Apple iPhone SE 2016

I'm on my 8th year of using my 2016 SE. Have replaced the battery and screen a few times over the years. A fair few of the apps I used stopped supporting iOS 15 so I've got old versions of those apps installed, but WhatsApp, Signal and my banking app still actively support iOS 15 so it works well enough for me, for now. I have an iPhone 13 mini sitting in a drawer for when I need to switch.

I regretted it too after I went with an SE 2022. I thought the battery life would be better, and I thought I didn't want to swap Touch ID for Face ID. 18 months ago I bought a used iPhone 13 Mini, and much prefer it. I used to feel unhappy every time I held the SE 2022. I never liked the wider, rounded-edged shape of the iPhone 7/8. I'm finally going to get a battery swap for the 13 Mini from Apple this afternoon. I'm hoping that stops me vaguely wondering about battery swapping for my SE 2016 (1st gen) and going back to using that. I don't think I'd want to go back to a camera that old, and too many apps are not supported. That was the last iPhone I really loved. Fastest smartphone on the planet in benchmarks when it was released, and in the rare event that it slipped out of your (someone else's) hand, it felt unbreakable compared to newer iPhones.

happy about this since I still daily an iphone se 2016 (same form factor as the 5s but 6s internals) and about to change it's tiny battery and maybe get yet another iphone og se just in case this one stops working. abysmal battery life and tiny screen makes for the perfect dumb smartphone. aside from google search, the phone is virtually ai free (most of the ai and majroity of the social apps do require at least ios16 o 17), i do have to have an older android to use 'institutional' apps (meaning that there's a phone always at home with my banking and govt id apps). sent from the tiny screen of the SE

Oh, that sounds annoying. I also bought an SE 2016 128GB as "Offline-First" / de-Appled device. I think what I did was just signing in to App Store, not fully adding my Apple ID to the device. It now serves as a time capsule, has all the classic apps like Doodle Jump, Fruit Ninja, MiniMetro etc and some resource-light open source apps like CoMaps, fileexplorer with connection / offline sync to Nextcloud. Jailbroken via Palera1n (Think I didn't have to approve install any certificate)

We had flush cameras the last time in the iPhone SE 2016. That camera was good enough for my modest needs. It's just that Apple has a different opinion.

The gap between 2025 and 2009 is massive for smartphones but I'd say it gets drastically smaller around the midpoint. If it wasn't for it no longer being supported by iOS I'd still be using a 2016 SE and the only things I'd seriously miss are an OLED screen (so good for using the phone in dark spaces) and wireless charging (basically for peace of mind if the charging port ever breaks)

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. https://blog.bschwind.com/2025/01/11/the-original-iphone-se-...

The iPhone SE 2016 remains to be the best smartphone Apple has ever released. This year, my wife made me replace it with a 13 mini, and it feels nothing but a downgrade: too large, too heavy, camera bumps, no headphone jack, no touch ID, atrocious PWM, etc. Sure, I understand people have different needs from mine and appreciate they have a choice, but it saddens me that I don't anymore, and all I want is a modern (read: not discontinued), compact device that can do what a 10-year-old smartphone could do and gets out the way.

> If the iPhone would have true user-swappable batteries, their business would collapse. For me it's slightly more complicated than that. I would probably still be using my 2016 iPhone SE with its headphone jack and size if (a) it was still receiving OS updates and (b) iOS bloat didn't make it slow. Would love it if the battery swap were easy for the end user to do, but TBH paying $100 to have it done every few years is doable for me. Better camera capability is the only other thing that even registered for me. The jump to the iphone 12 mini that I made last year did have some nice benefits on that front and got me some performance I'd lost back. Other than that, the main reason I upgraded is that I was forced to by the iOS obsolescence treadmill.

I've been on apple since ages and don't especially connect with their marketing. It mostly seems to be pretty photography that you could put alongside any product. I'm not sure there's much to wow people with iphone vs android but the iphone experience tends to be quite smooth and hassle free - my 2016 SE still works fine and gets security updates for example. Apple can be a bit control freaky about what you can do on your own device though for better or worse. One wow experience recently was a friend on android lost his life savings through some malware getting his crypto wallet. You get less of that on iphone due to the apple control freakery.

I'd love it if iPhone SE 2016 still got updates. I don't care about the speed, just want Voice/SMS/Music run banking and other low consumption apps. It's still my dedicated MP3 player.

I disagree that foldables are the best compromise, because they are thicker folded than a regular smartphone, which is inconvenient for pocketing, and what’s worse they are heavier, while the screen is also not smaller than a regular phone unfolded. For example, the Samsung Flip5, one of the smallest foldables, is 15.1 mm thick folded and weighs 187 g, while the regular iPhone 15 is only 7.8 mm thick and weighs only 171 g, while also being marginally narrower (0.3 mm). For those who find the regular iPhone to large, too wide, and too heavy, the Flip5 is not an improvement. Just for comparison, the iPhone SE 2016 was a full 13 mm (or 18%) narrower, less than half as thick as the Flip5 folded, while only being 45% taller (or 25% shorter than the Flip5 unfolded), and weighed only 113 g. Small phones are also about “thumbability”, that is, the ability to be used one-handed with the thumb being able to comfortably reach across the screen. The foldables are of zero help there.