This warms my heart.
I was just thinking about this the other week, when I bought an old iPhone, from the skeumorphic era, for nostalgic purposes. I've wanted one for years -- I only had the newer ones that were flat.
I always thought, nah, I'm just seeing thru rose tinted glasses, surely it wasn't that cool, I'm gonna be disappointed...
Well, I finally got one, and oh boy. It's even better than I imagined. There's just so much love and care put into the designs. We really lost something special.
(p.s. if you get a really old iPhone, don't reset the device. It's impossible to activate them now, found out the hard way.)
> It's impossible to activate them now
There's easy jailbreak options to bypass the activation for those and have a functional device, nowdays.
Every time some permanent downgrade was made to iPhones, everyone said you're afraid of change / it's nostalgia / you'll get used to it. Nope. iPhone 5S (or SE?) running iOS 6 is still the best combo ever. iOS 7 ruined the design, and it never fully recovered. BT is still not a replacement for headphone jack. The swipe gestures get mis-inputted all the time. Liquid Glass actually looked nice, but it introduced Android-level lag and glitches, like 1/3 of the time my camera doesn't load.
Biggest thing though, they broke the keyboard. Thought I was losing my mind after years of using a 6, 6S, 12 mini and still mistyping horribly. Then I picked up my iPhone 5 that hadn't been touched in years since ATT banned it, so there's no way I'm used to it... Instantly typed way faster with 0 mistakes. I'm not the only one, there must be some Ba Sing Se type of denial going on at Apple with the keyboard.
If it's so bad, why am I even using it? I'm kinda not. I use my laptop whenever possible now. I call more often than texting on my phone, and on speakerphone instead of earbuds. It didn't get fixed, just had to adapt. And all of this is practicality, not even touching how special the old iPhone felt.