All I want is a replacement for my mini. Was waiting for a new SE figuring that’d be a reasonable substitute. Instead they roll out a phablet. Sigh.
It's been close to 2 years and I still struggle with the size of my iPhone 14 - and to think that this fucking phablet is the smallest iPhone.
At this point I am just waiting for a much more affordable simple Android phone (with the OS being OEM-deGoogled and supported for at least 3 years with timely updates). I mean I will buy it even if it's slightly bigger than base iPhone because size was the reason I had bought my first iPhone which was the first SE :)
Google has pulled more and more of android out of the open source project (AOSP) over the years and replaced it with Google Play stuff that has hard dependencies on letting them surveil your phone.
In practice, this means that stuff like GPS lock “needs” the cloud and won’t work reliably for most apps (it works fine for ones in fdroid, and in third party map apps, but not in Lyft, Uber, EV charging apps, or other commercial stuff that wants location).
On top of that, many apps will silently crash at startup. Sometimes, giving them google play services fixes them, sometimes not. When I installed graphene, my phone battery got 2x the manufacturer estimate. When I added sandboxed google play services, it went down to the advertised battery life, so the phone spends about half its power budget spying on you.
On top of that, if the iPhone not pro / max were an android, it’d be one of the smallest on the market.
Good luck. I’d love to be proven wrong on either point.
I'm holding out hope for: https://smallandroidphone.com/
I just can't imagine ever going back to Android though after switching to iOS a few years ago. If my 13 mini dies I think I'm going to cross my fingers and hope that another used one is still viable. Or maybe start carrying my phone on a shoulder strap instead of in my pocket. I don't know. The situation is unpleasant to contemplate.
If my phone is lost, I’ll look for a refurbished version of one of a <= SE3 or a 13 mini.
If it’s run over by a truck, i’ll put the pieces in a bag and ask apple to repair it.
My budget for new phones is $1300 every three years, but no one makes a reasonable phone, so the budget is left unspent.