My iPhone SE 2016 is a good one. It’s easy to handle with one hand. The screen is more than decent. For most things the camera is good enough. It has a headphone jack. Good battery life. The Touch ID works faster than Face ID.
I dropped it on the pavement a few times. No problem, only the casing has a few scratches and dents. To you it may look like a piece of junk now, but to me it’s like that proverbial old pair of jeans.
Now you may think that it’s slow as mud in a pond. But, contrary to my experience with previous models, the iPhone SE actually got faster with iOS updates!
None of the currently supported iPhones is as small and light as my current phone. They all are more expensive. And I believed technology was getting smaller and cheaper each year!
I don’t want a new phone. But I’m probably buying one.
Why replace a perfectly functioning product?
I mentioned my six-year-old phone is a pretty nice thing. Lately I’m experiencing a few issues though:
- Starting some apps takes really long, like 10–20 seconds. I think it’s because today’s apps require more RAM than their older versions.
- Switching back and forth between apps resets their state. That’s particularly annoying trying to decide if I should change trains at the next station and switch between the train ticket app and Google Maps.
- Some apps get slow and unresponsive Resetting my phone helped, but then within a week or two, the same apps are slow again.
- I can’t install some recently updated apps, including a health app I want.
- For no apparent reason, Safari acts like there’s no internet connection. Rebooting solves that until a week later.
Interestingly, except for that last point, Apple have improved, making old devices usable for longer. It’s the app makers who decided that users with older devices aren’t worth the effort.
And I can understand that. When I write code for websites, I want to use the latest browser features too. They typically make it easy to create something that used to be difficult and require a lot of work. But most of the time, web developers can apply new features as enhancements. For example, if I use the latest CSS layout features (subgrid! clamp!), I write it in such a way that browsers that don’t support that can still show a usable, readable layout.
With mo
