The problem with most of the views expressed on this forum (and most other phone forums) is that those views are expressed in EXTREMELY subjective terms. "Battery is worse", "phone is laggy", etc. Couple that with the fact that just about any "real life" measure of a phone's performance is HEAVILY dependent on user configuration and use patterns and what you end up with are a bunch of opinions that may or may not have any meaning for anyone other than the writer.
I see many opinions out there that "iOS 11.x is a disaster" or words to that effect. However, that is the exact opposite of my iPhone SE experience. I have not experienced ANY lag at all on any 11.x version and my battery life is excellent. I tend to discount measures of battery life with screen on since there are far too many variables. But I do pay attention to battery life in standby since that can be better controlled. With push disabled, background refresh off, WiFi and bluetooth on and strong cell and WiFi signal strengths, the absolute WORST I have ever seen was 1%/hour overnight. Lately on 11.1 and up, that has dropped to about 0.5%/hour. For a 1700 mAH battery, I think that is pretty danged respectable. By comparison, my similarly configured Nexus 5X (Android) and Lumia 950 (Windows) can't quite do that (they run about 0.8%/hour to 1%/hour overnight) and they have significantly larger batteries.
That said, for anyone contemplating upgrading without a downgrade path.... I feel your pain. I recently switched to the SE from an Android phone (the Nexus line) and I could easily upgrade, downgrade and sideways grade to/from any OEM or 3rd party Android version that was ever released for that phone. I do miss that. And with Android 7 and now 8, Android has matured to the point where I am totally happy with it. More so than iOS actually. However, the Android world has totally abandoned small affordable phones so when Best Buy had the iPhone SE for $149 (ATT) I decided to give Apple a try. Haven't regretted it so far.
Paul
Paul, thank you very much for your detailed thoughts.
There are certainly a lot of user reports of iOS 11 causing problems on a multiplicity of devices; the fact that Apple has rolled out so many patches since release would appear to support the fact that issues have been/are still present (although one might well - and fairly - argue that the rapid release of updates demonstrates maturity and responsiveness to user feedback). That said, there also seem to be a fair number of people that are satisfied with the iOS 11 experience - and perhaps it's only logical that those who are experiencing problems will be more vocal than those who are not on the basis that they would like Apple to take notice and find a fix for them. None of which accounts for the fact that, as you say, user feedback will be entirely subjective and based on way of working. Just my two cents - may or may not be the case.
The biggest issue for me is a lack of a downgrade path. I would happily update my device to iOS 11 and give it a fair try, even put up with minor gripes in terms of responsiveness and battery if I knew that I could get back to iOS 10. But as I understand it, even with the iOS 10 file (sic?) from the Apple servers, this isn't possible as 10 is no longer being signed. Am I a power user as far as my phone is concerned? No. Would I be able to deal with charging every evening (at the moment, a full charge will normally get me through two days - just, definitely at 1/2% at the end of day 2)? Yes, probably. Would I be able to deal with a low performance, unresponsive OS? Definitely not. Is this situation likely to improve with subsequent iOS releases? And therein lies the crux - will older devices fair any better on say iOS 11.3.3 than they do at the moment on 11.2.1, as the software becomes increasingly demanding and complicated? And even then, what does that mean? Does it mean "go for it, waiting for later releases won't make a difference", or "stick on iOS 10 - it's smooth and it works. Just watch out for wi-fi hackers!". Short answer; no idea!
[doublepost=1513856638][/doublepost]I help a lot of non tech family members and friends with their electronic devices running iOS or Android and the type of comments I hear the most after most updates, including iOS 11 is along the lines of "Why do they keep changing things? It was fine before they updated it." I rarely hear anything about battery life and even less about performance, even on older devices.[/QUOTE]
Interesting. Thank you for this!
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My SE is on 11.1.2 and seems to run the same as it did on 10.3.3. The exception is Safari, where scrolling is now WAY smoother than it used to be. Worth the upgrade to me. Doubt I'll update my 6 past 10.3.3, though.
Interesting. May I ask why?
As I understand it, the SE is basically the 6, but in the smaller form factor.
