Last night I walked into the corner of an island kitchen counter at just the right (or perhaps wrong) angle, and cracked the home button and part of the screen of my iPhone SE3. Fortunately (or not) it was my personal one and not the work one, or the company meeting on Monday morning would have been… fun.

Hey everyone, had a good weekend, got a lot done. Oh by the way, I need a new work phone, I broke mine while cooking beans.

For now I’m mulling the idea of a DIY home button replacement, just as I did with my iPhone 4 back in the day. But it’s likely I won’t get Touch ID again, thanks to the Fruit Company pairing the specific sensor with the motherboard. The process also doesn’t look like fun, even if it is technically feasible. This is where a lot of advice falls short: I could spend my weekend amassing a pile of specialised hardware to perform a delicate repair on a device I don’t care much for, or… hear me out… I could do literally anything else. Like configuring a 1999 SCSI controller on a Power Mac G3! Or bush walking, that’s way more fun.

I’ve done the Assistive Touch trick for now to give me a soft home button on the screen, while I ponder what to do next.

The good news is that the iPhone SE 3, Apple’s best ever phone, can be bought refurbished for as little as AU $240. Apple have always released these things called updates for phones long after they’ve stopped selling them, so my hope is I’ll be able to keep using these for at least another year or two. After this though, I’ll likely be going Android.

This isn’t because the Android OS itself, or its various offshoots, have got better. Their fonts are still bad, their pull to refresh animations are jarring, most ship with bloatware, their UIs are tacky, and one of the platform’s primary selling points looks set to disappear. Gimmicks like folding aside, the hardware also has largely photocopied the iPhone-esque slab of glass form factor, because it’s cheaper to follow than to innovate. iPhones also mop the floor with Android hardware with performance, though I run an SE3 so that clearly isn’t a concern!

No, my issues are with the iPhone line itself. Apple has pitched the larger, heavier, and more expensive iPhone 16E as a “replacement” for the iPhone SE, which I suppose it is if you consider a kitchen renovation an effective way to replace a toaster. Apple have signalled they’re not interested in the lower-middle segment of the market anymore, to say nothing of their embarrassing political sycophancy and lack of “courage”. Worst of all, their self-imposed Liquid (Gl)ass debacle even managed to elevate Android’s mediocre Material Design to something that looks forgettable, which I consider a compliment. Whatever high ground the Fruit Company had in design and ethical principles have been discarded like a pile of ewasted AirPods with their dead batteries and glue.

Wow, I’m snarky in this post today! Maybe it’s because I under-extracted this morning coffee, and it’s a bit watery. How are you? Life treating you well? I hope it is. A sulphur-crested cockatoo just flew onto our balcony. G’day friendo, how you going? Wait no, that’s my washing!!!