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Comment by Nition | Hacker News Reader

The original iPhone SE (2016) is still the most powerful small smartphone ever made.

Here's everything released since 2015 that's SE size or smaller: https://www.gsmarena.com/results.php3?nYearMin=2015&nHeightM...

This SE, and the previous one, are significantly larger. The iPhone 13 Mini is closer to original SE size but still larger (around 8mm longer and 6mm wider).

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Currently using the original SE and I'm quite happy with it; as a device it still performs decently too. I don't need more than that for my use so I'm going to hold onto it till it dies out. One issue I've had with the small size is that a lot of websites are not rendering properly with this screen size and make the assumption that my phone's size is larger. It's not the device's problem the websites are broken but it's quite telling that the whole industry moved on to phablets.

A teenager nephew saw my SE recently and he held himself from laughing at it. I take pride in using an old phone.

Hows the battery life?

I've replaced the original but it's still not really great. I do need to recharge my phone at my office...

I am an iPhone 13 Mini user and the battery sucks. I am waiting to see the next gen and i will go for a larger iphone.

How do you use it? I've not had any issues with mine, but I've not been using it super heavily due to COVID/WFH. I don't think it'll be an issue for my normal post-COVID behavior, but I can see it being a stretch when I'm off at a conference, using it a lot, and without easy access to charging. I also expect that 2 years from now it'll probably be borderline for perhaps 20% of my days.

I'd be curious to know what your situation/usage is that it's been unsatisfactory.

My daily usage is mostly whatsapp, twitter, reddit. I don't do heavy apps like TikTok, Instagram or Facebook. Figure that out how much battery but a friend of mine depletes the battery twice as fast as me during a day. The mini and SE would be good for some casual usecases, but for example, when i go offroad and use apps that uses the gps, the battery dies pretty quick. I will not go for the max models, but the middle size models are much battery performant than mine.

I guess I use it differently, but i have absolutely no problems with the battery.

Depends what you use it for (with my 12 Mini). If you use your phone for lots of media consumption, like most do, you'll find it lacking I think. As for me, its a communications device, and handles an hour or so of YouTube in the morning, then gets through my workday and onto my charger in the evening with no issues.

Even if we use iPhone mostly for Whatsapp/email, for us with bigger fingers, typing on smaller screen is more typo-prone. Annoying.

iPhone 12 Mini is still acceptable. iPhone SE? Nahh... pass.

Here in China you can replace a new battery for about 16USD. I've done that 3 times, each of which lasts about 1 year.

1 year? Can you pay more than 16USD to get an OEM quality battery?

I'm replacing my own and my close circle old iPhone's batteries with Nohon brand batteries from China. They work as well and as long as new original ones. Advertised capacity is even higher than original, but I haven't measured it to confirm.

I’ve changed it twice. Long overdue for a third time. It’s still completely manageable.

I also have an original SE, and it's not only websites that renders strangely, also apps are sometimes unusable. I guess iOS developers forget to test in lower screen resolutions just as much as website developers.

Rather than forget, they may just have reprioritized. Or outright remove it from consideration. It's possible that users of much older phones don't spend enough for them to put time into it.

That's a fair point, but I wonder why the SE users aren't spending enough money/time in those apps ;)

I have the same problem and I hate it. I’m going to get a bigger phone cause it’s so annoying

Is it smaller than the 6S? Some websites that aren’t mobile are tiny on the display but otherwise it’s fine. I don’t use that many apps but never encountered that issue.

Would like to know because once my 6S doesn’t get updates anymore, I’ll probably switch to a SE.

Yes, it's smaller. But the original SE has the same innards as the 6S, so in all likelihood both will stop getting updates at the same time.

Kind of ironic considering that a sizable fraction of people using the new iPhone SE set it up so that the logical screen resolution matches that of the original iPhone SE (that is, they turn on Display Zoom).

I use the old SE and even big company websites are broken on that screen size: if anyone from Airbnb is browsing this forum, your home search is broken on the SE, the date filter popup covers up so much space that you cannot actually submit your query!

How is your OG SE even still functional? On mine the screen started to fall off and the battery started to fail, which, the cost to repair was as much as buying the SE 2020, so that was what I did rather than repairing it.

My OG SE is in perfect shape. Some people are just more careful with things that others. I've had to replace the battery and the Lightning port in January, everything else is still original and works fine.

I still have my original SE, but I use it as a secondary offline phone precisely because the web and apps are no longer optimized for it.

If I turn off data and WiFi the battery lasts for days and it's still perfectly usable for calling and listening to music since it still has 3.5mm jack unlike my "new" iPhone 11.

Used it for so many years, just last year I switched to the 12 mini. The form factor was my primary decision in using the SE, and when my last one broke I decided that the relative improvement in battery life was worth trading to a larger phone. I'm happy enough but if they make a phone the size of the SE again I'll switch in a heartbeat, and I would not be sad if I had to "down"grade again in the meantime.

I wish I still had my first-gen SE, because it actually fit in my small hands, and its nice solid rectangular body made it easy to hold and hard to drop. The home button on that unit was starting to give out after 4 years of heavy service and I didn't want to spend the money for an out-of-warranty repair.

Unfortunately the Gen 2 is also mostly "non-repairable"; I had to get a total phone replacement for something as simple as a dying Thunderbolt port. According to the person at the Genius Bar, the 12 Mini is much more repairable, more like the first-gen SE in terms of its internals.

This SE Gen 3 still has the rounded/slim iPhone 6 body style, so I would expect it to be equally non-repairable. So all things equal, I would still go for the 12 Mini over the SE Gen 2 if I could make the choice over again.

I've swapped the case on my iPhone 8 - the Lightning port is on a separate board and I don't believe there's any active logic in it that would prevent replacement. It's quite a long process though that involves taking most of the phone apart - plan around 3 hours if you don't have previous experience.

I still have my first-gen SE and it's my primary phone, the battery have started to show its age. I am also experiencing the problems you mention with the home-button being worn out, in humid conditions it will press without me pressing it, I've sort-of solved it by using the on-screen home-button (I haven't found a way to tell iOS to ignore the hardware button).

It's the perfect size of a phone, I've considered seeing if someone can replace the battery and the home-button.

It's quite easy to replace the battery yourself. You can buy a kit with a battery and all tools, follow the included instructions, watch a video tutorial if you need.

I've done this twice. My OG SE's battery is at 98% health right now and easily lasts me a day and a half except for days where I navigate with GPS.

It's a huge advantage for bike touring: I can charge this thing with a dynamo in a couple of hours because the battery is only 1600mah. That's less than a third the size of the battery in the current Pixel 6/6 Pro.

Isn't it also possible to just pay Apple like 30 bucks to do it? I thought battery replacements fell into a special category

$30? I thought it was $85

It's $50, but was $30 for a while during the "batterygate" stuff.

$49 in the US for iPhone SE (1st and 2nd gen), 6s, 7, 8; $69 for iPhone X and later:

https://support.apple.com/iphone/repair/service/battery-powe...

I have tried to switch my high use items (daily chargeables) to use magnetic cables/plugs that mimic the function of the original magnetic power cables on Macbooks (these are on EBay under various names). If you keep items for the long run, it seems like one runs the risk of wearing out the contacts on the port inside the device. This also serves to prevent dust/lint from getting inside the port. No data function available this way unfortunately.

Sounds like a Pro.

Not an iOS fan but if I was I always really liked the rectangular bodies so much better. Not to mention when they were stainless steel they scratched a whole lot less easily.

I didn't upgrade my original style iPhone SE until the iPhone 12 Mini came out. It's a little bit larger but still manageable, unlike most other phones that come out these days. No headphone jack though sadly.

I held out as well until the 13 Mini. I still use my OG SE as a media device, since it has a headphone jack.

There’s a lightning to 1/8” dongle for that

My daughter has broken 3 of these in the last couple weeks. Also, you can't charge the device and listen to music at the same time (unless you buy that extra dongle).

Anyone who can retain their dignity while also using something called a dongle can probably do anything.

For almost 4 decades 1/8" was a "just works" standard for interfacing consumer audio output from electronics. No fuss. More reliable than airpod pairing. Doesn't rely on battery life. No latency issues. Interference vanishingly rare.

Yeah, I can buy a dongle. Maybe I will someday when my original SE dies. Maybe I'll never buy an Apple phone again. But if I do buy a dongle, every time I will be cursing the person who took out the 1/8" jack.

It might have just been my headphones but mine would constantly disconnect on the 3.5mm side.

I'm kicking myself that when I bought the original SE in 2016 I opted for the smallest memory size. 16GB is just not enough any more, with the size of apps and OS constantly increasing. I'm seriously tempted to buy a used one with a bigger memory card, but am worried about end of life for OS upgrades.

As a long time SE v1 user, I’m really happy with my iPhone 13 Mini. Yes slightly bigger, but I love it for all the same reasons I loved my SE

I have an original iPhone SE and it's the best phone I've ever had. But it does have only 16GB and I have to suffer with offloading apps. Still, I was delighted last September when the SE made the cut for iOS 15. I'll probably replace it with a iPhone 12 mini sometime over the next few months. It's been a long run.

It's also the hardest to compute on. The screen real estate is truly just not enough.

It's from an era where we didn't run our lives and businesses on our phones.

About 70% of all website visits come from mobile phones: https://www.perficient.com/insights/research-hub/mobile-vs-d...

The world has changed a lot since the original iPhone 4 and 5 form factor hit the scene.

I would argue that the screen real estate is enough but with the ~2:1 screen ratio the iPhone X introduced and excessive UI whitespace bloat program UIs are just no longer space efficient and so the true area of importance ends up being the size of about two postage stamps.

What abouy my Jelly2? https://www.unihertz.com/products/jelly-2

Seems that it's not on GSMArena for some reason, so it doesn't appear in my linked search and I hadn't seen it. I'm a bit surprised as they usually have everything.

It's a great little phone but yea, it's not in Apple league at all. [I bought mine mostly for jogging in case I fall down and break a leg.]

I suppose it depends on your definition of small and powerful. My phone is smaller in width and height than the SE (which is what your gsm arena filters on), but has a larger volume due to being twice as thick and weighs 3g less.

With 6GB of ram and a 8-core (4 big + 4 little) 2GHz MediaTek CPU, it's more powerful than the dual core A9. On the other-hand its 480x854 screen is much lower resolution.

Can I ask what phone that is?

I admit I'm being a little unfair on "small", to suit my own preference. But you could fit a 5" edge-to-edge screen in original SE size (the iPhone 13 mini has a 5.4" screen), and it'd be fantastic. Hell you could do a 4" screen - same size screen as the original SE - but make it edge-to-edge and the phone would be tiny and just as functional (except maybe battery life...).

Unihertz Jelly 2. 3" screen, Android 11.

That looks really neat and it's not on GSMArena for some reason, or else it would appear in my linked search. I kinda thought they had everything.

I have a first-gen iPhone SE and it's been great, but the hardware is starting to wear out. I actually bought a Unihertz Jelly to migrate to but I'm waiting until the iPhone SE becomes unusable before switching over. How are you finding the Jelly?

I commented here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30606598 TL;DR everything is "okay" or better except the camera, which is terrible.

In fact, the A9 is likely at least as fast as the Helio P60 your Jelly’s got. It generally performs better than the Snapdragon 835, which is a higher performance implementation of the A73 + A53 design.

I agree. I'm an iOS developer (and Apple developer of 20 years) and I'm still using one.

Yep. I don't care if the new one is "only half an inch" bigger than the old SE. That's still half an inch too big. Apple absolutely nailed it with the original SE dimensions, and I will never upgrade until they make another.

Once it was clear that Google was totally done releasing phones that fit in my pocket, I upgraded my Pixel 3 to a 13 mini. It's an amazing phone. Not as small as the OG SE, but I'm not sure I'd want it any smaller.

My 12 Mini has been a brilliant replacement to my original SE. Easily the best iPhone I've ever owned.

The quick detour to the XS just made me angry. I hate the big phone trend (can you call it a trend when its the default now?)

I have an iPhone 12 mini and still find myself liking the size of the SE over it :(

Yeah what's the go with this, the SE is technically bigger but somehow feels smaller?

Its the thickness and the curve of the SE's body, would be my educated guesses!

My guess is that the screen is far larger?

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