Today is one of the days when I'm really feeling the need for bifocals or reading glasses of some type. Other than the fact that I need a new prescription quite a lot, I've been taking my glasses on and off to look at things up close and farther away. I can tell that this is playing a role in how tired or not my eyes feel trying to focus on a surface. My two eyes have a different focal distance, so even without the glasses on, one focuses clearly in a different focal plane than the other. So all this is interacting with how big a screen is and how tired they get trying to work with small vs large elements.
So, the iPhone SE. Apple this year started selling them again through their clearance site, and through Costco. This one is from Costco. The device arrived with a battery completely drained. It has a manufacture date in 2018 and came with iOS 11.3 (too bad, I was hoping for 10.3.3). After recharging it yesterday and letting it settle a bit, today I put it in DFU mode and did a full firmware update to iOS 12.3 through my PC just to make sure it was fully fresh. The 12 series is better than the 11 series due to optimizations on older devices, so if you can only choose between 11 and 12, you want 12. Scrolling is fine on 12.3, I don't notice any hitches in scrolling or with the animations.
The good, it's very light and very easy to hold one handed due to the 4" diagonal of the screen. Screen has good brightness, at max setting is brighter than the M8, is better colour calibrated and has a little better black level.
The screen is the same one as the 5, 5C and 5S and they are all interchangeable. At one point Apple had 3 panel suppliers for this, Sharp, Toshiba and LG (https://seattledevicerepair.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/20151226_122418.png). They eventually went down to 1 supplier in order to prevent the third party repair shops from being able to get access to panels. The panel used today, is whatever they had left in their spare parts bin to make the SE re-issue, I don't know who the manufacturer is but I suspect it to be Sharp based on the colour temperature.
The bad, it is one of the panels that has a flashing strobe on a pixel-walk inversion test pattern (vertical alternating lines). It is lower resolution 1136x640. This gives you a PPI of 326 like the 4S, but the problem is that when moving the device and due to the lower resolution and the pixel walk issue, I can see a subtle screen-door pattern on otherwise smooth areas. Looks like this basically: https://forums.macrumors.com/attachments/messages-image-904848875-1-png.660647/ when it is supposed to look like this under ideal perfect conditions https://forums.macrumors.com/attachments/messages-image-2753589014-1-png.660649/ Would someone else notice this? Probably not, the effect is subtle and it wouldn't be considered abnormal for this device if the majority of the panels have the issue. Is it useable, yeah. Can you get used to it? I think one could but am not sure if I want to bother because of the other shortcomings.
It's iOS and I've been using Android heavily for the last few years so I've gotten used to a few things which I'd like to be able to continue doing. It was the same way when I had been using iOS 5 & 6 for a few years then was on the Android learning curve. There are some nice things about iOS though too. So it's pros and cons.
I want to like this, but I think the small size in 2019 may be harder to deal with if you're a heavy web surfer and video watcher. You probably won't play games on this because of the size. Even when I was using the 4S and stuff was made back then for devices of that size, I did find gaming and videos to be too small.
For most of you, I think if you had no choice, you could get used to the SE if you gave yourself time to adjust to the changes but I wouldn't recommend it for heavy users, only for people who need small and light. I think I am going to return it, but I will think about it for a couple days.
The current new device that everyone is word of mouth fapping over (6" notchless LCD screen, 3.5mm jack, 5000 mAh battery, etc., etc.) is the Asus ZenFone 6. I have to admit I am tempted, but I'm also feeling cheap. This is a flagship device and is priced as one. I think I will wait for a panel review (likely notebookcheck) before I chance it.. would be much much harder to return something like that, unless it was available on Amazon.