Three things about the 6s didn't make the cut for the SE. Other than the (don't say chamfered don't say chamfered) chamfered edges that are a little less shiny, the stainless steel Apple logo on the back, and the tiny SE logo underneath the word "iPhone," absolutely nothing has changed. I'd tell you how the phone looks and feels-great, exceptionally well-made and thoughtful, like Apple made the phone it wanted to make rather than having to build something to solve for a giant, unwieldy screen-but you already know that. But the SE convinced me that at the very least, downsizing isn't downgrading.Īlmost everything else about the SE is exactly what you'd imagine. Typing is harder, too, and even after a week I'm still hitting the delete key half the time I go looking for the letter "M." Make no mistake: There are really good reasons for a bigger phone, especially as they become the hubs of our productive lives.
Watching movies or YouTube videos is fine. Forget about using this phone in Google Cardboard, because that's a blurry mess. Life with a small phone involves a lot of scrolling, since Instagram shows less than an entry at a time and any group text is going to disappear into the above-screen abyss almost immediately. Anytime you're typing something, it takes up most of the screen. There are big drawbacks to a small phone. As a result, I'm much more likely to just do the thing I need to do and put my phone away, rather than fall down the "Well I'm already holding my phone, I wonder what's happening on Twitter?" cycle I fall into 600 times a day. I can be doing or holding something else and grab my phone to answer a text or scroll through Instagram. It also means using my phone isn't an all-encompassing activity that requires both hands and undivided attention. It means I don't accidentally invoke that moronic Reachability feature, which pushes the screen down so you can touch it. That means I can put app icons anywhere, because they're all equally accessible. I can touch every corner of the screen with my thumb. But the SE convinced me that at the very least, downsizing isn't downgrading.įar more profound is what happened when I started once again using a phone I can truly handle in one hand. There are really good reasons for a bigger phone, especially as they become the hubs of our productive lives. It's not quite convincing enough that you should hacksaw an inch off the phone you're using now, but it's a serious case for the idea that bigger isn't better after all. It feels a lot like this might be the phone Apple always wanted to build, until everyone got dumb ideas about big screens. It's $399 (or $499 with a non-pathetic amount of storage). It's like Apple took all of Dwayne Johnson's strength and muscle and charisma and stuffed it into the 5-foot-5 frame of Daniel Radcliffe. Apple gave the people what they wanted: the guts of the 6s within the comparatively teeny-tiny body of the 5s. Given all that, what else is Apple supposed to do? Just keep yelling and making ads in which Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake shout "HUGE" until everyone's on board? No. That's a lot of people buying old phones, and it doesn't include the people who already had them and kept them. Apple said at its event last week that it sold 30 million 4-inch iPhones in 2015.
Other people, people who didn't already own an iPhone, bought the 5s long after it stopped counting as high-end. As Apple (and everyone else) released bigger phones with bigger screens, a shockingly large number of people held onto their 4-inch slabs of metal and refused to embrace the sun-blocking monoliths. The exception to the rule? The two-year-old iPhone 5s. One company found that of the 11 most popular smartphones worldwide, only one had a screen smaller than 4.6 inches. Televisions, hotel rooms, border walls (supposedly), paychecks, wine glasses, hands, and one or two other things I won't mention that come up very quickly when you Google "bigger is better." Oh, and phones.įor several years now, smartphones have marched inexorably toward a size resembling the stone tablets on which our ancestors chiseled their email and calendar appointments.
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