In the previous ten years, I’ve owned a lot of iPhones, but the iPhone 5 was the first. Not only was it my first iPhone, but it was also the first phone on which I consciously paid money. I lived on carrier-subsidized Razr flip phones and inherited, unbreakable Nokia candy bars till then.
Touch ID wouldn’t arrive until the iPhone 5S a year later, and the truly big screen sizes of modern iPhones wouldn’t come until the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus two years later.
The iPhone 5 isn’t even that noteworthy in the iPhone’s history, with a little higher display than prior iPhone models’ 3.5-inch panels. There was no significant upgrade in processing, mechanical design, or display density (as with the iPhone 4), nor were there any new software features such as Siri (on the iPhone 4S).
Sure, it had LTE, but given that it was also the first phone I owned with data (that I would quickly blow through browsing Twitter on buses between classes), I didn’t really notice a jump in speed. After years of owning iPod touch models that were only useful near Wi-Fi, any kind of cellular data was a major improvement.
Like Chaim, the iPhone 5 is my favorite gadget from the past 10 years, not because it’s the best, but because it was my first smartphone. I’d owned the likes of Blackberries, but nothing quite like a phone with features I was used to only computers boasting — and with a camera to boot.
I’ve since moved on to bigger and better phones, and swap devices far more frequently than I did back in 2012. But the iPhone 5 still stands out to me after all these years since it was the first phone that was really mine, and the first “real” phone I ever had. —Chaim Gartenberg
That iPhone stands out even more to me because it literally opened up a whole new world when I was going through a rough time. I didn’t have a car or reliable public transportation, so the easy access to ridesharing apps it offered was a lifesaver. Plus, the easy-to-use camera produced such high-quality images, I found myself constantly stopping to take pictures, awakening my creativity. It sounds funny, but that also ended up helping me learn about and embrace the concept of mindfulness. The camera literally made me stop and stare to appreciate the beauty in things I previously thought of as mundane or never noticed — like flowers.
Don’t get me wrong, I am by no means anywhere close to being a professional photographer these days. I am, however, a far more peaceful, mindful person. I think the iPhone 5 helped me become that way. —Sheena Vasani
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