After a year with the iPhone 17, I've found plenty to appreciate about it, but that still doesn't make me love it. The iPhone 17 was Apple's 2025 baseline release. For whatever reason, the general public really took to it. Apple's own Tim Cook pointed out repeatedly that the phone was one of Apple's best sellers of all time. As fate would have it, it was also the iPhone I was, more or less, forced into buying. My beloved iPhone 13 mini was on death's doorstep, and because I live in 2026 and not 2006, I can't really be sans iPhone. So, I gave Apple a big stack of cash and the corpse of my previous iPhone. In exchange, they handed me a new glass-and-metal rectangle. How I feel about it after that year of use is complicated.

I actively hate interfacing with my phone, any iPhone, casually. It feels like an anchor around my neck. But they do have some utility in my life, like they do in everybody's. I don't own a car, so I do rely on rideshare a few times a year when I can't bike or walk to a location due to weather or distance. I enjoy the fact that I have access to up-to-date maps, especially when I travel. I don't have to worry about getting completely lost when I travel. I like having a capable camera on my person to snap pictures when I need to. And really, that's about it.

So my upgrade from my iPhone 13 mini, a phone I would have kept forever given the chance, was not because I was so moved by the iPhone 17 that I needed to have it. It was because my iPhone 13 mini was actively dying. It struggled under the weight of iOS 26. Its battery life was not great towards the end, either. And I knew that I was going to eventually have to upgrade, so I rationalized it to myself. I knew Apple wasn't bringing back the iPhone mini form factor, so there was no real reason to hold out. And I thought, 'Well, the iPhone 17 doesn't seem so bad.'