iOS 26 - or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My iPhone SE

14 June 2025

Hardware

I've been using an iPhone SE since August 2019, when I bought my friend's old one off of him for $100. Prior to that I used my mom's old 5S that she had given up for a new Pixel 2. I remember my time with that 5S fondly; how I used to discuss with my friends with the same phone whether or not to update to the next ios, because of how haphazardly Apple was releasing these unoptimized software updates to such weak devices; how I could finally send snapchats to my classmates using an actual photo instead of a viewfinder screenshot like on Android; and how easily I could transfer files from my phone to my laptop over airdrop. This was my introduction to modern and capable consumer technology, but soon, in 2018, things would start to change.

2018 marked the release of ios 12, which for the first time in a few years, finally fixed the performance issues I used to have on earlier versions. Apps launched more quickly and everything just felt faster. This turned out to be Apple's parting gift to users of the early 64-bit devices though, as ios 13 dropped support for everything before the 6S. My phone was no longer up to date. This didn't bother me too much, but my phone's battery life had been getting pretty bad. At the time, the next logical step for me in my mind was to get a new phone. I had my eyes set on the blue XR.

However, it was out of my budget, and so I eventually gave up on that idea. Meanwhile, a friend had mentioned that he was looking to sell his SE, and I found my answer. For $100 (which was probably a crazy lowball at the time but he was nice), I got an up-to-date phone with the latest features like NFC for Apple Pay. And for the longest time, I was riding high. The software updates kept on coming, the fingerprint sensor and nfc chip, extraneous conveniences for sure, allowed it to keep up with the times, and I would get the latest version of any app I wanted.

This high of modernity lasted until ios 15, released in 2021, where my phone was now competing with the iPhone 13 series of phones. Around this time, I contemplated switching to a Mini, until I realized that the phone wasn't actually small at all, just that it was smaller than the rest of their phones. It was around this time that I became a little attached, not just to my phone, but to the form factor as a whole. I wanted a new phone that was exactly like my old one. I stopped caring so much about the latest devices, because I knew they could never be like the one I had now. Yes, I was coping with having an old phone.

The ios 15 launch came and went, and I still stuck with my SE. And everything was fine. My apps still worked, I could do everything I wanted to do, my only problems were storage and battery life. I had been dealing with the battery issue by lugging around a giant 26,800mAh power bank almost everywhere I went. My storage woes were mostly managed by Apple's convenient yet terrible iCloud photo backup solution (have you ever tried exporting photos off iCloud? -- theres no easy way and it takes forever and can fail on you; or deleting photos from your phone, but not iCloud -- you can't), and by the fact that I just didn't need that many different apps. And it stayed that way for a number of years. I didn't really care that my phone wouldn't be supported by ios 16. I took pride, for some reason, when tech headlines lauded the SE as the phone with the longest lifespan in terms of OS updates. Between then and now, people sometimes comment on my phone with interest, how I still run it, how it performs, how they like the design. I enjoy those conversations. I once spoke to the owner of an old bookshop downtown who was still using an iPhone 4S. That was really impressive, although I still prefer my phone.

Software

In the time between the iPhone 5S and the SE, I think there had been an interesting shift in how apps are developed. Long gone were the days of developers needing to target the latest OS versions to make use of new features, for the past seven or eight years, it seems to me that the requirements for a simple app have remained largely the same. Many of the apps that I download are still targeting ios 13. In recent memory, there has been two apps for which I've been forced to use the classic Download older version App Store hack to install on my phone: Overcast, a podcast player, and iMast, an open-source mastodon client. Everything else basically just works. Some of them, especially the big corpo apps, seem to be targeting ios 15, a lot of the other ones target somewhere between 11 and 13. What this says to me is that ios 13 provided good basics for text-based, graphically-bare bones apps, and that there hasn't been any feature compelling enough for those developers to bump up targets past that 5-6 year old platform, which suits me just fine. ios 15 seems to be another baseline-type OS version, for those apps that have more video/graphical elements. Even those apps whose latest versions no longer support ios 15, even if they do rely on remote servers, still work for the time being. I think it's a testament to how much these core technologies have matured over the past decade.

Future

With the announcement of ios 26, I foresee an end to these good times and the luck streak I've had with this phone. The overhaul of the UI with Apple's fresh coat of liquid glass across all aspects of the platform will mark a new baseline for app design towards which developers are expected to aim, in a similar way to the original Great Overhaul that was ios 7.

The apps I use that haven't been updated in years will still work. The apps that get frequent updates to shove algorithmically optimal advertisements in new places will probably stop working as well as they used to. Letterboxd is already a laggy mess on my phone, but I don't use it enough on there for it to bother me, even though it should not perform so poorly (i blame react native). I will be fine.

I originally wrote this as a sort of elegy for my phone and the time I've spent with it, because I was scared that it was soon coming to an end. But I don't feel scared anymore. It's just a phone, it's just my apps. I like the apps I have now the way they are now, and a fancy new os version won't change that for me.

Conclusion

Around the time I started writing this, I was "dailying" between 3-4 phones: my gen 1 SE, my mom's old Pixel 2, my aunt's discarded gen 2 SE and my other aunt's discarded LG android flip phone. I've realized that while I like the bigger screens of the Pixel 2 and the SE2, I literally don't ever need that big of a screen. I still use the Pixel for manga and anki, but I have no need for the SE2 and the new features it has. The flip phone was something like a 14-day experiment to see what life was like on the flip side, and it was fun. Being restricted to the English alphabet was kind of annoying for when I needed to text people in other languages, and the lack of entertainment apps, even the simplest Snake or Breakout clone, was a little unfortunate, but it's still a capable and reliable device in terms of calling and texting.

I like my phone as it is now. I'm no longer coping or feeling left out. It will serve my purposes as it has for the past six years for a few more years, at least. I will keep using it until becomes useless and unuseable.

Or until Apple comes out with another 4" iPhone.