My girlfriend has an iPhone 6 Plus. Not the 6s, the plain ol’ 6. It’s a little janky / laggy, and getting worse.
We’re going to try a “nuke and pave”, but if that doesn’t get us significantly better performance we’re looking at upgrading.
The parameters…
It has to be an iPhone. Too much into the ecosystem.
We don’t want to go with a brand new phone. Way too pricey.
We want something that would hopefully be supported for a couple of iOS upgrade cycles.
Screen size isn’t a huge deal (she has the Plus because it’s my old phone), but bigger is always a nice bonus.
She doesn’t do anything performance-intensive or storage-intensive, but a base 16 GB phone probably wouldn’t fly. She currently has a 64 GB (huge for a 6 - again, it was my phone previously) and is using 20 GB of that.
We can’t cycle my current phone down to her, as I have a reasonably new iPhone 11 that I’m not ready to part with.
I know it’s a stretch, but I’d be seriously tempted by the SE, I know you said not new, but it would easily last 4 years, would be pretty much guaranteed to receive updates for that time period.
Anything below the X is likely to fall off the update cycle in the next year or 2.
My wife is in a similar situation-she has an iPhone 6 and still doesn’t want to upgrade, other than now she has to as battery life is less than an hour now. She’s going with the SE, mostly because she doesn’t want to lose her Touch ID. My youngest son has the current SE also, it’s a solid performer.
You could wait until the new phones drop, then see which models they are carrying over, probably at a reduced price.
I.e. the 12s come out, so the 11 becomes the mid-price phone.
Right now, the SE is a great choice because it’s got a ton of features that are near-top-of-the-line for a lot lower price.
In a year or two it won’t be as good of a choice because it won’t get updated, but right now, it’s a great option and a good price.
That would definitely be what I would be looking at – although with new iPhones expected in the next month, there will be some used phones on the market soon too.
I think that either way, we’re waiting for those announcements to see what shows up. We’re pretty committed to not buying anything top-of-the-line, but unless we expected a massive price hike in the SE it would be crazy at this point to not wait until the new stuff drops, pricing updates, etc.
The Apple financing + the cheap AppleCare looks like it might make the SE the winner here.
Oh…and a completely random benefit - with the retiring of the 6, the last of the iOS 12 devices in our life, we’ll finally move into the world of the upgraded Notes experience from iOS 13.
