The iPhone 6 is the first iPhone that I didn't want to buy. I queued for the original in 2007 and I'm not so addicted that I could tell you each model I ever had since but look at any iPhone from then to the 6 or 6 Plus and there are only two options. Either I wanted one or I got it. I was on the typical UK two-year contract that meant I would have to sit out every other model and that should've meant I was ready to buy the iPhone 6 or 6 Plus but I didn't. Not until a couple of months ago, that is.
Initially the issue was that I had no money. Only, there was also the fact that I deeply cherished my iPhone 5 and both of these new ones were bigger. One was much bigger and the other was much, much bigger. Standing in the Apple Store, if I picked up the Plus first, I would have to check which size it was. Both of them are that much bigger than my precious 5.
Then there is an issue with the screen resolution which confused me. The iPhone 6 shows images and video that are this high quality and the iPhone 6 Plus shows them in some degree better. I don't follow specifications but I could see for myself that the Plus 6 screen just showed video that looked an awful lot better than the regular 6. Still, I knew from reading
MacNN that the iPhone 6 Plus really works at an even greater resolution but it squeezes things down to fit the screen. That just feels like a temporary stopgap until the next model.
Still, I stood there in a Paris Apple Store going back and forth between the two. I went between the two screen sizes, I went between the two prices, I finally realised what you can argue I should've figured out long ago: I didn't need to upgrade.
I just didn't. I suppose you never have to but I've always wanted to and here I had the momentum that made me want to upgrade and which made me spend such a lot of time thinking about it. I had the momentum but for once I didn't have the compelling feature that was calling to me. The phones also felt a bit slippy in my hand and I loathe cases so the idea of getting something smaller and slippy then adding a case to make it thicker and less slippy was just wrong.
Then something unprecedented happened: I reached the end of my two-year contract and did not have a new iPhone to subsidise all over again. My monthly bill for the first two years with the iPhone 5 was £40 (approximately $62) and for what I was getting, I was pleased with that. Unfortunately, the cheapest iPhone 6 bill I could get while keeping the bits of package that I want – such as LTE aka 4G and effectively unlimited internet – was around £45 ($70). That much more per month plus some amount like £100 ($154) to end up with the same experience but a bigger screen just wasn't worth it to me.
Plus by not moving to a new subsidised contract, I got to cancel the subsidy part of my current one and pay only for the phone and internet service rather than for the handset. Immediately my bill dropped to £18 ($28) per month. Less than half the cost for exactly the experience I'd been having, it wasn't a no-brainer but it was extraordinarily tough to argue myself into spending more when I neither needed to nor really wanted to.
Then the next thing that happened was the Apple Watch. That works fine with the iPhone 5, albeit we now realise you can use Apple Pay on it only in theory: apparently it works but there's no way to actually set it up. Otherwise, the 5 works fine and I love my Apple Watch: it fulfilled all my Apple techno lust and is genuinely great too. I even told myself I could afford to buy me and my wife Angela a Watch each because I wasn't spending all this money on an iPhone 6 or a 6 Plus.
But -- my iPhone 5 started to get flaky. It would freeze a lot, it would restart an awful lot and one day as I drove to somewhere unfamiliar but really important it went dead for a quarter of an hour leaving me trying to guess my route. Then when I was about to head out to another important gig in another unfamiliar place, my iPhone 5 died completely.
Part of the great fun of getting a new iPhone is looking forward to it, working out how much capacity you can afford, and either fiddling about on the online Apple Store or going in to a real one and buying it there. I had none of this fun: I had to have a working phone, I was way out of warranty and now I could also see physical damage to the phone, I had no choice.
When I was done with that important gig –– and not only looked at my dead phone many times but also had to help someone setup Siri on their new iPhone 6 just to rub it in –– I went to my local Apple Store and asked. What's the cheapest possible way to get an iPhone 6? All my thinking and pondering about the iPhone 6 Plus went out the window and never came back: I couldn't afford a new phone and I didn't want a new phone, I was never going to buy the more expensive Plus.
Apple took me through financing options and I'd rather not tell you what I paid but it works out at about a pixel less than the amount I used to be paying per month for my iPhone 5 and service. The difference is that I'm locked into this for three years, not two. The other difference being that the iPhone 6 is (presumably) going to be replaced by the iPhone 6s on 9 September and I'll have to sit that out. I'll have to sit out the iPhone 7 and the iPhone 7s. I'm looking at the iPhone 8 as my next phone.
Consequently, knowing even as I bought the 6 that its time as the newest and greatest was fast running out, knowing even then that I would be truthfully but in vain telling myself it's still a great phone, I got it and didn't want it. When you want an iPhone, it's a lot of money. When you don't want it but haven't really got a choice, it's an awful lot of money. Logically I could've picked up a cheap Android phone instead but this is just one more case where logic is bollocks. I needed the phone for my business: I need it to work, I need it to work now, I don't need to figure out some other system and consult geeks about which bit of software I need to install but can't because my carrier doesn't allow it.
The iPhone 6 was the first iPhone I had that I didn't want. Then I had made a mistake with the backups from my iPhone 5 and lost some data plus, most importantly, lost the ability to just switch the thing on and have it restore all my apps to where they were.
I have never before felt ratty about an iPhone I owned.
Only, that screen is rather nice. I'll give it that. Plus it's a lot faster than my iPhone 5 was even when it was working properly. I was starting to think that this could be good, except I found that the battery life wasn't substantially better than I had with my iPhone 5. Since my 5 never made it to the end of the afternoon, I used it so much, this was a disappointment.
If it had continued to be a disappointing phone that made me feely ratty and impoverished, though, you wouldn't be reading this. I wouldn't be writing a Living With and, at least so far,
MacNN doesn't run articles called Putting Up With. Instead, while it took several weeks for the pain of the price to fade, I have come to find this may even be the best iPhone I've ever had.
I've lost count of the number of times I've been able to use its faster speed and bigger screen to pull off some work that I'd previously have gone back to my Mac to do. I love Apple Pay, truly adore it and am only weary of how panicked sales people look when I try to use it. The health stuff is working: I now look to see how many flights of stairs I've climbed today and I have found myself walking much further than normal. I think much further than I used to be able to.
OmniFocus and Reeder, probably my two most-used apps on the iPhone look brilliant. MindNode mind mapping works well too. Perhaps the kicker for me was when The Omni Group also brought OmniOutliner to the iPhone 6. They really bought it to the iPhone and so I had been able to try it out on my 5 but with the iPhone 6 I was suddenly using it all the time. With the 5 I'd make the odd change to an outline but with the 6 I was writing them entirely on there and delivering speeches using notes in OmniOutliner.
Touch ID is so great that I now make a tutting noise every time I pick up my iPad and have to enter my passcode like an animal. At first I found Touch ID irritating in the way you had to use it every single time you pick up the iPhone but now that feels faster than tapping and swiping. It is interesting how often Touch ID will fail on me: always and exclusively because my hands are wet. It's also interesting how the best part of Touch ID for me, besides Apple Pay, is how you can use it to open 1Password.
I don't like Reachability where it pulls the screen down half way so I never use it. I could rearrange my icons to put the most commonly used ones at the bottom but I never bother. My iPhone 6 screen is nearly the same as my iPhone 5's, just with an extra row of things plus the odd twiddle as some apps come in and out of favour for me.
I don't like that I did have to buy a case for it but I like the case I got and when I take it out to stand the iPhone 6 up on my Füz designs stand, I get to marvel anew at how thin this phone is. It still feels slippy yet the sides are a good grip now.
It is without question the best iPhone I have ever had. I'd argue that, since the iPhone 6 Plus has this resolution squeezing lark, that the iPhone 6 is the best iPhone Apple has ever made. It will always and forever be the best iPhone they ever made – until (presumably) September 9. Then this glorious machine in my hand will somehow seem old and inadequate. I may skip this year's Apple announcements -- and next year's.
Though looking on the brightside for anyone who hasn't bought an iPhone 6, the odds are that it's going to be an awful lot cheaper come 10 September.
-William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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