Yes Peter, I was a systems programmer from '79 to '85 and apart from the tape drives the computer room was boring. At least the 3705 above had some flashing lights. After the S/370 the CPUs were just boxes.
I remember a (sort of senior) American colleague hand carrying a tape with the latest version of an MRP system over to our datacentre in Grenoble and I was entrusted with the tape. Instead of giving it to an operator I slapped it up myself on a 3420 but unfortunately didn’t notice that the automated backup scripts I’d in place hadn’t run the night before and were pending and that the tape still had the write permit ring in. I watched in horror as the “write” light on the tape unit started to flash. I had to rush up to the DP manager (CIO nowadays) and call him out from a meeting with our American visitor and tell him what I had stupidly done. Local collegiality meant we’d no option but to tell our guest that he’d hand carried a blank tape. We justified this morally as some idiot in the US had left the write permit ring in. One of many computing scrapes we had in the hands on early days.
As someone said, it depends on what you want to do with it. My wife still has a Nokia 3410 which works perfectly and does exactly what she wants to do – it makes and receives telephone calls. I’ve just been forced to replace my Samsung smartphone which gave up the ghost after four or five years. Something to do with the battery. I changed that, then had the whole thing reset to zero and it still wouldn’t work, going from 100% charge to zero in 30 seconds flat. So reluctantly I lashed out on a Nokia 7.2 which is brilliant and has solved my major problem of not being able to make calls from home due to the lack of a reliable signal, using WiFi to connect via my internet connection. Very clever. But it’s a lot of money for something I don’t really need but have to have given the modern fixation with smartphones as opposed to the good old land line. Which I’m told will be scrapped at the end of the year despite the fact that it’s a lifesaver when there’s a power cut because you can still phone people like your doctor, the fire brigade, the SAMU …
The IphoneSE available at around £230 is an excellent phone. My wife and I both own one. It is powerful and compact. The map and navigation tools work very speedily.
At current prices I think they would take some beating. Super reliable too with great camera for a phone. Especially good if you own other apple products.
There is a new one coming at the end of March - it will be approx €400 but it will be a big improvement over the previous SE. The new one apparently it based on the chassis of an iPhone 8 with iPhone 11 internals.
A big improvement? I think that that is in the eye of the beholder. One of the main reasons that I chose an SE was it’s physical size. I didn’t want a bigger phone.
The screen to chassis proportions have improved recently with much smaller bezels which is a good thing.
I also think wireless charging is fantastic, I have had it for 5-6 years- my son wasn’t keen until he upgraded his iPhone SE to an iPhone 8 recently and now also wouldn’t get a phone without it. Finally Apple have included it.
Well I certainly wouldn’t expect to be able to convince anybody of anything so no great surprise.
I trust I have the purpose correct of a forum such as this as voicing opinion rather than an open minded discussion.
In this instance I am not in favour of switching phones to every latest model every time as it is just a waste of money but once in a while it is worth embracing a newer model as like it or not things do progress. (responsiveness, battery life, security, capacity, screen resolution etc). I would say every 4 years is perhaps a good balance.
I like the overall size and chunkiness of my SE but am expecting it’s replacement to be slightly larger, as I only really use a phone for texts, calls and emails if the new one was significantly bigger then I’d switch brands.
From what I have read the SE2 (may be called iphone 9) is bigger than the SE. The SE2 will be based on iPhone 8 chassis so dimension comparison below should be valid:
I was disagreeing with the comment about the new SE being big improvement. It will be different but whether those differences improve it will be down to individual preferences.
@tim17 do you think your limited use reflects the small size of the screen? My phone has quite a bit bigger screen and I use it for Web browsing and YouTube also - just out of interest is this a chicken and egg situation?
With a device that lends itself more to browsing and videos etc - do you see your own use of a phone changing?
Ha ha, reminds me of something silly I did on my first IT job. I was asked to take a exchangable disk (remember those things that looked like an oversized kurling whatsit) to a customer site.
I do remember them. They came in 2.5 Meg or a whopping 5 meg I think. We had a salesman who left one in the boot of his car overnight in freezing conditions. He brought it back in the next day and it wouldn’t read, problem was it had the ONLY copy of the source code (it was written in BASIC) of the payroll system we were trying to flog. We turned off error detection and just left the disk to whirr away for a couple of days trying to read and eventually it did manage to read every sector. I’d forgotten about that
One of the main reasons that I have an iPhone is because I also use an iPad and the two work together seamlessly. When I’m at home I use the iPad because it’s screen is bigger but when I’m out and about I use the iPhone for for everything from A-Z; I don’t have a smartphone because a salesman told me that they were the fashion, I have a smartphone because I’ve got used to the benefits that I gain by walking around with a powerful pocket sized computer linked to the internet. I chose the SE because I didn’t want a bigger phone. Let’s not forget that when I want I can tether my iPad to it anyway, the best of all worlds.
I’m sure that wireless charging is great but I’m not sure that I see it as a big improvement, my routine allows me to charge my phone at home, in my car, on my boat and even when I walk down the street without any fuss or bother. In time I will probably end up buying a new SE but I will do it because I want to have a newer phone with a newer battery, it won’t be because I see the larger screen or wireless charging as a big improvement. In my opinion the former will actually be a backward step and the latter something that might have a value after I change my car when the new one will probably having a wireless charging deck.
The truth is following one of the posts on this thread I have discovered that it’s still possible to buy a current SE and an amazing price and I will probably go down that route. Win-win for me.
I’d do the same if it wasn’t for the issue of software support which normally only lasts 4/5 years, the SE came out in March 2016 so the ‘update’ clock is already ticking.
I’ve always had my iphones in otter boxes and have thus kept them in showroom condition and sold them on when they get long in the tooth for decent money.
Now onto a Motorola and love it.
It’s wall to wall Apple chez nous, Macbooks. iMacs, mini iPads, iPad pros with keyboard and pencil etc. etc. and my daughter has used iPhones all along but I can’t because they’re not dual SIM. They have a “virtual” SIM capability but I don’t know of any service providers supporting it yet.
