Goodbye, iPhone SE ⇥ eggfreckles.net

Thomas Brand:

As someone who doesn’t value his cell phone as much as the next Apple nerd, the iPhone SE has been an important product for me because of its price. The iPhone SE kept me invested in the iOS ecosystem, and enabled me to purchase a Apple Watch without approaching the ~$700 iPhone ASP I normally attribute to laptop computers. Now that an updated iPhone SE is no longer an option, I am evaluating alternative cell phone platforms. I am sure I am not alone.

The smallest and cheapest iPhone that Apple now sells is the iPhone 7, which is a 4.7-inch device that fills out a typical pants pocket and starts at $449. But, as a two-year-old iPhone, it’s likely that it will support three more years’ worth of software updates (iOS 12 supports up to the five-year-old iPhone 5S). To be clear, that’s more than you can expect of practically any Android phone, but it’s also less than you might expect of an iPhone purchased today.

I’ve seen a lot of people on Twitter and across the web unhappy with the discontinuation of the iPhone SE. For a lot of people, it was a perfectly-sized device — the last one that many people could comfortably reach with their thumbs across the entire display without doing a little shimmy with their hand, and the last one with flattened sides that made it easier to hold for photos. The SE was a really good product, and it’s unfortunate that Apple has chosen to stop making it instead of releasing a successor. It’s one of the few bum notes from yesterday’s event, but it is perhaps the loudest.