Screen preference probably depends on what your doing with it. My work phone is a regular iPhone 7. My phone use is like 70% phone, 20% email, 10% everything else. For that, smaller is better.
Nope. The 8 is still a good deal smaller, thinner, and lighter than the X or XS. I do get what you are saying though. An edge to edge screen allows bigger screens in more reasonably sized phones. Samsung figured this out a long time ago. The 8 is the smallest modern iPhone you can buy. It also has the advantage of pairing a X SoC with a 750p screen, which means it will probably outlast these other phones as it won't slow down as much with updates. 2K+ resolutions are pointless on phones. You already can't discern between pixels at 750p. All you are doing is needlessly thrashing the SoC. I learned the hard way with my 6 Plus why you don't really want a high res screen that much. That phone slowed down so quickly with updates. My ideal phone would be something the size and weight of an 8 with an edge to edge OLED screen, no notch, and a fingerprint reader and haptic feedback home button integrated into the screen. I still think the notch is hideous and that touch ID is superior to face ID. Also bring back the headphone jack. Having to use adapters sucks. Bluetooth headphones sound like ass. I don't find phones that exciting these days. It's a product category that already reached maturity a few years ago similar to PCs. Now what you are seeing is dumb stuff like high prices, change for the sake of change, over the top minimalism that goes too far, gimmick features, useful features like the headphone jack, fingerprint reader, and home button being removed. The state of phones right now reminds me of Windows PCs around the time of Windows 8. The X and XS are what Windows 8 was to PCs. Similar to how MS could have just kept updating WIndows 7 and most people would have been happy, I think Apple could have just kept updating the internals of the 4.7 inch iPhone and most people would have been happy.
Do you think your iphone 6 plus slowed down majorly because your usage may have aged the battery and the phone throttled down? I have an iphone 5 that's on ios 10.3.3 (newest update it can get) and it runs it just fine. It was my mom's phone, so it was fairly light usage. I gave my iphone 6s plus that I used for a year to my dad. it's on the latest ios update and runs perfectly fine too.
I replaced the battery. It was still horrendously slow. I have a 4.7 inch 6S. Only a year newer. Hardware is not that much better. And it ran circles around the 6 Plus. The 6 Plus put me off large phones and high screen resolutions on phones. The 6 Plus was the second worst smartphone I've owned. The HTC TyTN II (aka ATT Tilt) is #1. That thing was complete trash. It was so slow it basically wasn't usable as a smartphone. Apparently HTC never bothered to get drivers for the Radeon GPU it used. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_TyTN_II
So no matter what Apple or alterego claimed. The 6/6P had some design defects. On top of that the 4.7" model always outperformed the Plus models. Same hardware but half the pixels. However, I think the iPhone 6S will be remembered as the pinnacle of contemporary smartphones. Kinda like the Moto Razr of the previous phones. It has very few faults and if could've cheaply upgraded to the 128GB version I would have. But It's stupid expensive even in 2019 ($275-$325). OEMs will need to come out with some "revolutionary" jump to boost upgrade cycles, in my opinion.
Yep. And it explains why Apple was able to get away with selling almost identical phones that unfortunately had some annoying tradeoffs for two more generations after the 6S. As I recall the RAZR was around for a really long time too, retained its price, had subsequent versions with some annoying tradeoffs, and continued to sell very well even when other phones had surpassed it in hardware, and even continued to sell during the early days of the smartphone era. I still have fond memories of my RAZR. It was a sleek phone with perfect ergonomics and design. It was the best flip phone I ever owned. I actually know someone who was still using a RAZR until just recently.