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Phones · Apple iPhone SE

Apple iPhone SE 1st gen

28owners with an opinion
77%of verdicts positive
12/5positive/negative since 2024
6.5 yrslongest happy owner
3happy after 3+ years

Praised for ease of use and portability; criticized for reliability and software.

What owners wrote

Likes itOwned 6.5 years
I don’t know if I just got lucky or what. But my AirPods Pro (1st gen) just finally crapped out last week. And the batteries are mostly fine: the speaker blew out in the right one, and it now sounds awful. But that’s ~6-7 good years that I got out of ‘em.
NeutralOwned 5 years
I had a 1st gen iPhone for 5 years, and currently have a 4s that I've been using for 5-6 years (I only replace my phones when my current one stops working). There's longevity in the devices, but not as much longevity in the software. Each update gets slower than the last and then you stop getting updates at all.
Likes itOwned 4 yearsStill going
I would like to update my iPad Mini 1 since it seems like it should be so ancient now (it's had 3 iterations since then), but dammit if the thing still doesn't just work fine. Yeah, it feels a little slow for some things now (especially browsing the internet, can't seem to keep more than one or two tabs in memory), but it's still super solid and gets the job done, and even still works with the vast majority of apps and games. I might have to soon to be able to iOS dev with the newest XCode, but that's the only reason I have. I've owned that thing for almost 4 years now. It's probably the most solid piece of hardware I've ever owned.
Doesn’t like itOwned 3 years
Speaking of AirPods, do people have bad experience with their quality? I have an AirPods Pro 1st Gen for about 3 years and the noise cancellation function has degraded to the point of unusable. The Apple store technician said the audio hardware has failed diagnostic and it couldn't be repaired. For a $250 equipment failed after 3 years of moderate usage is pretty disappointing.
Neutral
I love my iPhone SE 3rd gen. Perfect form factor. Neither too big nor too small to be able to do useful things on it. My hands and arms hurt using large phones. I am so used to using one hand to operate phones. My previous was iPhone SE 1st gen. Why do people need such a large phone in day to day life usage? Carry an iPad/tablet if you really need one.
Likes it
There’s still one mystery for me. I’m now at the iPhone 16. The performance of those chips with 8GB in non throttled environment (Neo..) can run as a fully performant macOS. Yet, as a phone I don’t feel upgraded performance since my SE 1st gen days. Sometimes I get stuttering, basic browsing can get the device pretty warm, sometime camera lags to launch. My usage profile didn’t change much over the years. So I can only assume codebases became more bloated, websites became more heavy on resources. Because, if my device now throttles to what I was happy with years ago assuming the software would behave the same, I’ve expected my usage to give me at least cooler non stuttering performance. But that was never the case.
Likes it
Haaa! I also paused reading at “as a kid.” I bought the 1st Gen iPad for my daughter while I was in the States for work (2010). Not a phone, big enough, and can be Internet-connected with a SIM. Lots of Games, and later my feeling of having bought something amazing was that my daughter learnt to speak brilliant English with Peppa Pig, way before her formal school started. Palo Alto Stanford Shopping (USA) › FedEx to a Relative in Maine (USA) traveling to Manipur (India) › he trimmed a local SIM to fit the Nano-SIM tray › Happy Daughter on her 2nd Birthday.
Likes it
When cleaning out my deceased father's electronics closet, I found a 1st gen iPhone. Fortunately its charging cable was nearby. I charged it and, miraculously, it turned on, and was in fact fully usable (minus calling, due to no SIM card). Note that the device is almost 20 years old at this point. In contrast, none of the various Android devices he collected over the years turned on. One came close, then errored out right after booting.
Doesn’t like it
> Removable batteries were the industry standard in the early days of mobile phones, and it worked perfectly. Phones back then were bad (so accommodating replaceable batteries was easy), and batteries degraded quickly (so it was a necessity). Modern phones are smaller, need to be more water proof, stuffed to an unimaginable degree with components -- and modern batteries last a really long time. I am not so sure it's a good idea to force them to become consumer replaceable again. My iPhone SE (1st gen) ended up being pushed apart from the inside last year because the battery had swelled up. I could have had it replaced but the CPUs were a bit too weak for the modern world and the RAM too limited. A fresh new battery would not have upgraded the CPUs or the RAM. Li-ion batteries have improved since 2016 so I expected the battery in my iPhone 16e to outlast the useful life of the CPUs and RAM in it. > extract the remaining rare earths More for the gold, I believe. There are youtubers who do it semi-professionally and are remarkably transparent about how they do it. It looks like the only really toxic fumes they contend with are a tiny bit of sulphuric acid vapour from their electrolytic baths. I don't think we should ship the trash to Africa or poor parts of Asia. I don't see how replaceable batteries would have prevented my iPhone SE from becoming trash or have prevented my iPhone 16e from becoming trash in the future. Or preventing them from ending up in Africa/Asia, for…
Likes it
I’m still on the 1st gen SE from 2016. Imagine my disappointment when I found out that the iPhone Pocket was, in fact, not an iPhone that fits in your pocket. Looking at replacing my SE with a keitai supplemented with an Android emulator
Doesn’t like it
I find it interesting you describe the issue like that. I had my airpod pro 1st gens go out on me in a way that was very similar to that, with the popping noises as you walk and move around. I figured out that when I put them in “normal mode” i.e., totally disabling the noise cancellation microphone, it mostly went away. I just figured something had happened to/with the external microphones and/or the noise cancellation processing was not happening correctly. It was basically impossible to test this theory I had, but I wondered if it was an update that introduced a bug. I can’t recall now at this point, but I do recall the feeling that the different ways I played with and tested to understand the cause and symptoms of the noise, left me with a feeling that it was not a physical/hardware issue. I suspect Apple even knows, with as many problems they’ve had with the AirPod pros; but that’s another story… when they had to replace mine one bud at a time, about 6 complete sets, i.e., over about 10 replacements or so… during the pandemic nonsense.
Doesn’t like it
After some researches I ended up with Wallabag as well, hosted on wallabag.it. I've got a lot of things saved, sometimes quite long articles (I read a lot, but I save a lot more) The ePub export was a requirement for me since I moved to Kobo (originally for the Pocket compatibility) after old Pocket app on my 1st gen iPad Mini stopped working. I made some test to self host it but the epub export and the images caching was to much for my Synology NAS. I had some good results with a more powerful machine but I didn't want to keep it running 24/7. And finally the export works well on wallabag.it so I though the hosted version worth its price!
Likes it
> I used an iPhone SE (2016) until last year actually, which was even smaller. It worked fine, until software updates made it useless. That's a recurring theme with my phones! Very similar story with me. The iPhone SE 1st gen was peak iPhone. Small, had a headphone jack (and could charge while using headphones), nice display, decent battery life. I absolutely loved that phone. I miss having it every day (when I have to use two hands to use this clunker of a phone I have now, when I sit down and feel this gigantic phone in my pocket, etc). I used my iPhone 4 until the cellular radio wasn't supported anymore. Then I moved into an iPhone SE 1st gen. When the battery bulged I killed it trying to replace the battery (I am not suited to small electronics repair). I gave up, at that point, and moved to a janky Android phone because I couldn't get any phone I wanted from Apple (small and with a headphone jack). I wish I could have enthusiasm for phones again. Everything isn't what I want. I certainly won't make the mistake of making a phone integral to my personal workflows and habits again. I certainly won't come to rely on any native apps anymore, either. I recognize I'm a fraction of a fraction of a percentage of the market. Very few people regard their technology like I do. I feel like the computers (and, at one time, the phones) I use are extensions of myself. I think it's a little like how a musician might regard a beloved instrument, or a craftsman might regard a well-used too…
Doesn’t like it
Same AirPods, after a couple years the left one’s speaker sounds like it’s blown: any louder sounds played have a crackle and if I turn on the NC just brushing it with a finger makes it crackle like crazy.
Likes it
I bought an iPad Pro 12.9 1st Gen. recently. It costed $150-ish and I’m very happy what I got for the price. So I’m considering to upgrade everyone to used iPad Pros. Most people don’t need a desktop operating system these days. The 1st Gen. iPad Pro won’t get past iPadOS 16, while the current is 17. But I believe it won’t be a problem for the next 5 to 10 years, which is plenty considering the price tag. However, with Linux it’s much better software-wise: if you have relatively recent hardware, your support would be literally indefinite. I use 15 years old hardware and I can believe it would serve another 15 easily.
Neutral
I have never seen a WiFi 5 device benchmark anywhere close to 866Mbps in real world scenarios. Most of the time, you're lucky to reach half of the "theoretical" numbers for WiFi due to the way that they're calculated. I would almost be amazed if you could consistently max out your 300Mbps internet connection over WiFi 5, but that's probably just within reach of WiFi 5, assuming there isn't much interference for WiFi 5 to handle. EDIT: I checked on my old iPhone SE (1st gen), which is a WiFi 5 client device, and it was only able to achieve ~240Mbps down on the best run. Are you sure you're not bottlenecked by WiFi 5?
Likes itStill going
I had a horrible experience with Samsung plasma TV about 7 years ago. TV cracked in front of my eyes - it went from completely fine to having a huge 'spider web' crack right in the middle. Samsung support claimed it was physical damage; After extensive research i found multiple other people who had the same problem. These TVs were extremely fragile, a slight impact could cause a tiny non-visible breakage; And then due to the heat generated during normal operation this tiny breakage could progressively turn into a cracked screen. At the time, Samsung's determination seemed like an extreme injustice... i filed multiple complaints with consumer protection services. Samsung people reached out and after a few weeks of 'passionate' phone conversations they agreed to refund the cost of repairs provided that i sign off that it was 'indeed' physical damage (obviously i did that). I never bought a Samsung product after that; But that TV still works :). As for phones, i am still using iphone SE 1st gen. Simplicity, beauty, and absolutely perfect one handed operation on this phone has not been matched still. Which tells you everything you need to know about phone 'innovation'.
Likes it
If android can get its audio latency act together there is some real opportunity here to steal market share from Apple. Since the release of the 2nd iPad Pro Apple has forced audio processing onto the slower low power CPU core, this means that for the last three years I can run all my iOS synth applications at 96kHZ with a low buffer sample size without any drop outs on my first gen iPad Pro and an iPad mini 3. What I cannot do is get similar performance on last year's iPad Pro. It is absolute insanity that Apple has no work around to direct audio processing to the high powered cores for apps made for musicians. Presumably at some point they will allow you to do this with a documented programing call but it has been three years of bad performance on synth applications due to the necessity to have high sample buffers (ie high latency).