A Year With An iPhone SE

Just over a year ago I finally made the switch from a relatively modest Android phone to an iPhone — in particular an iPhone SE. No, not the new one, of course — the older one which, apparently, many feel is the “best iPhone ever made” given its form factor and inclusion of a headphone jack. My acquisition of this phone was really me taking advantage of an opportunity I had, as opposed to a conscious decision to just go out and switch.

Here’s what happened; a friend of mine had gotten a new phone line for his job and, as a side effect, wound up with a pair of iPhone SE’s to use. Once the short-term contract was over he was free to sell these phones, and one found its way to me for an extremely modest price. The device was barely used for more than a bit of live stream work, all while on the charger, and arrived in perfect shape. Obviously buying from someone I trust was a benefit to this — he’s not going to lie to me about the phone, after all, so I would have been crazy not to go ahead and buy this from him, especially since my old Android phone was well past its prime. Hell, it was past its prime when I bought it — hot they can release such poor phones and expect people to have a good experience in the Android ecosystem is beyond me, but that’s another story for another time. Suffice it to say, I wasn’t happy with my old phone holding me back.

So, enter my iPhone SE: a 32 gig model. That’s plenty of storage space for me, and then some, beating the paltry onboard storage on my old phone. Sound quality during calls is incredible, especially when compared with the aforementioned Android phone. Overall performance, both on iOS 12 and then, upon its release, iOS 13, has been spectacular, as has, on a whole, battery life. That’s not to say my Android phone wouldn’t last a good long while, but the thing was I barely used it for anything — every app was too goddamn bloated to make the phone usable.

Let’s address that old phone, actually, so this comparison makes sense. It was some kind of budget Samsung Galaxy phone which, at the time, was at least 2 years old. It had I believe only 8GB onboard storage, which was fine for me as I could throw in a large SD card to offset that for photos and the like. The problem is applications for the most part have to be installed onto the device storage, and then some of the data can be offloaded to the SD card, but not all of it. That meant for anything I installed I’d always be using up at least a chunk of onboard storage. When you add in how apps, especially social media ones like Facebook, will cache data and flood the onboard storage anyway, or how every time there’s an update the app would reset to being fully contained on the onboard storage, the device basically became useless for anything but text and calls. What’s worse, because of the way Android works I, for some damn reason, needed 500+ megs free on the phone just to open the fucking image gallery. Someone please explain to me why that’s even a thing? At that point the device was annoying to even try to use for normal onboard features.

Granted, it was a budget phone, but that’s why I bring up the earlier question of why companies would even make such low quality devices if they are, in effect, useless? I’m not a heavy phone user, but I expect it to at least not be a maintenance chore to have more than 2 apps on it, or have to clean the system cache every time I just want to look at a photo I took! It’s a mess, and given I already wasn’t the biggest fan of Android itself, or of Google (remember, Android is a Google product and their services (and thus data mining nature) flood the platform and any device running it) I naturally would take any opportunity to get off of the platform and, given that Windows Phone is effectively dead (recall I was a big supporter of that platform, and in many ways still am – more on that in the future, maybe) the only option left was an iPhone, which I had never properly owned before.

Let me stress that the iPhone SE cost me just a little more than that otherwise “budget” Android phone did — again, I don’t use phones as my be-all-end-all main “how I entertain myself or communicate” devices. Hell, it’s really a formallity — I’d rather not have one at all, but without such life can get pretty complicated. I carry a laptio with me often for working on things on the go, and at home will use my multiple desktop systems for most everything. My phone is really only there as a mobile device for convenience and the few things it excells at. It’s my go-to camera, a way to keep in touch and, if I need it something to watch videos or research things on, but only as a one-off case. Otherwise, the only other major thing I’d use my phone for is music, in the form of Spotify and a few online radio stations I like. That’s it. I don’t need some major device. I don’t have to have a ton of storage, or anything super powerful — hence why the SE fit so perfectly for me. It’s modest, but still capable, and that’s all I want — a compitent device! Every other Android phone I’ve gotten has just felt like a stripped down mess, a hassle to use — the iPhone SE felt like the complete opposite, and the hilarious thing to me is to think that in the long term it’s a relatively low end device these days; what does that tell me about what I can experience from an even slightly newer iOS device? Quite a bit, I’d think, honestly.

That leads me to iOS itself, and the Apple ecosystem. The fact that, in 2018 I finally “got into” Apple and Macintosh stuff really helped out in this regard as it made using an iPhone make more sense. Things like iMessage syncing text messages between my multiple Macintosh systems (including the MacBook I carry with me often), iCloud sync for my photos meaning soon after I take them they are available on both my Macintosh computers as well as my main Windows system, and the nature of the applications available for the phone all just work well with how I do things.

It’s ironic that I’m such a techy person yet I actually like the “walled garden” nature of iOS. At least, when its a current device. I don’t find myself wanting to get super deep into my phone workings or do anything too crazy with it. I just want the device to work and, with modern cell phones being a decade-old concept the way they do things has matured to a point where I find myself quite happy with the device as is. I have no real desire to “jailbreak” it. Nor do I feel I’m being shafted on applications for it. Again, I don’t do too much with the device. All I need is a pretty standard set of apps to handle what I actually do in my digital life and that’s that. I don’t need to SSH into my home server from my phone, as cool as that may be. I don’t need to run fucking benchmarks on a device that mostly sits in my pocket and does nothing. I just need the damn thing to work and not get in my way when I’m trying to check email, order an item on eBay, check my site statistics, or make a damn phone call.

I hate to use Apple’s marketing here, but for the price I paid, my iPhone SE truly does “just work” and I’m quite happy with it. As time goes on, I’m certain the next cell phone I buy will be an iPhone. That is, unless Microsoft suddenly brings Windows Phone back from the dead, but that’s not very likely.

The point I’m getting at is, I’m quite happy with my decision. You could say if I had a better Android phone my experience would be different, and that’s true, but the situation that presented itself to me is what it was. I’m not going to spend $500 on a damn smart phone that will be obsolete in a year when the next Android version releases. I don’t want to have a device which has Google’s data mining spread through every inch of it, and I don’t want to have to decide between 20 different brands and their flavors of the operating system only to be told, or find out firsthand that for the best experience I need to hack the damn thing anyway – I just want to buy a device and it do what I need it to, and in the end it looks like the modern iPhone and iOS ecosystem does that for me, and does it well.

Once again, I’d like to thank my buddy Tim for selling this to me for a hell of a good price. Too bad his 128GB SE found its way into a washing machine.

More to come, as always.