Try the SE! It’s the same internals as the 6s in the body of the 5s.
I had a X, cracked the glass on both sides, and went back to my SE. It just feels so good to hold. I never dropped those old phones, because you can actually get a good grip on them, so the glass remains unshattered (even on my old 4S which was glass on both sides like the new models). There are some downsides: Typing is much slower and more error-prone. I get frustrated with TouchID not working when my hand is sweaty or dirty. The radios aren’t as reliable as the new phones - my bluetooth headphones stutter a lot more and I sometimes need to toggle airplane mode to get cell data to work. But the size just feels right. I also notice that I don’t do that thing where I get sucked into browsing Instagram or whatever and waste tons of time as much with the smaller phones. And somehow the small screen makes everything feel super fast, too.
I sucked up and replaced my wonderfully small 5s with an XS last year on the logic that it was the smallest of the modern iDevices. The XS is still too large, but better (faster, more capable, water resistant, longer lasting battery) phone, so I don’t regret upgrading. LCD vs. OLED doesn’t make much difference overall except that at the very lowest brightness setting the darkest shades of black can get truncated on OLED.
Boy howdy did I used to feel this, because it is so right. Large phones suck to hold.
But then, unfortunately, something in my head changed: my eyes.
I got a little older (over the space of the six years I’ve had the 5S) and my eyes didn’t like seeing smalll things anymore. I have to wear cheaters everywhere, and that’s a pain.
Thankfully, I don’t wear a watch, and I can tell the time just glancing at even a small screen phone. But even the larger text modes don’t seem to work as well as they used to.
So what am I gonna do?
Oh, and also I guess the battery is failing and carrying an extra battery around just to keep the thing alive when I need it to be pretty well nullifies the entire “ergonomic” argument for keeping it.
Even considering all of that, I resent paying for almost any new technology—the expense, I mean (if we weren’t poor, this would probably be a nonissue, but we are and it is). Most of the new features on these devices are less important than the benefit of a new battery.
I’ve repaired some pretty small electronics, doing my own battery surgery in the past (on a 3GS), but with my eyes it is so much more tedious and I just can’t really do it any more. Buying a new one (maybe an XR?) makes more sense to me.
(It’d be cool if I could use an Apple Pencil to draw on one of these, but I gather it doesn’t work.)
I highly recommend NOT ordering any refurbished or ‘renewed’ iPhones from Amazon.
My two experiences with these goods were just ridiculously bad. My iPhone SE arrived bent; I sent it back. I received another one that looked okay, but kept turning off by itself while I was using it, shutting down entirely over and over again. I sent that one back, too. Both times, all of the customer service was with Chinese companies doing business in America and refurbishing phones for Amazon.
I’m not sure why a new smaller phone would need to keep the same bezel dimensions as the iPhone 8… a 4.7" phone with the same front camera and notch design as the X and 11 lines would provide Face ID support and eliminate both the forehead and the chin from the overall device size.
Given that Apple announced that they were actually just keeping the 8 around as the low-end model, I wonder if the “new small phone” rumors will keep going between now and March.
If they do ever make a new small phone with the same industrial design as their current lineup, the one thing I’ll definitely miss is the fact that the SE fits perfectly into a 1 LEGO Brick-wide slot. I built a little “couch” for my iPhone to lay in overnight so that the alarm clock app I use can display the numbers at a larger size for when I need to see the time with my glasses off.
The thing I don’t get is that Apple seem convinced that price point was the only reason anyone got an SE. it couldn’t possibly be that some people actually prefer smaller phones. Bigger is always better, right?
I’d be curious to know what the breakdown is between Apple people who just bowed to the wave of Android phablets, though they would never say so on stage; and the ones who genuinely think that the future of ‘small phone’ is buying a big phone, some airpods; and relying on Siri’s…tenuous…grasp of spoken instructions as a UI is.
A friend in the late 90’s told me the thing she like most about pre-smartphone mobile phones is that it was the only time you’d ever hear men saying “look at this - mine is much smaller than yours.”
So, should I be ashamed of my 64gb 4S? Otterbox keeps it looking brand new and it still does everything i need, although I am noticing that some of my apps are no longer upgradeable…
Last month I finally replaced my circa 2013 samsung relay 4g (with the slide out qwerty keyboard, i miss it sooo) with the Sony xperia xz2 compact, definitely the smallest modern mobile I could find (and still almost an inch bigger than the relay…). I freakin love it. A fantastic camera, not too much bloatware, seems sturdy as heck (no damage after a few drops). I don’t see why they’d get poor reviews…
Funny thing about this. I actually swapped from an iPhone 6 to an iPhone SE because I read a bunch on it and it doesn’t weigh as much. The 6 would hurt my hands after a while. Aside from a handful of apps that don’t seem to be tested on the smaller screens, it’s perfectly functional for hours of reading a week.
