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I'm with you here, I went through a period of moving to feature phones and ditching the smart watch to reduce the phone back to utility rather than a distraction. But feature phones, even those running kaiOS, just don't have the support for communication tools and things like 2fa authenticator apps.

I eventually went for an iPhone SE (2016) in the last year, after it was discontinued and managed to get a boxed, new unit for less than even the low-end android market phones go for. Thus far it's the most enjoyable phone to use having moved from an S8 which was certainly "better" on paper.

The size is incredibly portable and easy to handle, the battery, despite only being 1500mAh, does a very good job lasting me the day (though I certainly expect it won't continue to do so) and the screen is acceptable but annoying enough that I don't want to be using it for long stretches. It's got the lastest iOS and I fully expect the lack of iOS 14 support will be the reason I have to swap it for a new model once software support falls away.

It seems like this new SE model is still the smallest phone you can get despite the increase in dimensions and weight that you mention. It's nice to see a comment that shares my view and I hope a market for the smaller phone will come back around similar to that odd stage in the early 00s where handsets suddenly became impossibly small.

> It's got the lastest iOS and I fully expect the lack of iOS 14 support will be the reason I have to swap it for a new model once software support falls away.

For what it’s worth, Apple last updated iOS 12 on March 24th, so they seem to be supporting not only the most recent major version of iOS: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201222

I didn't know this, this is excellent news. Thank you! I was worried that my work policy might block my phone without the latest firmware.

Note that Apple, as far as I’m aware, doesn’t officialy support any other iOS version than the latest. So your employer might still block your phone.

My iPhone SE got destroyed and I got a 7 to replace it since they wouldn’t give me another SE. The larger screen isn’t nicer and just makes the phone harder to hold. I actually feel like I have a harder time touching things accurately as well, I think the 7 detects touches at a different place on your finger.

And of course I can’t use headphones, I ordered a dongle from newegg and waited weeks and now it hasn’t come. I’ve mostly given up on using my phone for music because of this.

The water resistance is nice though, that’s probably the only feature I’ve actually enjoyed.

I thought iPhone 7s have the dongle included

Mine came with one.

I've had smart phones for over a decade, and a mobile phone for 2, I can't think of any point when I've needed water resistance.

I have however had a smashed screen once, and the bigger a phone is, the harder it is to hold, the more likely the screen will smash

The old macbooks were great with the maglock power lead not pulling them off the desk. I believe new ones have downgraded the connector?

New ones just charge over usb-c.

Which isn't magnetic (unless you get extra kit)

> I can't think of any point when I've needed water resistance.

I couldn't too, then I fell into a channel. No harms to me and my bicycle but I had to turn off the phone and let it dry for a day before I could use it again.

> The old macbooks were great with the maglock power lead not pulling them off the desk. I believe new ones have downgraded the connector?

I have been using this Magnetic USB C Adapter and am very happy with it: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0816PV1YZ/

Be careful with that; during disconnection of the magnetic part, the pins carrying 20 V on the cable can make momentary connections with other pins on the portion of the connector remaining in the machine; if this happens, the port may never work again (for charging, or for anything else).

The risk is probably not worth it.

I can't think of any point when I've needed water resistance.

Then it's not for you. But given that phone manufacturers go to the expense of putting water-sensing strips inside phones, someone is going to put that water resistance to use.

Try different phone, may be your touch screen is not calibrated properly.

If I got a different phone it would have to be one with a reasonable size or one that let me leave gcc/openssh installed for more than a few weeks at a time.

Sounds your 7 was not new at all.

> the battery, despite only being 1500mAh, does a very good job lasting me the day (though I certainly expect it won't continue to do so)

Once _Settings - Battery_ indicates you need a new one, the $59 (or equivalent) that Apple charges is well worth it. You will also likely notice a performance increase as well!

I hear you. I was like you for the longest time. I had an SE for 3~ years and I absolutely loved it. I researched and researched to find another phone with the exact same dimensions. Couldnt find anything. The thought of moving up to a bigger phone pained me.

I eventually bought the iphone 8 about 6 months ago. And my god, it is just as good if not better. The size that scared me so much? Turns out I like it even more. The speed has been great, and I never knew how much I'd appreciate the larger screen. Point is, I know where you're coming from. But trust me, the iphone 8 size still feels relatively easy to hold (I can still comfortably hold it with one hand 100% of the time), and I have 0 regrets whatsoever about the upgrade.

I agree the 8 and now the SE 2020 is a great size. I traded up to the 11 and found the size difference to be negligible. You can see for yourself in the dimensions section: https://www.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone2=9847#diff-*,*...

>rounded edges that make it even harder to grip one-handed

I don't get this criticism - I owned a 5 series iPhone and the anodized finish was anything but easy to grip. It looked nice but massively reduced the friction between your hand and the surface, making it the easiest phone to drop that I have ever held. Their lightness didn't help either.

Conversely the newer iPhones with glass backs stick to your skin almost like glue in comparison, and if anything I find the rounded corners increase the amount of the phone surface in contact with your skin.

I used iPhone 4S for 4 years and did not drop it once. I dropped iPhone 8 first day, I have no idea how to hold it, so I bought case immediately. Now it's bearable. Another reason for using a case is a terrible camera protruding from the phone.

What climate do you live in? I live in the north (Canada) and during the winter my skin gets very dry. The glass and metal of recent iPhones feels extremely slippery to my dry skin. I use a rubberized case which makes the phone much more grippable, at the cost of even more bulk. I really want a small, lightweight, grippable iPhone.

This was in the UK so not very humid. Interesting that everyone's experience is so different. I just dried my hand and holding it flat with my XS placed on top, I can tilt it to about 15-20 degrees off vertical before it starts slipping off!

Agreed. I'll keep using my 2016 SE.

The slightly bigger body I could accommodate, the rounded edges are f* ugly but can handle that too if I must, even the dumb protruding camera may not repel me if I meditate enough but not having audio connection without some kind of adapter or adapters - considering the various use cases - is just incomprehensibly idiotic. I will never ever go for such. I rather have a granny-phone and paper+pen address book, relearn using printed maps and never carry around e-tickets than giving that amount of money for a defective product design, for an audio device without audio connection (that'd also spare me of annoying update and uninvited functionality frenzy as an extra btw.).

This functionality degradation for the sake of design mania indicates utter madness and gross incompetence!

Just the very idea of installing firmware updates on a set of headphones is completely bizarre.

We live in an age where cars reboot while driving (Tesla). It's bizarre because we never experienced it before.

But the additional flexibility offered via software updates is the core power of software. Where we are able to replace hardware with software functionality, there's additional flexibility for improvement and iteration. That's a valuable add.

The bizarre here is squeezing in matters into things just because we can. Using techniques just for the sake of using those techniques or approaches elsewhere is not a good enough argument.

It is bad putting software into anything and everything, just because we do it frequently to other things. It should have much better reason for that. Complicating unnecessarily and many times introducing risks and troubles is a no good.

“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

Sadly, we forget this simple fact.

It doesn't seem that bizarre to me. If something can be improved ex post facto, it seems more bizarre to me that this wasn't a thing sooner.

Headphones are purely electromechanical devices. They don't need software, except for silly contrived reasons.

That's a rather narrow view of things, one that I'm surprised to see on HN.

Automatically that view is disqualified because we are talking about Bluetooth headphones; there must be software on them to communicate efficiently with paired devices.

AirPods receive firmware updates to make adjustments to the audio, and AirPods Pro receive further updates to make adjustments to balance audio quality and the way the noise cancellation works in order to make sure that the AirPods fit properly in peoples' ears.

I don't know that (A) connectivity, (B) audio quality, and (C) fitting in peoples' ears are contrived in any way.

So, just don't buy it? I dunno what to tell you -- it sounds like a lot of your identity and mental health is wrapped up in what Apple's product people want to develop.

Personally, I would never want to go back to the crappy headphone connectors. The connector always wore out on me. So while I understand why you might want a headphone port (and some people likely want an in-built parallel or ADB2 port), it's hyperbolic to call it "utter madness and gross incompetence".

In reality, it's just someone having different values than you. Why is that so difficult to accept for some people?

That was the point exactly, you do not need to analyze and put so many uninvited speculation into a simple fact that I see tings differently and doesn't like certain things. Yes, the point was not to buy the device, exactly!

I stand by the phrasing of 'utter madness and gross incompetence' when usability is degraded and things get unnecessarily complicated in an essential functionality. All of this for questionable changes (I wouldn't dare calling it improvement, I feel improper just to mention this word in this context, the whole thing is very far from improvement).

What I also need to add how strange is that certain groups of people get offended on strong and grounded opinion about some consumer product like if it was a central element of their life not a utility of an auxiliary topic.

You can stand by the phrasing, which I think most reasonable people would deem hyberbolic. It is a misuse of language to make such a strong emotional statement about a design decision where you have zero knowledge of the considerations involved, and what tradeoffs were considered.

There must be some sort of an internet rule one party intends a statement to be about the other, but it really applies to the author.

Let's say Apple comes out with a phone with a perfect folding screen, a battery that holds a charge for a month, perfect offline speech recognition, and it costs $100. I still wouldn't buy it if it didn't have a headphone jack, because I'd consider it a bad design. Does that make me stupid? Perhaps. But as an engineer I'd find such a phone insulting: There's no valid engineering reason not to include a headphone jack. The only reason is for Apple to thumb its nose at people who actually care about good design by saying "We're Apple. See what we can get away with?"

It would be like Mercedes suddenly deciding cars didn't need air conditioners any more and refusing to build cars with that option. "We're Mercedes. We know best. You don't need an A/C. Open the window if you're too warm."

The whole premise just sounds insulting, and if it happened you'd never buy a Mercedes again.

Agree!

Most of us here work with workstations or laptops, daily. But generally speaking not as many people are using them in their home. A lot of folks do use their phones primarily for media watching and browsing. And that's a big chunk of Apple's market.

It makes perfect sense to have

Cheap phone with big screen and not much else - the "lowest common denominator"

Expensive phone with big screen - the "power user"

Expensive phone with small screen - the mobile user

Laptops tend to come in such groupings, why is the last group ignored when it comes to phones?

My theory is they want us to forget about small phones and then reintroduce them as a shiny new feature. History goes in spiral.

> why is the last group ignored when it comes to phones?

Presumably because there isn't actually that much demand for that category. Apple tried it out with the original SE and they have the sales data. If there were tons of people clamoring for a sequel, they would have made one instead of a refreshed iPhone 8.

I think one part is that they're afraid to be grilled by reviews leading to bad sales.

A $1000 4" phone won't have the same capabilities as a $1000 6.5" phone, and reviewers somehow do not seem to understand it might be ok and will trash the smaller phone.

Totally agree. I'd like to love the light phone 2. It's just not quite there yet...

>the rounded edges that make it even harder to grip one-handed.

Do people really not use a case with their phones?

edit: Can anyone explain the downvotes? is this a bad question?

Never.

Why would I want to make my already too large phone even bigger by adding a case?

because it breaks when you drop it? it provides a gripped texture so that it's easier to hold on to?

If we're talking about iPhones, they don't necessarily break when you drop it, especially the last few generations. You might get an unsightly scuff on the back or edge, at worst the back glass might crack — but it will do so in such a way that the phone still won't shatter.

In fact, my partner's iPhone and my previous one both broke in independent incidents when both were in cases. My new phone, I don't use a case, drop it regularly on asphalt, concrete, and it's even taken a dive into hot dishwashing water — and it's just fine.

I know somebody will come along with a story about how theirs smashed into smithereens but, for my money, Apple builds their phones to last.

> at worst the back glass might crack

this isn't broken??

Technically, yes. Realistically, no, because it's not the sort of crack that will make the back shatter; the crack is, somehow, under the surface glass. On my phone, it's entirely cosmetic — it knocks the resale value down, but that's about it.

Fun fact: my phone took its dive after the crack. No water got in at all.

Calling it a crack when it's made with crack-resistant glass doesn't give the right impression of how undamaged it really is, compared to one's expectation that it shattered into a million pieces and embedded itself into my carpet like grenade shrapnel — it ain't like that.

This is a fair point but everything is online and at our finger tips. Having it on your phone just means you’re not sitting at your computer for longer hours, hurting your back, neck and even fingers.

Aren't there some of the same "wellbeing" issues with the prolonged or ergonomically wrong use of a mobile phone too? Neck, fingers, eyes?

RSI's are a result of prolonged use of the same apparatus, switching to phone after long day of computer use would help in that case. Doesnt help with the eyes or the forward head posture, i agree.

Lots of people having fingers and neck pain due to phone usage. I see lots of bad posture as well

My hand was hurting after just 40 minutes of using an XR. I’m back on my 2016 SE.

This is anecdotal, of course, but I hurt my body much more by using a phone as my primary computer. Using a desktop (with a proper keyboard) is much less taxing on my RSI than a phone is.