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Comment by Kirth | Hacker News Reader

A bit painful to read considering the iPhone SE-series is now discontinued. (Despite that the SE is still a very good phone. Wish more manufacturers made devices with these dimensions and polish.)

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Yeah, the SE was best value/price phone. I have hard time understanding why Apple stopped producing it. The form factor was the best as well, I can't stand bigger phones personally.

I told my parents to buy an Android initially but ultimately they moved to the iPhone because they thought it was simpler and better than Android. To me the fact that I can code my own apps with Java without having to buy a mac is a plus, but I understand people who aren't developers don't care about hackability if they can afford an iPhone.

iOS can also be pretty fun to develop for if you have a mac and xcode.

IMHO iOS is good for developers who are okay with coloring inside the lines set out by Apple. The developer experience isn't perfect by any stretch, but writing personal apps/utilities in Swift using a package manager like Carthage is pretty painless.

Apple has some great features for de-centralization, such as the Multipeer Connectivity framework.

I think it depends a lot on where in the stack you want to work. If you want to customize your baseband or do system-level modifications then Android is the way to go. If you work higher up the stack, writing apps, then you might like iOS more than Android. I certainly did.

It will be supported for another year or two so there's time to wait a bit to see what Apple does. An Xr Mini would be an instabuy for me even if they would price it around US$700.

It's discontinued, but you can still purchase the device (for fairly low price too!). On top of that, based on Apple's track record for software support, you can expect support for at least another year, if not more. Note that the iPhone 5S, a phone released in 2013 on iOS7, received the iOS12 update not too long ago.

Where can they be bought? Via a cellphone provider or online retailer?

I'm not sure what HN policies are on sharing retailer links, but amazon, ebay, ali-express are all retailers that sell the iPhone SE. The major US cellular providers also still sell the SE, though at a much higher price.

A quick check of Amazon brought up a hundred or so resellers. Unfortunately you can no longer get them via Apple refurb program, but an online retailer like Amazon is probably the next best thing if you are careful to vet the seller.

Swappa is the best place for used phones. SE's there are $110-150 in good condition.

It's still a capable phone, but keep in mind the hardware is between 3 and 4 years old at this point.

The SE was launched in 2016, after the 6S. It is on par with many newer Android models, has a great camera, supports AR, and still feels faster and smoother than almost all of them due to iOS and better touch response time.

That doesn't change the fact that the hardware is 3-4 years old. The SE has nothing that's newer than the 6S which launched in fall of 2015. It also has some components that are from the 6 era, so fall 2014. Like I said, it's still a capable phone (I've had the SE since release).

You can still buy one at local Apple stores (it's in stock but not listed anywhere), and most online retailers; won't last long though. I expect it to be fully supported for at least another 2-3 years considering it's 6S hardware.

Just got one myself a couple weeks back, after being disappointed by the new Max Extra Turbo-sized models.

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