10 long years with—and good riddance to—Apple’s iPhone 6 design
Enlarge / The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, the first iteration of a very, very long-lived phone design. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)
This past weekend, I said goodbye to Apple's 4.7-inch iPhone 6 design after 10 long years.
It started with the iPhone 6 itself in 2014, a long-awaited screen size upgrade for the iPhone (some of the 2011-era Apple punditry insisting that 3.5 inches was the functionally perfect size for a phone screen and that Apple would never, ever change it, is an interesting time capsule). It ends with my wife's third-generation iPhone SE, its battery capacity already collapsing, which I replaced with an iPhone 16 on Friday.
There are huge differences between those two phones-eight years' worth of spec upgrades and water resistance being the most significant-but they look and feel almost the same, and things that were fine or forgivable in 2014 have become harder to live with now.