My wife just replaced the battery on her iPhone 6s. She got it shortly after it shipped in 2015, replacing an iPhone 5s whose camera had gotten a bit dinged up. I don\u2019t think she cared much for the extra size, she never used the 3DTouch, and I\u2019m sure she would have just as happily taken the iPhone SE had it existed at the time (and to this day she finds the 5-series form factor preferable for most everything except maybe movie-watching at the gym.) A combination of age and work MDM did for the existing battery, which was famously smaller than the one in its predecessor to make room for the gimmick 3D Touch technology (which I am almost certain she has never used and neither have I.)<\/p>\n
Thing is, that phone is pushing 3 years old. But if you look at what is out there to replace it in the Apple-sphere\u2026what is there that\u2019s worth spending more than $29 for a battery replacement? Moving to the 7 from the 6S gets you\u2026slightly better processor, water resistance, and no headphone jack. Hardly worth it. Okay, so spend the money and move up to the 8? That gets you\u2026the same as the 7, plus wireless charging and a glass back, so now you have twice as much to shatter if you drop it. Okay, so move all the way to the iPhone X, and pay $1000 for\u2026the same as the 8, plus Animoji and no TouchID so you actually have to pick up the phone and stare into it to unlock instead of just absently resting a thumb on it. And yes, AMOLED screen and a bigger battery, but is it really worth paying a thousand bucks for all that instead of twenty-nine?<\/p>\n
And that\u2019s the point I\u2019m at myself: work bought the iPhone X, but if they took it back and Apple fails to replace the iPhone SE, I\u2019m going to put a new battery in mine for $29 and ride that bomb to the ground. Apple had to make a bigger phone, because the market demanded it. But the iPhone 6s that dropped in 2015 had a 4.7″ display, \u00a0NFC payment capability, 2 GB of RAM, could listen for voice commands and shoot HD video or take double-digit-megapixel pictures – just like the original Moto X two years earlier<\/em>. And since then, Apple\u2019s \u201cimprovements\u201d have either been the sort of gimmicks we mocked Samsung for, or else decisions that actually make the phone more<\/em> difficult to work with. More glass to break, fewer useful ports, unintuitive UX modifications – and to what end? Higher margins and flat unit sales.<\/p>\n Apple is content to become Tesla. And that\u2019s a problem, because the only other game in town on smartphones means letting Google have free rein to gallop through your privacy and personal data while you accept that the version of Android that came with your phone may be the newest one you ever get. But then, if the best use of your money is to replace the battery in your three-year-old iPhone instead of wasting twenty times as much on gimcracks and reduced compatibility, you may not have that many more iOS updates to look forward to either. How well do you expect iOS 12 to run on an A9 processor, given that my iPad mini 2 and its A8X struggle like hell with iOS 11?<\/p>\n I say all that to say this: it\u2019s past time for Apple to decide what it wants to be. If the plan is to disappear up Jony Ive\u2019s asshole, then go on and do it so I can figure out what plan B is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My wife just replaced the battery on her iPhone 6s. She got it shortly after it shipped in 2015, replacing an iPhone 5s whose camera had gotten a bit dinged up. I don\u2019t think she cared much for the extra size, she never used the 3DTouch, and I\u2019m sure she would have just as happily … <\/p>\n