Well, let's not get crazy. It's fine (I'm using it currently because my Samsung S9 died) but it's definitely no perfect phone. It doesn't even have water resistance and the screen to body ratio is pretty bad, IMO.
Only upside is the thing is built in such a way that it has barely taken any damage from the years of abuse I put it through.
I'm likely getting an iPhone 12 Pro Max very soon and will continue to only use the iPhone 5S I've had since 2013 as a backup.
I love the 5S form factor as well. I only updated from it earlier this year to get iOS 13 to use the COVID Alert app here in Canada (and my upgrade was buying a smashed-screen iPhone SE for next to nothing, of course, and swapping the old phone's screen onto it).
What's in your back pocket? Seriously, love my SE. I just got the battery replaced, $49 taken from a MacBook trade-in value, so basically free since I can't use that money any other way.
How do you still have one that's running OK? My Apple products almost always "die" after a few years. I had the 5S but one day it crashed and would not turn back on no matter what I did. The iPhone I had before that did the same thing.
Is that a common issue? I've certainly heard about devices losing battery life and cameras progressively getting worse, but complete death is very uncommon unless you use it without a case and drop it all the time or something.
I still have a working iPhone 5 (no S) with a home button that spins and a slightly broken screen bezel but no other issues.
At one point I thought it died permanently. But it turned out to only be the screen dimming to much. In bright light it auto adjusted enough to be visible, allowing me to rise the brightness.
The list of old Apple devices that still work well is impressive: I still have one original iPad, an iPhone 3GS, several iPhone 4. Same goes for the more recent ones, with the exception of the few devices that I dropped on hard floors over the last 10 years...
Still have a first-generation iPod Touch running iOS 3. Works like a charm, can even download some apps from the App Store. Bit of a shock how both primitive and advanced the early versions of iOS were.
I had an iPad 1 running iOS 5 I think, but in the end I stopped using it because Safari would "crash" on most websites due to it running out of ram I guess.
I have a 4S that's still running perfectly happily. Can't do much with it, mind, given that everything is wildly out of date but it may yet get repurposed as a webcam when I get some free time.
I believe you but I've honestly never heard of anybody suffering "random cellphone death" - Apple or otherwise. Everybody seems to break them or upgrade them long before that.
I had it with Nexus 5x. It died after 1.5 years when I used an app to get a train ticket. It turned out it was a known hardware bug judging by forums. It was in Norway so the phone was still under warranty and it was “repaired” - the motherboard was replaced. Still not much later I bought the original iPhone SE. I just did not like the idea of phone stopping working for no reason.
I have an iPhone 3GS and an iPad 2 that still work. They are very slow and most apps don’t support their oses. I’d still have an iPhone 7 Plus if it wasn’t at the bottom of a river rapid. My wife has a white MacBook somewhere from 2009/10.
The only problem I’ve had was a 2011 MBP have a gpu issue.
I write iOS software, so I have a whole bunch of test units.
My "low-end" test unit is an iPod Touch (last gen). Basically, a skinny SE (Apple doesn't even have an iPod simulator -you're supposed to use an SE sim).
My regular daily phone is an Excess Max (XSMax). I'm sick to death of it. I don't have much use for all that screen real estate, and it's a big honkin' monster.
Only upside is the thing is built in such a way that it has barely taken any damage from the years of abuse I put it through.
I'm likely getting an iPhone 12 Pro Max very soon and will continue to only use the iPhone 5S I've had since 2013 as a backup.