Still Sick

I'm still sick with the cold I caught at SKO. This is day 6 of the symptoms. The symptoms have generally been moderate, Thursday evening excepted, though they still drain my energy enough that I've been dropping activities like playing boardgames with my partner and writing to this blog. Yesterday, for example, I had good energy through the workday, but then after 5:15 or so it dropped precipitously. By 6pm I was 50/50 on whether to make dinner or just go to bed. I think I'd prefer having severe symptoms and being over it in 2 days instead of crud that hangs over me for more than a week.

New iPhone SE 3

Today I bought I new cellphone, the Apple iPhone SE 3. It replaces an iPhone 7 I originally purchased in January 2017. Yes, I kept my outgoing phone more than 5 years!

The SE 3 was announced less than 2 weeks ago with deliveries starting yesterday. How long will the wait be to actually get one? my partner and I wondered. New product launches often run into supply problems. Plus overseas shipping has been a mess for at least a year. iPhones are manufactured by Foxconn in Shenzhen, China. Plus, Shenzhen, China is under a lockdown this week after a massive Coronavirus outbreak. The wait could be weeks, even months, right?

9 Models, No Waiting

90 minutes. That's the answer to how long I had to wait for my iPhone. I ordered it online at 10:15am and was told I could pick it up at the Apple Store at 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino at 11:45. And it wasn't just one model they had in stock; it was all of them. All 3 colors, all 3 storage configurations.

The only waiting question is why I waited 5 years to update my phone.

The simple answer is Duh, the iPhone SE 3 only came out a few days ago. 🤣

The longer answer is that as the smartphone market has matured the pace of technology development has slowed. Early iPhone adopters itched to upgrade after just 1 year because the model 2 had numerous compelling improvements. I jumped aboard with the model 3 and was happy with it for 2 years, as most people were. Then I waited 3 years for my next. The phone I just replaced I planned to keep for 4 years. I stretched it to 5 when 2020's models weren't compelling enough.

The Old is New Again?

The iPhone SE 3, or iPhone SE 2022, or "the New iPhone", whatever you want to call it, is both old and new.

Many would call the SE an old phone because it comes in the form factor of the iPhone 8, released in 2017. It's got a 4.7" display, with bezels top and bottom. Even the iPhone 13 Mini has a 5.4" screen.

The SE's bottom bezel includes a fingerprint scanner home button. Other iPhones ditched the fingerprint scanner for facial ID a few generations ago.

The SE also retains an older camera. It's a single-lens setup; there's no two- or three-lens rig here.

On the other hand, the SE is genuinely a new phone because it sports Apple's latest A15 chipset, the same as in the iPhone 13 line.

I bought the new SE because I mostly don't care about the updates in the bigger iPhones. I'm okay with the screen size I've got. I'm okay with fingerprint scanning. I actually prefer it to facial ID. And while I wouldn't mind having a nicer camera in my pocket, I don't need to pay $$$ for it because it's not going to touch what my mirrorless ILC can do. Plus, I know from Hawk buying the SE 2 over a year ago that the camera is an upgrade over my iPhone 7.

The biggest plus for buying the SE is there's no tradeoff of power for price. In the past we've considered buying one-generation-back phones to save some dough while getting a relatively recent device. The drawback is the older technology is always older, becoming too slow for fatter, hungrier applications sooner. With the SE there's no need to make that compromise. It's low-cost access to the latest generation processor and 5G technology.