Excellent to see a fellow SE user! I still happily run my iPhone SE (1st generation). I might take 5 minutes to boot Notion or run out memory and crash when I try to boot Amazon; but, my EarPods pair instantly—I just plug my 3.5 mm jack in my 3.5 mm port and then I can freely listen to music or do a phone call (works every time)! Also, I can easily swap connections from my laptop to my phone with the same workflow—simple (but sadly not futureproof).
I would rather have a gen1 SE than my current iPhone 12 mini. Had an iPhone 5 before, but AT&T stopped serving data to it. I thought maaybe it'd be ok not having a headphone jack, but nah, this sucks.
Please accept my sympathy. I do understand and soon enough I'll be in the same predicament. Every iOS 15 patch feels like a gift. I seriously don't know what I'm going do when iOS 15 becomes end of life; there aren't any modern phones that have my critical—and arguably reasonable—hardware requirements.
Buy the $9 dongle from Apple and keep it permanently connected to your headphones. Then it's just a plug in scenario, the same as a headphone jack whenever you want to use them. Sure, you can't charge and use your headphones at the same time but I get 2 full days of battery life from my iPhone 12.
Same phone here. Only thing I really wish for is better battery capacity out of the box. Battery health is now 83% which is not the worse but definitely noticeable when I don’t charge during the day. But even brand new the phone would not make it through some days without charging or powersaving mode.
In the same light my S20, which by all benchmarks should be inexcusably slow compared to Apple, still feels like a brand new phone to me as well. I think we've lately hit a level of performance excess that means that phones don't age like they once did.
