I'm in the same boat, my kid is now the third owner of a handed down 6S and it still does everything without being slow or lacking app support. The features it is missing are mostly neural engine related and are conveniences not vital functionality. I could 100% use that phone as a daily driver and not be frustrated if I swapped in a new battery.
Buying an iPhone 6s was an excellent if lucky choice, the luck was that the original SE was based on it so the support guarantees of the SE carries the 6s with it. With Apples usual 5 years there'll probably be another 1.5 years of support since the orignal SE was discontinued. (After that I suspect that a bunch of other devices will be discontinued quickly again)
I’ve got more than enough karma and a secure enough ego to have no need to go fishing for votes on HN thanks. Don’t the site guidelines say something about being charitable in your interpretations of other people’s comments?
Anyway I have used a 6s on recent versions of iOS. It works but don’t kid yourself if you think the experience in any way compares to using a recent device.
It's actually not true. I bought a 6S last year (or previous year) for use in testing iOS apps. My main phone has since died, and I've switched to the 6s. And the experience is excellent. In fact, in many ways it's superior to newer iPhones: it TouchID, and a headphone jack! The only thing that I wish it had is a better camera.
I use an iPhone SE (mk 1) that's basically a 6S, mostly works fine (have had to replace the battery). Things like web browsing, general apps are fine, nothing feels slow. Most things are responsive etc. Have no need to update as it does everything I want it to do with no issues.
I have had an oddity in the last year or so (so iOS 14 and onwards?) is that music playback software seems to get background killed (OOM?) fairly often if it isn't playing. Main issue for me is my general pattern with driving would be to cue up music / podcasts beforehand, pause it and when I select bluetooth for sound in car it would start playback. Now I seem to have to be careful not to actually do anything with my phone (like check websites or whatever) after preparing audio, otherwise there's a strong chance you'll just get nothing.
So not perfect, but this may be a weird edge case I'm running up against. Doubt the phone is going to get iOS 16 though, so will have to think about what to do.
I think those first few years of iPhone where phone power was really leaping up between models, and iOS was jumping in complexity alongside it did give Apple bit of a bad reputation. We got software updates (good) but they just didn't perform at all well on older phones (bad). It seems to have settled down a bit nowadays where iOS isn't outgrowing the old hardware as much. But of course then we had the infamous "people think we're intentionally slowing down old phones, lets ship a feature that protects the battery by intentionally slowing down old phones and not tell anyone" thing.
I had the same issue with my old 6s but I recently changed the battery and it is shockingly fast now. The battery replacement only cost me $34 which is cheaper than buying a new phone. I have a SE 2 but since it doesn't have a headphone jack I will be sticking with 6s.
Are you basing this on real experience or just fishing for HN anti-Apple upvotes?
Just asking because my kid is using an iPhone 6s with iOS15 and really experiencing absolutely no problems whatsoever.