To be honest, this wasn’t clinched until yesterday, when the Wall Street Journal reported that the notional iPhone 7, so-called, will indeed feature the removal of the analog headphone jack in the cause of making the phone even thinner. This is an alarming decision on a number of fronts, assuming the report can be trusted – but given that most Apple kremlinologists regard the WSJ as the pre-announce channel for all things AAPL, it probably can be.
First off, of course, is the drive for all-things-thinner, which is stupid. The iPhone 6 design is already too thin to contain its own camera entirely within the body of the phone; shaving almost a millimeter off the case is borderline mentally defective at this point. Unless there’s some sort of miracle arc reactor sandwiched into that thinner case, there’s a very real chance you won’t see battery life commensurate with the 6 either, and the 6 was no great shakes to begin with. But phone battery life clearly isn’t a priority for Apple at this point; the 6S came with an even smaller battery than the 6 for the sake of accommodating the technology necessary to facilitate 3D Touch.
(Note here that the Apple Watch tends to finish the day with a good 30-40% of battery left if you put it on in the morning; since the first iPhone, Apple has always gone overboard cutting things down for the sake of battery preservation in 1st-gen hardware, sometimes at the expense of performance. The iPhone 3G had a smaller battery than the iPhone AND more power-draining 3G and A-GPS technology, but the first-gen phone HAD to make it through the day. Same with the watch.)
So here we have an iPhone 7 which of necessity almost cannot have a larger battery than the 6S, and will rely on digital headphones to boot. You’d think the move would be to introduce Lightning-based headphones here, alongside the analog jack, and wait for the next generation of the phone (the purported glass-body all-screen iPhone) to cut out analog, give the market some time to build and people to get used to the idea that yes this can be done and it won’t suck. You’d think. And yet.
More nefarious yet is something that’s being kicked around in different quarters: the notion that digital headphones mean the same restricted audio-out that we now have with video thanks to HDCP as part of the HDMI standard. That’s not an idle concern, not when I can’t play movies downloaded from the Apple store on my Mac mini with the 10-year-old DVI monitor cabled through it. Not when the trend seems to be toward media rental – whereas Steve was firmly in the “buy this song and it’s yours to keep” camp, the rest of the industry keeps shoving its chips in on the celestial-jukebox model. Instead of buying songs, or DVDs, you pay $10 to this provider or that provider or Netflix or Spotify and just stream everything, and that $50 or so a month becomes your new media utility cost (presumably replacing your cable bill, depending on how good your internet access is and how many friends will let you sponge). Like cable TV, it sounds like you’re getting good value for money…until you realize you’ve gone from 15 channels you watch and 10 you couldn’t care less about to 20 channels you watch, 200 you couldn’t care less about, 50 of just infomercials and a bill quadruple what you started with.
Well, here’s the thing: I’ve had this little iPhone SE for a month now. The under-the-hood guts of the 6S without the 3D Touch gimmick shit, crammed into the body of a 5S, with a smaller and thus less power-sucking screen and a larger battery than the 5S had. And in that month, do you know how many times I’ve pulled out the 6? Zero. It went in a drawer at work the next day and hasn’t been taken out since, let alone turned on or used. I miss the larger screen size not at all. I get home every day with half the battery still there even when I don’t plug in. It fits comfortably in my hand. I haven’t dropped it once. It works fine with every piece of my pre-existing phone infrastructure (except for the dicky Bluetooth headphones, which is surprising not at all because they never work consistently with anything, and the SE connects just fine to Bluetooth in the car without having to do a thing).
Best of all, this phone is mine. I bought it unlocked and un-SIM’d directly from Apple, so I have the choice of keeping the work account there or just popping a T-Mob SIM in for the dirt-cheap $30 plan if I decide I don’t want to be on work’s dime any longer. On current form, I stand to get updates at least through iOS 12 if I want them. Goes in any pocket, nothing protrudes if I don’t have a case, there’s four years’ worth of accessories and infrastructure out there supporting it.
This is what happens when you prioritize a quality product and value for money over design wankery and too-clever-by-half bullshit. No regrets whatsoever. Would do it again, and based on feedback from others, I’m not the only one who thinks so. For all the derision in Silly Con Valley and its amen corner in the tech media, this was the best new iPhone Apple’s produced in years.