By weening myself off iPhone. Just use the core apps.
I used an iPhone 6 Plus on iOS 9 until 2022. 8 years on the same OS.
I didn't upgrade it through the years because I knew, from past experience that the so called upgrades would ruin the phone.
After iOS updates ruined my 4S and then my 5, I learned my lesson the hard way so I never updated the 6+.
By then (2022) Safari was pretty much worthless for shopping and many apps were cut off - especially finance apps, but the core standard stock iOS apps still all worked fine. (Calendar, notes, reminders, messages, email, phone, camera).
I used my Mac instead for internet stuff.
As for battery life - its not an issue. My 11 year old 6 Plus still has its original battery and battery health is still at 95%. 2170 charge cycles.
Impossible you might say? Yes it is impossible if you charge the battery like Apple recommends, but I knew I was going to keep this phone for a really long time --- so I kept the charge level between 65% to 75% all those years.
Yeah it was tedious - but it worked. Luckily now its easy to create a iOS shortcut to turn a smart plug off & on at any battery level automatically.
Eventually I got a 8 Plus and then decided to upgrade the 6+ to iOS 12 to see what would happen - and to no surprise, iOS 12 obliterated it. It became so slow it was unbearable to use. Everything taking forever. Ridiculous.
But surprisingly, my 6S Plus on iOS 15 runs fine. So maybe the days of iOS upgrade carnage are behind us.
Sooo- I know this scenario with my new SE3 will play out again in the future as iOS inexorably marches forward - which is why I purchased a 2nd SE3.
I can't risk apple ruining my usable and fast SE3 with a new iOS version in the future (looking at you iOS 27), so I'll use my 2nd SE3 as a iOS tester and see how things go on it. That one is my guinea pig.
If I'm lucky, the SE3 will function fine on iOS 28 in a few years - and then I'll stick with that to the bitter end.
Maybe by then (8-9 years from now) there will be a new display technology to get us out of this OLED PWM hell.
Crossing my fingers
What is your Mac setup? If iOS updates are making LCD phones unusable, then would I be correct in assuming dithering is the trigger? Every Mac within the past 10 years utilized dithering either via the GPU (Intel, AMD, and Apple Silicon) or TCON FRC. I actually find the phones and iPad Pros much more tolerable than any of the Macs.
