What do you do with your phones that it doesn't last more than 24 months?
I've had only two iPhones for almost 11 years. An iphone 6s and currently an iPhone 13 mini there entire time.
They're solidly reliable
The camera iterates significantly every other year. My kid plays baseball, from little league to now high school ball. The pictures I can take on my iPhone are incredible. (I’d do the same thing with a Pixel or Samsung if I was a Android person)
My work phones are typically on a 4-5 year cycle. I’m currently carrying a 12 or 13 pro. I would have upgraded early for USB-C with that phone, but MagSafe is good enough.
Same here. Had a 7 for years. Upgraded to a 13. So far not felt the need to upgrade.
I compare this to when I had an 3G and the 4 came out. The gap between the two was so huge that I upgraded quickly. Reminded me of how quickly PCs evolved in the 90s.
You have kids? I want pictures At random points throughout the day while doing random things, every day. I’m not a photographer that keeps a SLR camera on me at all times.
I don't see the need to photograph every second of their life, 50 years old over here, having gone through times when taking kids pictures were limited to 12, 24 and 36 attempts.
My only two iPhones have been the iPhone SE 2016, and the 13 mini.
I miss the SE but the 13 mini is really nice too. It's a shame because the SE is still perfectly capable of running most software I use on a phone, but that software has just gotten more inefficient over time.
Apple says they stopped producing minis because they didn't sell. It seems they sold relatively better than the Air, and pretty much everyone I know who still uses a device of "13" or earlier generation, is on a mini. That's about 5 people just in my social circle still on a 13 Mini, and 0 people on any other non-Mini 13th or older generation. I reckon that's the real reason they stopped making them, people who use them, are willing to stay with their phones for much longer periods. Could also be that they break less due to being smaller.
Yes. The kind of people who use iPhone minis are generally more reasonable and won't spent too much time doomscrolling on them or overusing them for random stuff (like pretending you are a good photographer).
In that sense they are very bad customers because they won't upgrade for social status reason or just novelty. They actually need to come up with something that is worthwhile, which is pretty hard.
That being said, I'm pretty sure many of those users would upgrade if they could keep the small format and make it more reasonably affordable by removing most of "useless" stuff. It seems like they tried that with the air (no multiple cameras, no multiple speakers) but they made it too big and went with thinness for feeling points. They could have just kept it reasonably sized (under 6") and designed the internals in the same way while keeping it flat but not too thick.
I think Apple is a bit lost because their design focus too much on looks/feelings and social status points. They lack the focus that Apple products used to have, this is what made them interesting: deceptively simple in presentation but actually providing everything that you need without going crazy on the gimmicks.
As it is, one wonders why he should go with an iPhone. They are just chasing specs sheet points, trying to maximise the amounts of stuff they can put on the phone in order to create the appearance of "value". At this game they get destroyed by competitors like Samsung and even more the Chinese. Before, one could argue for an iPhone because of the CPU lead or the software but nowadays none of those things really matters or can even be considered an advantage.
Apple will keep selling lot's of iPhone because they are still somewhat the "hip" brand and people really don't like to change habits. But they are going to need to provide more value in the long term. Since the high-end doesn't meaningfully evolve anymore, brands have started a price war and Apple will definitely need to adapt if it doesn't want to have its crown stollen. In the US they have some time, but I think they are already losing ground in the EU and China has clearly stopped caring about their devices.
I have the 22 SE and I suspect I’ll get 3 more years out of it before they EOL it. I would have bought the 16e if it wasn’t such a blatant money grab. Touch ID is going to be hard to give up
I'm kind of the opposite, I would never want to go back to Touch ID. It's so nice that you can set your notifications to be private by default, but the contents will be revealed when you glance at the phone.
I think it really matters how you store your phone as to the usefulness of Touch ID. Someone storing it in their front pocket will have it always available in an ideal position to unlock on grab, whereas someone storing it anywhere that doesn't lock it in a position like that is going to see less benefit of being able to unlock the thing as they grab it.
I just had to get a new phone old was a 2020 SE (Previous was a 6S plus) so 5 years.
The new phone is FaceId ioty is much less reliable than touch id. With touch it just fails if I have wet hands or in cold weather with gloves, faceId fails in many places.
Agreed, pulling the phone out of a pocket with my thumb on the home button and having it unlocked and ready to use by the time I look at it is is ideal.
Much better than having to pull it out, hold in in a way that it can see my face, then swipe up, then wait for the stupid animation at the top of the screen to finish and the actual unlock to occur and then finally be able to use the device.
Since 2010: 3GS, 6S and now an SE. All of them were dropped, submerged and generally knocked around. The SE fell off the top of a moving vehicle. I do use an Otter case.
Similar -- I'm currently nursing a 13 mini (the lightning port barely works, so I'm on magsafe). and before that I had an iPhone XS I think -- that one I managed to break the screen (the only time I've ever done that, I dropped it in a metal elevator). I replaced the screen but it was never the same.
So I didn't go 11 years on two models, more like 7 years or so. But I'm definitely not on the two-years-and-upgrade plan.
I had a 12 mini for 5 years, it was a really lucky year to buy one because of MagSafe. The lightning ports just don’t hold up as well as the rest of it.
Thanks, I did. Maybe I just have linty pockets? It can charge sometimes if I press the lightning cable end down or up just so. And that gets a little better maybe if I toothpick it, but only maybe and only for one or two times?
I’ve had a 6+ and a 12. I guess 18 should be coming along soon, maybe it will be with an upgrade. But the 12 still feels… I dunno, really quite good.
I’ve also had it in a case the whole time, if I opened a box and found this thing I don’t think I’d be unhappy. Other than the inevitable gunk that gets in the speakers and the charging hole, it could be new…
I guess it is a race between battery health (80%) and update incompatibility, to see what will kill the thing.
Its a threesome! (cringe) Yes, our iPhones really get pounded on and end up with so much street credibility as they look like they were shot with bullets but they keep working.
I think a more charitable reading is that OS upgrades left their devices barely usable to the point of having to be replaced. I'm not a big Apple person so don't have personal experience but have heard similar stories from multiple other people, that OS upgrades wrecked the old devices they were still using.
Two iPads, an iPod Touch and an iPhone of mine have been made unusable by OS updates. If Apple had made the cutoff just one OS version sooner, then they would still feel snappy to use. They’re not actually bricked, but completely unusable and essentially e-waste.
Honestly I wish i knew. I find the battery really gets substantially worse after 12-18 months, and eventually I'm living with it plugged in to avoid getting caught with it low when I'm out.
Recently I dropped my phone (while in a case) and now there's a black spot on the screen.
Stuff like this. I live a life between a lot of DIY work and software dev, so I'm physically probably rougher on it than most, but also a heavy user of the technology too.
