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

By: ARS Techica - Tech Posted On: September 23, 2024 View: 7

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Enlarge / The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, the first iteration of a very, very long-lived phone design.
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.

What follows is less a celebration of the iPhone 6 design's long life and more of a good riddance. It's not that we never had any good times together, iPhone 6 design, but after a half-dozen versions of you, I think it is time for both of us to move on. Consider it catharsis—and maybe if someone in your life is still rocking an iPhone 8 or iPhone SE, it will be cathartic for you, too.

Battery capacity

Battery life was always an Achilles heel of this phone's design—the battery had to fight with every other component in the phone for relatively little space, and as a result, it was always exceptionally hard to make it through a full day on a single charge. A portable battery pack or some kind of midday charge was almost always necessary, especially if I had deigned to use a power-hungry feature like Personal Hotspot.

And more charging means putting more cycles on the battery, which over a couple years of ownership makes the mediocre battery life even worse. The battery life in my first "modern"-style iPhone—an iPhone XR, in 2018—was a revelation after years with the 6, 6S, and 8, and since then, I've found my iPhone 13 Pro and 15 Pro to be similarly capable of making it to the end of the day with some battery to spare.

Those curves—specifically, those curved edges

Enlarge / Goodbye, gap between the edge of the protector and the edge of the screen! Goodbye, little air bubbles!
Andrew Cunningham

I put all of our phones in screen protectors and cases, despite usually also springing for AppleCare+. Especially when you've got a kid, it's worth it not to have to worry about every little drop or bump, and they're good for the resale value, too.

One thing about the iPhone 6-era design was its curved edges, including a subtle curve all the way around the edge of the screen. Over many years with this phone's design, I have slowly come to hate this subtle curve—screen protectors either fail to make contact with the screen all the way around its perimeter, leaving annoying visible air bubbles, or they do make contact on the flat part of the screen while leaving the curved edges of the glass unprotected. The small ridge created by the screen protector ends up being a trap for dust and other little bits of detritus.

Apple returned to an all-flat-edges design with the iPhone 12 in 2020, reverting to what had been the norm with the iPhone 4 and 5 design. On a flat slab of glass, the additional layer of a thin glass screen protector is nearly invisible when you apply it right, being careful not to trap any dust between a freshly cleaned screen and the protector (my wife goes through roughly one screen protector every three or four months; I have become adept at this dance). It's nice to be able to guard against scratches and cracks without having to look at and think about it all the time.

And if you're not the case-and-screen-protector type? One of those "I have AppleCare so I don't need a case" people? The curved edges of the iPhone 6-era design made the phones more slippery and harder to hold. I thought that was even more true for the iPhone 8/SE version of the design, which switched from an aluminum back to a glass back to enable wireless charging support.

Goodbye, Lightning

Apple was ahead of the curve when it introduced a small, omnidirectional port on the iPhone 5 in 2012. But now that USB-C is entrenched, I'm ready to be done with Lightning.
Jacqui Cheng

In many ways, Apple's Lightning connector won the port war; clearly, people were mostly happy to standardize on a small omnidirectional do-anything port. It's just that the Lightning port isn't the version of the idea that took over the world. It's still a little weird that the Mac was a relatively early adopter of the USB-C port, while the iPhone essentially ignored the port until regulators forced Apple's hand.

Myself, I'm glad to be phasing out the last few Lightning-equipped devices in my house, the same way I was happy to give most of my Micro USB stuff the boot a few years ago. For the last year, we've been living with a mix of Lightning and USB-C iPhones, making it ever so slightly more of a pain to share backup chargers or connect to the car's entertainment system (I tried ordering a cable that had a USB-A connector on one end and both Lightning and USB-C connectors on the other from Monoprice; by the time it became clear that it was never going to show up, I had already resigned myself to swapping the cables every time I used the car).

Over time, I've also found that most Lightning cables in my house (especially, but not exclusively, the Apple-designed ones) have frayed and stopped working more rapidly than the USB-C cables. I've still got an Apple TV remote, a Magic Trackpad, and an old iPad in the house that charge over Lightning, but having all of our phones standardized on a single connector again clears up a major pain point.

Only one camera

Enlarge / The iPhone 6 design used a single-lens camera, usually because of either phone size or phone cost.
Andrew Cunningham

All of the iPhone 6 derivatives have only included a single rear camera lens. This was originally because, in the design's heyday, most phones only came with a single rear camera lens. In later generations, it's because the phone was too small to fit multiple cameras—the 7 Plus and 8 Plus both shipped with a pair of camera lenses. And now it's at least partly because this is Apple's cheapest phone, so it gets Apple's cheapest and least-capable camera. Either way, stepping back down to a single 12-megapixel camera feels surprisingly limiting.

The flexibility of the camera system is ultimately what made me step up to a Pro iPhone from the standard one, but even the dual-lens camera system on the regular iPhone 14, 15, and 16 gets you a lot of extra options: the wide-angle lens, the regular lens, and the 2x "zoom" feature (which is still technically just a 12 MP crop from the center of the regular 48 MP image, but it still beats digital zoom) all make it easier to capture different kinds of shots, and that's before you consider things like Portrait Mode or spatial photos and videos that are either impossible to capture with one lens or look much worse when captured with one lens.

A small screen

The screen size at 4.7 inches felt pretty roomy in 2014, especially when moving from a 3.5- or 4-inch screen as iPhone owners would have been doing in those days. But once you go to an iPhone X-style phone with an edge-to-edge screen, it's hard to give up the extra screen space, particularly the extra vertical screen space.

It hasn’t been all bad

There are things I like about the iPhone 6 design. It's compact in a way that modern smartphones just aren't. That size helps contribute to the battery and camera limitations I mentioned, but the old phone is easier to slide into a pocket or small bag than modern iPhones are. There are still times when I miss having Touch ID. The iPhone 6 and 6S were the last models Apple shipped with headphone jacks, a feature removal I'm still a little upset about.

It's also really important for Apple to sell a version of the iPhone and the Apple ecosystem at a lower, more accessible price for cash-strapped customers who don't want to buy an old used phone, for people who want an inexpensive but modern phone for their kid or elderly relative, or for anyone whose phone usage doesn't justify the cost of a full-price iPhone 16 or 16 Pro. I think the iPhone SE, as it currently exists, is in desperate need of an update, but the idea and the market position of the iPhone SE is still an important niche for Apple to fill.

The design also isn't fully dead yet, even though I'm putting it in my own personal rear-view mirror. Apple still sells the third-generation iPhone SE, and a new one (rumored to be similar to an iPhone 14, but with a single camera and a USB-C port) won't be coming out until at least next spring. Apple is still updating both the second- and third-generation iPhone SE and will likely continue to update one or both of those models for at least a few more years, so app developers will still need to consider that 4.7-inch screen when designing their apps.

But 10 years is a long time to spend with any product design, no matter how good it was at the time. I wouldn't want to still be using a MacBook Air design from 2014, even if it had a modern Apple Silicon chip inside; screen technology improves, designs get more streamlined, ports change, and eventually the benefits of updating (or the frustrations that come with not upgrading) become too big to ignore.

So I say again: farewell, iPhone 6 design. We'll probably meet each other again for a while next June, when I open the testing drawer so I can install early iOS 19 betas on a phone I don't rely on day to day. But for the first time in a decade, I won't be seeing some version of you every single day. Pretty soon, you'll disappear from Apple's lineup, too. You had a good run, but it's time.

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