Using the iPhone 8 in 2021 - worth it? (Review) By 91Tech

The iPhone 8 and 8 plus came out right before the iPhone 10 in 2017 and served as the transitional options for those not quite ready to move on from the home button, and they fit that role perfectly, hitting the mark with great specs a terrific camera and that classic iPhone design just modernized a bit: hey how's it going, I'm josh from 91 sec and the iPhone 8 and 8 plus are getting up there in age. So today, let's talk about how they hold up in 2021 and whether they could even still be worth buying the iPhone, 8 and 8 plus are basically the same phone. Just the plus is bigger, at least that's probably what most people think, and they're not far off, but the plus does have an extra gigabyte of ram, an extra telephoto camera lens and, more importantly, a much, much larger battery. The smaller iPhone 8's biggest flaw from launch to now has always been the lackluster battery life and given the phone is over 3 years old, if it's being used even moderately, there's a good chance. The battery has degraded over time and may not even last you the day. Of course, the 8 plus battery could have degraded also, but because it is bigger, assuming it's at a decent health, you should be okay.

I wanted to start with the battery life of these phones because I think in 2021, just like any older smartphone, that's going to be the main point of contention for most users, everything else about the iPhone 8 and 8 plus hold up very well besides the fact that they do have that older design, albeit intentionally so if you have the iPhone, 8 or 8 plus right now, you don't need to upgrade yet, especially if you have v8 plus, I wouldn't blame you for considering upgrading from the smaller iPhone 8, at least and again, that's really because of the battery life, although the camera is a decent bit behind as well as for what you should upgrade to, I will have my full iPhone buying guide in the description below, but, in short, I'd recommend the iPhone 11 or 12. The 10r is a decent upgrade, but practically speaking, it's only one tier above the iPhone 8, whereas the 11 is a significant improvement in both battery and camera, and then the 12 brings a much better display. The iPhone SC might seem tempting, especially if you want to keep the home button, but I don't think there's much point in upgrading to it from the iPhone 8 as they kind of are really the same phone. The SC has the same camera just improved on the software side, so photos do look actually quite a bit better, but not enough to make it worth. Upgrading and the iPhone 11 or 12 is a massive improvement in the camera department, and the battery life again could have the same issues if you're on the 8 plus you're good to go in my eyes.

The phone is the best large-sized home button, iPhone ever even to this day and there's a good chance that will never change. If you want a better display, the iPhone, 12 or 12 pro will be good options. If you really just feel like an upgraded camera, I'd go for the iPhone 11 or higher, but again assuming your battery life is doing fine. I'd say by no means do you have to jump from this phone yet so check battery health. If you're curious, you can go to settings battery health and there you'll see a percentage of what capacity is remaining once you're getting to the low 80s or 80 percent is.

You might want to start considering a battery replacement through apple and, if you're under 80, you might start seeing issues such as slow-downs or unexpected shutdowns. I've been mentioning this a lot in my videos lately on older phones as it's a very, very common issue and a simple battery replacement for only 50 bucks through Apple can breathe new life into your device. It's crazy, but on the flip side of all this, perhaps you're on an even older iPhone like the 6s or the original SC, and you're thinking about upgrading to the iPhone 8 or 8 plus. Maybe you want to keep that home button. You need something cheap and so the iPhone 8 and 8 plus could make sense.

You're, probably not going to be able to find them new anymore. If you want an iPhone brand new with the home button, you'll need to go for the 400 iPhone SE. If you want the iPhone 8 or 8, plus you'll likely have to go to the used market, I'm not a big fan of recommending people buy used, just because you don't always know what you're getting it's very easy to find a listing, that's misleading or dishonest. But if you're willing to take that risk and understand the battery life might not be amazing. If it's been well-used.

Turning to ebay. com, we can find the smaller iPhone 8 for around or under 200 us dollars and the 8 plus for more length 250 to 350 us dollars. That's a very wide range of pricing. It really varies, so you're going to need to look around a bit for a deal and the eight plus especially, can be a bit overpriced because apple never directly replaced it. As you know, the iPhone SC only comes in that smaller size, the sweet spot for the plus in my eyes, is around or just over 200.

That might be a little hard to find, but if you can,, I'd, say you're getting a very good deal and the reason for me, the 200 mark is kind of important is because the iPhone 10r really isn't that much more money used, often just over 300, and it has the updated design as well as a better camera. Overall, though, the iPhone 8 and 8 plus hold up very well in 2021, they run the latest version of iOS, and they run it really darn well performing exactly how you'd expect with little to no slowdowns anywhere to be found. They feel fast and practically speaking, they can do basically anything the newest and greatest iPhone 12 Pro can do downloading any app and playing pretty much any game. Besides the battery life and older camera, there are few to no gripes I find with these iPhones, especially the eight plus they really do hold up. So, with the initial answers out of the way here, let's back up a bit and talk about the design of the iPhone 8 and 8, plus the iPhone 8 and 8 plus, might look similar to the iPhone 6 and 6 plus from 3 years earlier, but the phones are much more premium and, in my opinion, kind of perfected that general design, the iPhone 7, was good cleaning up the antenna bands and having a plethora of colors.

The iPhone 8 went to a glass back instead of aluminum, while retaining the aluminum frame and same general. Look the glass back not only looks and feels great, but it also allows for wireless charging, something that was new to the iPhone line in 2017. These phones are fast charging capable and water resistant. So you get a lot of the quality of life features you would get with a flagship iPhone. We also get a good few colors with silver gold and space gray.

I, of course, have the small gold iPhone 8 here and then the plus I've been showing in space gray is actually my mom's and for the record she absolutely loves the phone, although she might actually upgrade at the end of the year for a better camera and yeah. I forgot a color. Well, I didn't forget, but I waited to see it. There's also a limited edition product red model, iPhone 8, which looks absolutely gorgeous and is unfortunately, kind of hard to find. Now what I'm showing here is my iPhone SE, as you probably noticed, but it looks pretty much the same, so I'm definitely a fan of the design with the iPhone 8 and 8 plus, but had they been the only iPhones to drop in 2017? There would have been mass disappointment, but they weren't as the iPhone 10 came out soon after it has a stainless steel frame and a vertically oriented camera setup.

But besides that it looks just like the iPhone 8, at least from the back from the front. It's clear that these are very different phones. The iPhone 8's biggest concession was retaining the older lcd that apple had been using for ages, although it did have the addition of true tones. So it does look good, don't get me wrong. It's retina, which means everything is sharp and clear, and while it isn't nearly the level of the iPhone 10 or better, it's actually equivalent to the iPhone 10r and 11, as those phones also went with LCD screens.

In fact, the iPhone 8 plus actually has a higher resolution and pixel density than both the 10r and 11 bringing 1080p to its 5.5 inch panel. The smaller iPhone 8 will give you 4.7 inches and, of course, what works for your comes down to personal preference. I do really like the pluses size. I do find it a bit large, but the big screen is nice to look at and at the same time, the small iPhone 8 fits my hand perfectly, and I can actually reach all four corners of the screen without readjusting my grip, something lacking on newer phones. Is everyone likes to keep making them bigger? If you consider yourself a small phone enthusiast, the phone you should really be looking at is the iPhone 12 mini as its top of the line and even smaller, physically than the iPhone 8 and newer SE.

Although the actual screen is larger thanks to the lack of home button and the home button, that was a huge selling point for the iPhone 8 line with many people just not ready to give it up yet in favor of the gesture system and face ID with the iPhone 10. , and it's fair that not all want to move on. Although I do want to emphasize that getting used to swiping around from the bottom really doesn't take long at all, and if people gave it a chance, I think they'd be fine with it. That being said, we do have those thick bezels and the home button there with the extremely fast touch ID it works really, really well and as much as I like face ID on my iPhone 12, there's no getting around. How well touch ID does work and with this current world of wearing masks, it's actually a very appealing feature.

The bezels are there, and they're thick with two c's. But honestly, I don't really mind like yeah having thin bezels is nice, and it looks cooler, but all it really does is give you some more screen real estate and if you want a big screen, the iPhone 8 plus has that for you- and I think most actual users probably won't have an issue with it. What you're, much more likely to have an issue with is the battery life, as already mentioned, and I have to talk about it briefly again, because it really is the main flaw with the smaller iPhone 8. Even a healthy battery with moderate usage during the day might have trouble getting you a full day's use. If you're someone who doesn't use your phone too much- or maybe you just don't mind charging it here or there then don't worry about it.

But if it is a concern, I strongly recommend going to the iPhone 11 or the 10r. The 8 plus, on the other hand, is very good from my experience. I actually switched to the 8 plus from my iPhone 10 back in 2018 right before the 10s came out, and I really didn't want to go back. Why? Well, I missed the screen and everything from the 10, but the battery life was so much better. It was insane, and then I got the 10s and sure enough.

I was disappointed with the battery life, so if you've got an 8 plus just make sure the battery health is okay, and you're good to go. Let's talk about the camera. This is always kind of a difficult subject to approach. I'm certainly no photography expert and because phones in general have improved so massively year over year. Particularly there was a big jump with the iPhone 11.

It's kind of difficult to properly talk about how older iPhones hold up but hey. Let's give it a shot. Both phones share an optically stabilized, 12 megapixel wide lens on the rear. This is the camera, you'll be taking most photos with, and it does a good job, especially outdoors with proper lighting. Newer iPhones brought night mode photography which these phones don't have, although notably the iPhone SC also lacks it, despite it only coming out a year ago, but from the iPhone 8.

Anything in lower light conditions tends to look blurry and grainy from shots in the dark outside to basic indoor photos as well, but outside when it's properly lit photos can look terrific and these photos, I'm showing here, are a mix of my own, as well as from my mom as she's used her 8 plus the last couple of years. Video is also very impressive, with 4k 60 recording capabilities more than enough to fulfill your needs. The iPhone 8 can take a really strong photograph and I think, for the vast majority of people, it'll do the job, although if you want to take a lot of darker lit photos, then the iPhone, 11 or better is what you should be looking at and then, of course, the camera department is where the eight plus shines, as it brings a second telephoto camera lens. Along with that main sensor. This gives you the option of two times optical zoom, in ideal conditions.

So you can take photos closer to your subject with little loss in quality. It also allows for portrait mode photos which the smaller iPhone 8 doesn't have. Newer. iPhones no longer need a second camera lens for portrait photos, including the iPhone SC, but how it works with the 8 plus and also the 7 plus, is it uses the two lenses together to kind of guess the distance between the subject and the background and then blur the background, giving it a look similar to what a proper DSLR camera would provide with coca. It can look really really really amazing and over time my mom has managed to capture some just awesome shots with it.

This one, especially of my brother holding Christmas lights, blows me away to be fair, though portrait mode is quite inconsistent sometimes so the best thing to do is take quite a few photos at a time just in case, and you are missing. A few nice features from newer iPhones in the portrait mode, but in the very least we do have it here on the 8 plus the selfie camera on both the iPhone 8 and 8 plus. Is the same being 7 megapixels and taking a pretty decent selfie? No complaints, really it does the job and for zoom or Snapchat or Instagram or whatever the heck it'll be perfectly fine, and so that's the camera. It can be very impressive with good lighting, but in lower light it really does struggle and all photos can look great. Newer.

iPhones are able to take more consistently great photos. So if you want to have a really, really strong smartphone camera, the phones to be looking at is the iPhone 11 and better, as there was a very big jump when they came out. Hardware wise, the iPhone 8 and 8 plus are no slouch having apple's a11, chipset and two gigabytes of ram in the small iPhone 8 and then three gigs in the iPhone 8, plus that extra gig in the plus was to help with the telephoto camera lens and in most situations you shouldn't notice any difference between the two phones when it comes to real life. Use. Both phones feel very fast on iOS 14 and should continue to stay this way for the foreseeable future as they get iOS 15.

At the end of 2021 and they're extremely likely to get iOS 16 in 2022. Past that it does get a bit harder to say, but two more versions of iOS basically guaranteed is a pretty good starting point and the specs here are so strong. I honestly doubt the phones will ever actually feel slow. Of course, assuming the battery health is okay in the last five years, or so Apple has made some huge strides when it comes to providing better performance in their chipsets they're, even making their own computers now with their own processors and mix that with some software optimization, and you have a smooth premium experience that leaves you with the phone that by no means fields its age, even if it might look it thanks to the older design, the iPhone 8 and 8 plus mark the end of an era. Yes, the iPhone SC technically is a worthy successor, but it was meant as a budget phone, whereas the iPhone 8 was a full-on flagship being every bit as powerful as the iPhone 10 just with the old style and display.

You know what a lot of people preferred and still prefer that and that's totally okay, it's nice to see the phones hold up so well in 2021 and while they're not without their flaws, they more than do the job for the vast majority of their users. They can be worth the money if you want to buy. One used just look around for a deal and if you have one right now and don't want to upgrade, don't feel bad, there's still great phones and will continue to be for likely at least another couple years. But with that I think I'm right about done here. Do any of you have the iPhone 8 or 8 plus how's it working for you.

Let me know in the comments down below if you found this video interesting or helpful, maybe hit that like button and consider subscribing for more content. Just like this, you can follow me over on Twitter and Instagram 91, underscore tech, if you'd like to for some reason. Thank you so much for watching I'm josh from 91 tech, and I will see you all next time you.

Source : 91Tech