Winds Howling

Yesterday was my 1,232nd, and final, day as an iPhone 14 Pro user.

After spending about an hour inside the local T-Mobile store, I walked out with a new iPhone 18 Pro.

This was the longest I’ve ever held on to a phone. Before the 14 Pro, I had another fairly long run with an iPhone SE 2 for 972 days. I jumped around more frequently before that, with an iPhone XR for a year and a half and an iPhone 7 for two years.

I owned the iPhone 14 Pro during three years full of travel, with many of the best and biggest trips of my life to date, during which I had no iPhone-related disasters, mishaps or major memorable glitches. It never really slowed down to a substantial degree over time, and even survived last year’s transition to Liquid Glass with its everyday performance pretty much intact.

The thing that really made me want to upgrade was the battery life. After a little over 3 years of ownership, its battery health was at 77%, and I was pretty reliant on battery packs to make it through a day of heavy use. I could have replaced the battery for $100 or so, and kept trucking with it, but… the newer iPhones are noticeably lighter to hold, I really wanted to leave my Lightning cables behind, and I had the usual degree of FOMO, so the scales tipped toward it being an upgrade year for me.

When I got the iPhone 14 Pro on May 8, 2023, I’d just gotten a new job, moved to a new, bigger, town, and decided to graduate into the life of a Flagship Phone User. Until that point I’d always chosen the smaller phones of Apple’s line-up, or, in the post-iPhone X years, whichever one would allow me to have a home button and Touch ID. I chose to get over all that for this one and just get the best phone I could (though I still can’t quite stomach the leap in size to Pro Max).

I was happy with it, then quickly had a twinge of regret that haunted me for the next three years. I bought it at a bad time without really thinking about it. The iPhone 15 came out four months later. With that phone, Apple switched from their proprietary Lightning ports to USB-C, bringing it into line with virtually everything else that charges, and they switched stainless steel parts to titanium, making it a lot lighter in the hand. I put all this aside in my mind and resigned myself to a few more years of the Lightning cable lifestyle; the 2010s would live on for me a while yet. I nearly went for the iPhone 17, and for a time was convinced I would have to hold out for next year’s 20th anniversary iPhone, but eventually concluded I could wait no longer and would go for this generation.

Here are some initial thoughts from a day of lightly using the iPhone 18 Pro:

• I like the Action Button and the dedicated camera button. I’ve got the Action Button set to activate the flashlight. The camera button helps me snap photos for this blog a few milliseconds faster, at least in theory. I’ve still got to get used to using it.
• Sort of disappointed to not feel a boost in battery life. I keep looking up at the percentage and thinking, “huh, seems like that ought to be higher.”
• Visual Intelligence and Siri AI seem quite nice.
• I was pretty intent on trying to go caseless this generation, but I’m caving early and already ordered a couple cases to try. The iPhone 14 Pro was too angular and slippery to hold without a case, and while this form factor is improved in every way, it’s still just way more slippery than it needs to be. It’s better with a case.
• I got the “glacier” blue color. It’s the first iPhone I’ve gotten in a color other than black since I had the yellow iPhone 5C. I quite like it and am reluctant to cover it with a case. A little bit of the glacier blue frame is visible along the edge of the screen when I’m using it, so you get to enjoy the color even from the front.