When writing my last blog on the Kindle Scribe, I linked back to an Old iPhone blog, which I thought might be interesting to revisit some five years later! I think my daughter has interrupted the natural order of upgrades, although other factors may be at play, too.
Let’s start with a lovely picture gallery!
In the previous blog, I’d just upgraded to the iPhone X, with my partner using the iPhone 7 and my daughter using the iPhone 6 (the middle row). My grandma was using the iPhone 5, but sadly passed away in 2021 at the grand old age of 89. That’s probably the main thing I’ll take away from this blog: regular blogging acts like a time machine and takes you back to places you’d started to forget about. It’s also a helpful reminder of some of the things you did, which this site now takes me back to 2016!
Anyway, I reminisce! Back to the iPhones. Since the previous blog, we’ve all had a few new phones starting in 2020 with the 12 and 12 Pro. My X was only two years old for me at that point but was three years old from release. The 7 my partner used is even older, so we all got an upgrade, including my daughter, although she was using an iPad at home now. The iPhone 7 sat as a spare for some time (before being sold on eBay in 2021, when I sold both the 6 and 7 for £76 – can’t remember individual prices).
The 12 Pro was a great phone, but the following year, I upgraded again to the iPhone 13 mini. I’d found the 12 Pro quite heavy and liked the idea of a smaller phone. It was also the first time I’d ever bought an iPhone where I just went for the lowest storage configuration as I was starting to use iCloud more and more and had signed up for an Apple One account, giving me lots of iCloud storage and access to all the Apple services, importantly Apple Music so I didn’t need to carry a big music library with me. So we all upgraded again, with my partner getting the 12 Pro and my daughter the X, which she did use a little more as you could send emojis!
I loved the iPhone 13 mini and might still be using it if my daughter did not want to start using a phone as an actual mobile phone when she started high school! This is where the cycle was broken!!! I bought an iPhone 15 Pro on the day it was launched from the Apple Shop in Glasgow, and the iPhone 13 mini was handed down to my daughter, with my partner sticking with her 12 Pro and 12 months later, after the iPhone 16 launch that’s still what we’re all using.
It’s certainly true that every year, Apple make a slightly better iPhone that offers slightly better functionality than the previous generation, but that doesn’t mean that the latest will always be considered the greatest. I’m sure some would argue for the 1st generation, and while I didn’t own one, it was a flawed device. Limited storage and missing some fundamental stuff like copy and paste kept me using a Nokia Communicator until the 3rd generation. Even then, it didn’t feel too far ahead of the limited competition. I think that changed with the 4th generation, and the design of that still carries through into today’s devices. I certainly have a soft spot for the 4th generation, and it would be in my top 3. The 5th generation felt like a step back in some ways, although looking back, it was probably better than I gave it credit at the time. I loved my 7th generation Jet Black iPhone and used it for almost 3 years. It was perhaps the longest of any iPhone. I also liked the iPhone X (10) and think that would also be in my top 3, introducing the button-less form factor and FaceID. It was also the first which cost over £1000! I loved the mini form factor, although I think the 15 Pro combines the best of the 4 and the 10 and might be my favourite of all time, disproving the statement I started this paragraph with!
To finish up, the only device I still have in the house (well, garage, actually) from the original Old iPhone blog where all this started is the iPhone 4. It’s a bit of a classic, and I still have it in the original box, although I suspect they made too many for it to be worth anything in the future. It’s part of the IT history cave, along with some 1980s Sinclair computers, but that is probably another blog altogether; I should have blogged about that when Sir Clive sadly passed away. As I’m sure you’ve worked out by now, I’m a bit of an Apple fanboi (although I work in IT, so I have devices running Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and ChromeOS in the house!) As well as the family of iPhones, we all have other Apple devices, which is probably another blog. In fact, I blogged about some of them here, here and here (although my daughter is now using an M1 iPad Pro from 2021, and the iPad I blogged about here is used to Facetime, another grandparent, this time my Dad or my daughter Grandad).
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