My last iPhone purchase was the original SE... which turned out to be the most highly-regarded iPhone of them all.
It got smashed, so now I have to deal with all the regressions. No TouchID, no headphone jack, no SIM slot. Will I enjoy having a much better camera? Yep. But that won't do me any good while I can't listen to shit on the plane or in my cars... unless I carry an octopus of dongles everywhere, and none of it breaks and none of its non-removable batteries die.
The sad fact is that manufacturers work harder to screw the customer now than they do to impress him. Apologists enable this behavior, and entire product categories regress.
Same here! Haven't smashed mine yet thankfully and it's still great in 2024. Except that everyone is making their software slower because that's how it goes.
I did replace the screen on it. I've replaced screens on several phones several times, including once before on this one. But for some reason it suffered a total collapse of functionality this time. Not only did the Home button stop working (and no, there was no damage to it, its ribbon cable, or connectors... I examined every millimeter with a microscope), but the speakers stopped working and maybe the mic.
I've been writing an application and jumping through hoops to make it work on iOS 15 simply because I wanted it to work on my own phone. And those hoops were a PITA because SwiftUI was full of absurd holes and defects until iOS 17 (yes, 17). So I guess I can go through and shitcan all the workarounds I had to implement, at least!
That's a positive way to look at it! Shame that SwiftUI is tied to the OS version though, I guess that's why apps are slowly dropping support for iOS 15.
Even the 3rd-gen is pretty old at this point, and it retains the dumb rounded edges of much older models. The original SE had the nice flat edges, which Apple has wisely returned to.
It got smashed, so now I have to deal with all the regressions. No TouchID, no headphone jack, no SIM slot. Will I enjoy having a much better camera? Yep. But that won't do me any good while I can't listen to shit on the plane or in my cars... unless I carry an octopus of dongles everywhere, and none of it breaks and none of its non-removable batteries die.
The sad fact is that manufacturers work harder to screw the customer now than they do to impress him. Apologists enable this behavior, and entire product categories regress.