25-12-2022, 01:34 AM
Of course, you can pay a fortune for an iPhone.
Or, like any purchase, you can do your research and spend an amount you're comfortable with to get what you want.
I would suggest that you don't look at the "normal" iPhones, such as the iPhone X, 11, 12, 13, 14, etc. Those are for people who wish to spend serious money on premium phones. Instead, look at the "SE" models.
There are 3. The 2016 SE, the 2020 SE, and the 2022 SE.
Work replaced my Android phone with a 2016 SE in - you guessed it! - 2016. The company made a decision that was pragmatic pretty pragmatic at the time, and has proved to be a good call several years later: rather than attempt to support countless variations of Android and Apple phones, let's just support Apple.
My 2016 iPhone SE received regular OS updates from Apple until September this year. Not bad for a 6 year old phone, and something that you just won't get from Android, whoever makes the handset.
I was agnostic at the time - I had no preference for Android, but if anything, I was slightly biased against iPhones because of various people I know who were Apple fans, and that can be off-putting. But to me, it was just a phone, that needed to work as such.
After a few months, I realised I was no longer needing to do the things I had to do to keep Android alive and well. No more reboots every week to prevent rogue processes flattening the battery; no more needing to forcibly close processes I didn't actively need to keep it stable and reliable. In other words, it just worked. If only you could say that about every modern device...
I hadn't looked into the life-cycle aspects of iPhone vs Android at this point, although I had spent several hundred pounds on Android devices that were great for the first year or two, but became unusable after updates that had either bricked them or made them much less responsive. Perhaps Android today is better in this regard, but my experience definitely was not good. Reviews today will always highlight the long support periods you get from Apple phones (typically 6 years since model inception) and contrast that with the 2 years you'd expect from Android devices (though I've read some recent reviews that stretch that to 3 years, so that's positive).
After 6 years of continuous support and completely reliable operation with my 2016 SE, I've now got a 2022 SE. So far, so good. I get 2.5 days between charges, and everything on the old phone was automatically transferred over to the new. The "ecosystem" works really well, and if you have a young family, the family sharing and screentime controls work really well to make sure your kids aren't doing things they shouldn't be. The return-on-investment is really good - the SEs are around £400 new, which works out to be around £67 a year for the hardware. You can, of course, buy second-hand. That's what we did for the kids, using CEX, who are easy to deal with if there's a problem.
There are a few limitations with iOS, meaning that some apps that exist in Android can't be ported to iPhone. One example would be wi-fi analysers. That's because Apple don't allow app developers deep access to some aspects of the operating system on security grounds, but then, that helps to make them generally more secure than Android (though there's no such thing as completely secure operating systems, of course).
Price-wise, new SE models have always been around £400. At the time of release, they have the most up to date processors, but the case/chassis/screen is older. The 2022 iPhone has the iPhone 8 chassis, but the innards of the iPhone 13 (which costs double). My son has a 13, and it is larger, with a nicer OLED display, but the 2022 SE is much the same as his in every other respect. Obviously, work pays a lot less for them (and, as mentioned, gets a fantastic ROI on them over their life).
The iPhone 4 did suffer from "Antenna-gate", but Apple gave out "bumpers" free of charge to affected users. That was in 2010.
Or, like any purchase, you can do your research and spend an amount you're comfortable with to get what you want.
I would suggest that you don't look at the "normal" iPhones, such as the iPhone X, 11, 12, 13, 14, etc. Those are for people who wish to spend serious money on premium phones. Instead, look at the "SE" models.
There are 3. The 2016 SE, the 2020 SE, and the 2022 SE.
Work replaced my Android phone with a 2016 SE in - you guessed it! - 2016. The company made a decision that was pragmatic pretty pragmatic at the time, and has proved to be a good call several years later: rather than attempt to support countless variations of Android and Apple phones, let's just support Apple.
My 2016 iPhone SE received regular OS updates from Apple until September this year. Not bad for a 6 year old phone, and something that you just won't get from Android, whoever makes the handset.
I was agnostic at the time - I had no preference for Android, but if anything, I was slightly biased against iPhones because of various people I know who were Apple fans, and that can be off-putting. But to me, it was just a phone, that needed to work as such.
After a few months, I realised I was no longer needing to do the things I had to do to keep Android alive and well. No more reboots every week to prevent rogue processes flattening the battery; no more needing to forcibly close processes I didn't actively need to keep it stable and reliable. In other words, it just worked. If only you could say that about every modern device...
I hadn't looked into the life-cycle aspects of iPhone vs Android at this point, although I had spent several hundred pounds on Android devices that were great for the first year or two, but became unusable after updates that had either bricked them or made them much less responsive. Perhaps Android today is better in this regard, but my experience definitely was not good. Reviews today will always highlight the long support periods you get from Apple phones (typically 6 years since model inception) and contrast that with the 2 years you'd expect from Android devices (though I've read some recent reviews that stretch that to 3 years, so that's positive).
After 6 years of continuous support and completely reliable operation with my 2016 SE, I've now got a 2022 SE. So far, so good. I get 2.5 days between charges, and everything on the old phone was automatically transferred over to the new. The "ecosystem" works really well, and if you have a young family, the family sharing and screentime controls work really well to make sure your kids aren't doing things they shouldn't be. The return-on-investment is really good - the SEs are around £400 new, which works out to be around £67 a year for the hardware. You can, of course, buy second-hand. That's what we did for the kids, using CEX, who are easy to deal with if there's a problem.
There are a few limitations with iOS, meaning that some apps that exist in Android can't be ported to iPhone. One example would be wi-fi analysers. That's because Apple don't allow app developers deep access to some aspects of the operating system on security grounds, but then, that helps to make them generally more secure than Android (though there's no such thing as completely secure operating systems, of course).
Price-wise, new SE models have always been around £400. At the time of release, they have the most up to date processors, but the case/chassis/screen is older. The 2022 iPhone has the iPhone 8 chassis, but the innards of the iPhone 13 (which costs double). My son has a 13, and it is larger, with a nicer OLED display, but the 2022 SE is much the same as his in every other respect. Obviously, work pays a lot less for them (and, as mentioned, gets a fantastic ROI on them over their life).
The iPhone 4 did suffer from "Antenna-gate", but Apple gave out "bumpers" free of charge to affected users. That was in 2010.
