme in every Apple thread. The oxymoron (see? i can big words) is that most bashers haven't done their homework or just being purposely sheepish. From the processor, camera, screen to the software and the app store, you will see the iPhone objectively among the top in every category.

And yeah, shame on people for spending so much money on, argubly, the device they use the most everyday...