Back to 5c

Jan 9, 2019

The week before Christmas I brought my trusty iPhone 7 to the local Apple Premium reseller to have its battery replaced before the special discount on battery replacement expired.
Having been able to reserve a spot would have allowed me to wait just a few hours for my iPhone to be serviced, but finding a place in every store nearby had become nearly impossible. In the end, I brought it in without appointment, knowing that this would have meant not to have it for a few days. Now, while being a couple of days without a phone sounded like an interesting experiment to make, in everyday life my phone serves as the place where I keep the train subscription for commuting, a valuable tool to check work emails on the go and - most importantly - a way to tell my fiancé if I'm late at work or lost due to some massive problem in public transportation.
Luckily for me, we have a spare iPhone at home: a glorious blue iPhone 5c that used to belong to my sweet half and which served as my only phone for 4 days while the iPhone 7 was being held.

The gains

Apple has made the experience of changing iPhones quite easy, and this was no less. Going back, something got lost - WhatsApp, for example, wasn't able to inherit backed up chats since the 5c could only run a previous version of the app - but all in all I didn't miss many things: having leveraged on iCloud Library for Photos and iMessages in the Cloud for few months now, all my pictures and messages got synced without any problem.
The 5c also uses the same Nano SIM format the 7 does, allowing me to just pass it over with no compatibility problem of sort.
Even if at first it seemed kind of strange, the new (old) device size was quite nice to handle. My hands can easily hold the 7, nonetheless the reduced size allowed me to have it sitting in my pockets more comfortably.
Last thing, since I thought it was not worth configuring my Apple Watch to this new (old) phone, I was left with few days of notificationless peace which didn't bother me at all.

The misses

Of course, going back 4 generations of iPhone wasn't without compromise.
Touch ID and Raise to Wake were the features I immediately noticed were missing. The combination of these two features had allow me to use the home button much less than before, since I didn't need to push it once to wake the screen and once again to invoke the numpad for inserting the unlock code. I would even say, that having to manually tap even only the four security digits of the reduced code I set up for the 5c every time I needed to enter the phone, made me seriously think to remove it altogether. The magic of seamless security, made possible by Touch ID first and Face ID now, might be one of the biggest achievement Apple has accomplished in recent years.
As you may expect, speed and camera quality were one other area where the 5c vigorously lacked. iPhones 5 and 5c housed a 32-bit A7 processor compared to the 64-bit A10 chip used in the iPhone 7, which was the first to spot a quad-core configuration with two cores for low power activities and 2 cores for intensive tasks. Besides from overall speed, the difference in processing power and architecture yielded one other thing: the difference in supported OS.
The iPhone 5c latest supported iOS is version 10, 2 major releases behind the current handsets; and while I thought this wouldn't be such an issue, the strong interlocking between hardware and software there is to the iPhone experience meant there were many things I was missing, from grouped notifications, to the improved performance thanks to code optimization.

Epilogue

Once the iPhone 7 got fixed, I gladly went back to it of course.
Increased screen estate, while not so comfortable in the pockets, is quite handy for my tired eyes and to look at more things at once. Security is seamless again and performance is back up, something that allows me to do all the things I didn't even try to do during the 5c parenthesis.

All this said, the experiment was interesting: in a world of increasing screens (iPhone Xr, I'm looking at you!), going back to a size that would actually just be normal few years ago, and a performance that made me think twice before doing anything with it, helped me remember the phone is just a device from which we could all take some distance, from time to time. That all the things we do with it, and the fact to be always reached by some notification, while handy, may not be - after all - always so necessary.

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