Because of a piece of news, the iPhone 6 Plus returned to the public eye.
On February 15, Apple updated its list of antique and obsolete products, adding the iPhone 6 Plus to the list of antique products because it has been more than 5 years since its suspension. The iPhone 6 Plus was released in September 2014 and discontinued in September 2016. As soon as this news came out, many netizens said "full of memories" and "goodbye 6 Plus".
The iPhone 6 Plus has done a lot of wonders. According to Wikipedia's mobile phone sales charts, the iPhone 6 series is Apple's longest-selling smartphone series ever, with a cumulative sales of 220 million units. The second-ranked iPhone 12 series, which sold more than 100 million yuan in the 7 months of listing, has become the most popular iPhone model in recent years, but there is still a big gap between this number and the iPhone 6 series. In addition, the iPhone 6 Plus has also appeared in the iOS praise list many times, which is enough to see the market's high love for it.
In the face of the ever-changing iteration cycle of technological digital products, even if the sales volume and design are brilliant, it is inevitable to be replaced. Apple no longer supports the software update of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, but for some fruit fans, the iPhone 6 Plus has accompanied their youth, until now, some people are still iPhone 6 Plus nail households, "as long as there is no card, there is no need to change." As for the other part of the population, the character of the iPhone 6 Plus has changed from "the only" to "one" and continues to exist in their lives.
A
As early as last November, foreign media learned from an internal apple document that the iPhone 6 Plus would be listed by Apple as a retro (antique) product.
What is an antique product? According to the official website, Apple stipulates that products that stop selling for more than 5 years but less than 7 years will be called antique products, and products that stop selling for more than 7 years will be called obsolete products.
According to the official introduction, antique products can continue to get hardware support from Apple's official after-sales or authorized service providers, although the official is no longer sold, but the maintenance service has not stopped, Apple direct stores and Apple authorized service providers will continue to provide maintenance services for antique products for up to 7 years, but depending on the availability of parts, if you can not adjust to the right accessories, you can not provide users with repairs.
Taking the iPhone 6 Plus as an example, after the inclusion of antique products, Apple will no longer produce its repair parts, but the inventory can still be maintained for several years, and the iPhone 6 Plus repair service will be completely stopped only when the inventory is used up; for obsolete products, Apple will stop all hardware services, and at the same time, service providers cannot order parts for outdated products.
With the launch of iOS 13 in 2019, Apple began to no longer support software updates for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, but Apple will also release a new iOS 12 software update to fix bugs that existed in the old system.
The iPhone 4, iPhone 5, and iPhone 5C, which were discontinued earlier than the iPhone 6 Plus, have all been listed as obsolete products, and the previous 2015 MacBook (12 inches) have also been on Apple's obsolete product list.
B
The iPhone 6 series is regarded by many fruit fans as one of Apple's most classic iPhones, such as the first support for Apple Pay, the first large-screen mobile phone and other features are opened, and its design has been used for many years, until the full-screen iPhone X appeared, Apple has undergone major changes in appearance.
The iPhone 6 Plus has now been re-focused by Apple as an antique product list, resonating with many people on the Internet, some using college memories as an adjective, others calling it "divine machine". In July 2021, I knew the previous question "What is the experience of still using the iPhone 6 as the main machine in 2021?" The highest praise replied, "Never feel that the latest mobile phone is any different from the 6, the basic functions can be everyone." ”
After 95 Xie Fang still remembers that before going to college in 2015, her parents took her to the only apple official flagship store in the county to choose a mobile phone, when the iPhone 6 Plus was the latest model, her parents finally did not cut the price, bought at the official offer price of 6888 yuan, Xie Fang has had the first mobile phone in her life since then.
This use is 6 years, this mobile phone carries all of Xie Fang's college memories. Until Xie Fang graduated from the second year of work, the Spring Festival home, love K song father euphemistically said that apple mobile phone recording effect is the best, just when Apple issued a new machine, she gave the old apple to her father, she bought the latest iPhone 12.
Another iPhone 6 Plus "nail household" is Lu Xiaomin, who also belongs to the post-95 generation, and is still in use until now. Lu Xiaomin bought it 3 years after the series came out, and the price was 2,000 yuan lower than the year of sale. In the past few years, due to improper operation, the number of times this mobile phone has been repaired in Lu Xiaomin's hands cannot be counted with one hand, and I don't know how many times it has fallen.
In the most brutal one, Lu Xiaomin slammed his mobile phone on the door frame of the dormitory, and the black screen shut down on the spot. Lu Xiaomin suspected that the inner screen was broken and took it to Guangzhou Tianhe Computer City for repair. Worried that the maintenance price is too high, Lu Xiaomin was once mentally prepared for a new mobile phone, but he did not expect that because this mobile phone is too old, the internal screen maintenance is not expensive, and only 200 yuan was used to solve the problem.
The mobile phone has been used for several years, Lu Xiaomin also encountered the problem of battery not being durable, she must bring a charging treasure when she goes out, and later she found a cousin who is proficient in digital to help replace the battery, but the memory of 64G is still a problem, which makes Lu Xiaomin dare not download too many APP, and it is impossible to play games.
A friend advised her to change her phone, full of sarcastic tone, "Who still uses the iPhone 6 Plus now?" "Lu Xiaomin doesn't want to change, but he doesn't have money to change." She is still in graduate school, no savings, buy a new mobile phone is embarrassed to ask her parents, plus she is a loyal fruit powder, if you change the new mobile phone will definitely buy Apple, but in view of the iPhone 12/13 is still relatively expensive, she decided to wait and see two more years to wait and see the price reduction and then buy, "I hope 6 Plus can stick to that time."
People like Lu Xiaomin who are still using the iPhone 6 Plus as the main machine are a minority, and more people are playing it as a functional backup machine.
In June 2020, retired aunt Chen Xiaohong spent hundreds of yuan on the second-hand platform to buy a 90% new iPhone 6 Plus. She is in order to do the platform task of the wool, did not insert the phone card, only downloaded vibrato, WeChat and other APP, every day is to brush the video to do the task, only one year she earned 500 yuan from various applications, has long returned the cost.
C
Even in the face of incomplete official accessories and the software system can not be upgraded to the latest version, the iPhone 6 plus still has a market. Some people continue to publish a series of posts seeking to buy the iPhone 6 on second-hand platforms, the purpose is not limited to taking photos, beautiful pictures, singing, grabbing red envelopes and so on. Some netizens on Weibo did not understand why they would buy the iPhone 6 Plus in 2021, and one of the replies they got was that "the camera effect of the iPhone 6 is better than 11", and some people consulted the difference between 6P and 6sP, and enthusiastic netizens directly threw out the two parameter comparison charts.
The reason why iPhone 6 Plus is so popular, there are second-hand Apple buyers to explain, one is that apple system is stable, iPhone 6 Plus rarely appears in Caton, many people have long been accustomed to Apple's operation interface; second, in terms of hardware, iPhone 6 Plus is equipped with an A8 processor, as well as 1G running memory, and now a variety of operations are still smooth.
Where there is demand, there is a market. Apple officially stopped selling, followed by hardware services, and from sales to maintenance, it made a blank market for third-party repair manufacturers.
On the e-commerce platform, the current search for "iPhone 6 Plus" will jump out of thousands of results, and the price of the product ranges from 300 to 800 yuan. On a store page that sells the iPhone 6 series, the monthly sales of products show more than 200 pieces; the services around the iPhone antique products are also accompanied by a steady stream of purchase demand in the market, such as screens, battery replacement, motherboard fault repairs, etc., and third-party manufacturers can be found online and offline.
According to the quotation table provided by a mobile phone repair business, the iPhone 6 Plus battery replacement costs 150 yuan, the internal screen is about 200 yuan, and the price of expanding the capacity of 128G is 350 yuan. The merchant told alphabet that basically no one came to expand the capacity, and most of the customers came to replace the battery.
However, the lack of official endorsement of the third-party repair market is inevitably chaotic. Some users complained that after repairing the screen in a store, "typing failed many times, fingerprints could not be used" and "only domestic bad screens"; the situation of purchasing the whole machine was not optimistic, and some people reported that "it took a month, the mobile phone screen fell off" and "several phone cards could not be used"...
At this time, iPhone 6 Plus "nail households" such as Lu Xiaomin have a particularly strong desire to change the machine.