WWDC happened. And it contained nothing I was actually excited about. No M2-powered Mac Mini (so that I can pick up a less expensive M1-Powered one), Improvements to iPadOS that still aren’t close to bringing it to feature parity with a desktop OS(why can’t I enable system-wide ad blocking on iPadOS again? And why are we still trying to get all browsers through WebKit? Firefox’s add-on ecosystem suffers greatly from it.) However, there was one piece of news that actually does affect me significantly.
The iPhone 6S has finally fallen from the support list.
I’m not angry about it. Quite the opposite actually. In a world where most phones’ support still hinges on manufacturers willingly supporting however many SKU’s they release beyond a token update or two, that the 6S will be supported for seven years (assuming that the public release of IOS 16 happens around September) is as much an statistical anomaly as it should be an example for these multibillion dollar companies that expect you to drop four figures on a flagship and then expect you do it again just a couple of years down the line.
It’s not like the 6S was a particularly interesting upgrade when it dropped either. It would be a while for Apple’s hype machine to recharge from the normal 6, which had ditched the familiar 4.0” form factor to go into larger sizes that we’d laugh about now but were “normal” and “enormous” at the time. Show of hands everyone who remembers seeing the HTC ONE back in 2012 and being shocked at the giant 4.7” display? Besides which, Apple was still dealing with the fallout of the original 6 and its propensity to bending.
But with a sturdier chassis, A9 SoC and an additional GB of ram, it turned out to be much longer-lasting than its seemingly-identical predecessor. The normal iPhone 6 only made it to IOS 12 and 2019 apart from the occasional security patch. My 6S is one of the later ones, bought right around the time when Apple was dropping the iPhone X on us. Gold. 64 GB. And actually my first.
It has gone now, but it was still a pretty good introduction into modern apple for a man whose last apple product had 4GB of storage space, a sub 2” screen and needed to be traversed with a click wheel. Even without any other devices to take advantage of “the ecosystem”, it turned out to just be a very good, solid, dependable phone which was in no risk of not receiving the latest updates around the time where even the most committed Android phone manufacturer would call it quits. It also ended up being the last iPhone with a headphone jack, a limitation which I’m sure has driven the sales of wireless earbuds for many but merely remains an inconvenience for me every time I am in the middle of a call and notice that very soon I will have to decide on trying to finish my call on a hard time limit or hold a phablet with a wire sticking on it to my ear.
So here’s to you 6S and to your smaller sibling the Gen1 SE. Your road was longer than most, and that’s what’s made it remarkable.
