Everyone I know is talking about the Model 3 numbers this week, 250-something thousand reservations and climbing, people camping outside Tesla stores with sleeping bags like it's a PS4 launch. I get it, it's a big deal. But I'm not going to write another "here's what the Model 3 means for the auto industry" post, because by Tuesday there will be nine hundred of those and mine wouldn't add anything. Instead I want to talk about a much smaller, much cheaper piece of hardware that's been in my pocket since Friday: the iPhone SE.
I went to the Apple Store on my lunch break Friday, half expecting a line because that's just what happens at Apple Stores, and there wasn't one. Walked out twenty minutes later with the 64GB in space gray for $499. The 16GB starts at $399, which is the number everyone's fixating on, and fair enough, that's the lowest entry price for a new iPhone in years.
Here's the thing nobody really prepared me for: it feels weird going back to a 4-inch screen after two years of a 6. Weird in a good way, mostly. I can use this phone one-handed on the subway without doing that stretchy thumb-yoga thing I've been doing with my 6s. But weird in a bad way too — typing feels cramped for the first day or so, like my fingers had adjusted to more real estate and now they're annoyed about it.
Under the hood it's basically a 6s in a 5s body. Same A9 chip, same M9 motion co-processor, same 12-megapixel camera with Live Photos and 4K video. Apple Pay works. The one thing missing that I actually notice in daily use is 3D Touch — no pressure-sensitive home screen shortcuts, no peek-and-pop in Mail. I didn't think I'd miss it and I sort of do, mostly for jumping straight to camera from the lock screen.
Battery life, though. That's the actual headline for me. Smaller screen, same battery tech roughly, and I'm ending my day at 35-40% instead of scraping by on 12% like I usually do with the 6s. I haven't run any lab numbers because I'm not that kind of blogger, this is just me, one guy, noticing his phone isn't dying by 6pm anymore.
I know a bunch of people are annoyed Apple even bothered making this thing: the narrative going around is that it's a phone for "the fading middle class of iPhone users" or whatever, people who don't want a phablet and don't want to pay $650+ either. Maybe. I think that's underselling it. My mom has been using an iPhone 5 held together with a case and prayer for three years, and this is the first phone in a long time I can point her toward without either overspending or handing her something two generations stale on the inside. That's not nothing.
Small complaint, because I always have one: the packaging still ships you a wired headphone splitter situation that feels like an afterthought, and there's still no fast charger in the box, just the same 5W brick Apple's been including since 2011. If you're spanking $499 on a phone in 2016 you'd think they could throw in something better than a charger that takes two and a half hours to get you to 80%.
Anyway. I'm not trading this back in for a 6s Plus anytime soon, which surprised me more than it probably should have. If you've been holding onto an old iPhone 5 or 5s because the current lineup all felt too big, this is genuinely worth a look before you write off small phones as a dead category. Apple clearly doesn't think it is, and after four days with this thing in my pocket, neither do I.
Also, separately and unrelated: does anyone else feel like the Panama Papers thing that broke today is going to be one of those stories that's a slow burn for months rather than a one-day news cycle? 2.6 terabytes of leaked documents is an absurd amount of data to work through. I don't have anything smart to say about it yet, just filing that away as a thing to watch.