10 long years with—and good riddance to—Apple’s iPhone 6 design

Enlarge / The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, the first iteration of a very, very long-lived phone design. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

This past weekend, I said goodbye to Apple’s 4.7-inch iPhone 6 design, after 10 long years.

It started with the iPhone 6 itself in 2014, a long-awaited screen size upgrade for the iPhone (some of the 2011-era Apple punditry insisting that 3.5 inches was the functionally perfect size for a phone screen and that Apple would never, ever change it, is an interesting time capsule). It ends with my wife’s third-generation iPhone SE, its battery capacity already collapsing, which I replaced with an iPhone 16 on Friday.

There are huge differences between those two phones—eight years’ worth of spec upgrades and water resistance being the most significant—but they look and feel almost the same, and things that were fine or forgivable in 2014 have become harder to live with now.