I have a 13 mini that is hanging on by a thread and you will pry it from my hand (because I can actually hold onto it). I'm actually considering finding a refub because I prefer my old-fashioned artillery to the 6.1".
The larger phones barely fit in pockets, fit poorly in running packs/biking gear and are just generally inconvienient for being active with them.
Same boat, though with battery replacements, I think what will actually do me in and force me to downgrade to a newer model will be when they stop supporting OS security upgrades. I'm perfectly happy to keep replacing the screen protector and battery until that point.
I would have kept using mine if it didn't have issues dropping calls and also certain app incompatibilities that began to be frusterating. It is actually a lot better of an iphone than my newer SE2. It is much faster on the OS it runs than this SE2 on ios 15. Spotlight search is instantaneous on the old SE. On the SE2 it might hang in spotlight for 5 seconds or longer.
I'm still on iPhone 7+… It gets a new battery every 2-3 years and works great. I love how it has a big screen but feels much smaller and thinner in my pocket than any modern iPhone. I was really looking forward to this new "SE4", but the 7.5W charging and lack of magsafe is a deal breaker for a phone that in my country costs ~900 usd.
Eventually, Apple (and 3p developers) will abandon you, and you'll need to throw away a perfectly good phone and take another step on the treadmill.
I'm still hanging on to my perfectly working iPhone 7, while app developers tell me to fuck off left and right. It does everything I want a phone to do, but developers consider "old phones" to be icky and stop supporting them.
Yup - it was the same for me with the 2016 SE. Still runs perfectly fine, we're still doing the same old CRUD web shit for apps, but apparently now our apps are so much more advanced that there's no possible way they could keep supporting that "legacy" hardware.
I'm totally with you, with that article. It is terrible how owners of slightly-old hardware are treated by software developers. Leaving potentially millions of users out in the cold because they just can't be bothered to keep a maintenance branch around and backport a few fixes to it. For apps that are by and large not complicated. So much waste sacrificed at the altar of developer comfort!
Ultimately, one of the cameras in my iPhone 7 failed, and I replaced it with an SE3 - which was indistinguishable from the 7 - but another issue was patches.
Eventually yes, but the 13 is less than 3.5 years old and will likely receive iOS updates for another 3.5 years. And most apps support one or two iOS versions into the past. I agree it’s not ideal, but ~8 years of use isn’t that bad either.
I plan to use it, until I need to charge the battery every 15 minutes.