iPhone 12 mini in light green for Meg

Updating & transferring information to migrate from
2016 iPhone SE to a 2020 iPhone 12 mini in light green

Meg ordered up an $858 unlocked iPhone 12 mini 128 GB directly from Apple & copied all info from SE to the mini, added the Mint SIM card & loves the new light green colored iPhone

Meg was utilizing a 2016 iPhone SE 64GB for more than 5 years, and I replaced the internal battery twice using my professionally device repair skills & a few tools from iFixIt. Updating the OG SE with the latest iOS made it run the battery down even faster despite another newer battery cell. Out of support range from Apple & beyond its design life of 36 months, Meg was saying the SE was slowing down & having other glitchy issues with the home button & finger print Touch ID sensor. 

It was my advice to get a newer phone that compelled Meg to finally upgrade. I do not mean to inspire needless purchases of eco-toxic electronics, but we both use our smartphones daily & get a lot of value out of them. Nearly all of my twitter, YouTube & blogger content videos & photos are captured with my iPhone SE 2020 (looks like an iPhone 8 with the CPU of the iPhone 11. I do not care about having the latest & greatest phone personally. At $399 base & $449 with a 128 GB unlocked flavor, the iPhone SE 2020 the best value in iPhone by giving you the most tech per $ in an official Apple product. 

We use iMac's at home, also recently updated to the last Intel model before Apple's colorful M1 refresh, via Costco at a significant discount since the outgoing models were officially discontinues. Apple also discontinued making the iPhone 12 mini recently, citing significantly higher demand for the standard iPhone 12. I personally like smaller square edge iPhones & used a 2017 iPhone SE 128 GB until my sister purchased the SE2 for my 37th birthday as a very generous present. While I find the iPhone 12 interesting, the lack of home button & type C charging port & headphone jack, these issues annoy me in terms of design philosophy. Wireless charging & mmWave 5G in the iPhone 12 are features I find interesting along with the latest fasted wifi & bluetooth standards that work well for wifi calls over out Comcast Technicolor wifi router. 

The iPhone 12 contains a swipe interface thats different than the home button centric design that existed in most iPhones until the iPhone X. Apple now also uses Samsung OLED technology in the iPhone 12 mini that can dim to much lower levels, which I really like in low indoor night time lighting so as to not photon bombard the eyes & retinal & brain with melatonin suppression & cortisol release before bed time. Any light can be a stimulant as exposure to light reduces melatonin levels in the blood & increases circulating levels of the stress hormone cortisol. 

Science of sleep & circadian rhythm largely elucidated via the research & published finding & content produced by Director of Sleep Medicine at Harvard, Dr. Charles A Czeisler who shows that even holding a lit candle at arms length in a dark room produces enough light (a few lumens) to reduce circulating blood melatonin levels & thereby promote wakefulness or sleep disorders largely related to over illumination or light pollution, increasingly common worldwide since the introduction of artificial lighting technology nearly 100 years ago. 

Today LED lighting energy efficient & enabling brighter battery electric flashlights & vehicle headlights of daylight 5000K + color & micro-nano solar electric photo-voltaic panel in MPPT controller & lead acid storage battery electrical systems experiencing global diffusion in developing countries where a lack of formal or centralized electrical grids or power plants makes home solar energy systems the most practical way to have electricity at home for light, appliances, cooking, cleaning, etc.

Solar PV or photovoltaic panels are the function inverse of light emitting diodes. In the PV light from the sun strikes a PN junction created in the panel (band-gap) forcing electrons from the P layer to holes in the N layer. These electrons are diverted as voltage & current into electrical circuits to perform work like charging a smartphone or operating a wifi modem or TV or computer or appliance in solar energy systems. Solar PV only makes electricity flow when the sun shrinking the PV panels, so these systems often employ a large energy storage battery system, an 8D large format 12V SLI battery designed for heavy duty deep cycle industrial use in Class 8 trucks. 

People in many developing countries put up 100-1000 watts of solar PV on the roof of their home & then run the cables from the panels to a charge controller & large format batteries & often an sine wave inverter to power electrical loads in their homes. I know about this because I sell these batteries to people who patronize the Batteries + I work at, having traveled to America. They put the huge truck batteries that I sell them into shipping containers with other consumer goods. It costs several thousand $ to send a full container from a port in Washington State to their local port in Kenya or Ghana or Ethiopia etc & they tell me it takes about 3 months from the time the container ships to when they can start unloading it to retail their stuff. They export iPhones & Samsung Android phones & wifi modems & TV's & bicycles & sometimes even cars in these containers that are send by ship to different countries around the world. They tell me that "No stores like the Batteries + I work at are available locally where they are sending the goods" 

Distributed energy generation with rooftop solar a relatively simple thing to setup once you have the fundamental basics of electricity, fuses & breakers, electrical connections, wiring, voltage, current, amperage, wattage, loads etc understood. 

If uneducated people in developing countries can setup roof top solar PV, that also explains why many van life people in developed countries mount solar panels to the roofs of their portable homes for energy. They tell me they use propane for hot water & air heating in the cooler & colder season & mostly run fans & lights & compact electronics & a small fridge using the rooftop solar into storage batteries & an integrated inverter charger controller setup. Lots of DIY YouTube content about this if you want to setup something like this on a boat for an solar electric trawling motor system or RV solar energy setup. 

Just lookup "How to install solar panels into a boat or RF" in Google or Youtube. Charing smartphones one the main things that people do with low power solar energy systems since those phones form their internet access, banking & accounting, bill pay & more platforms including peer to peer payments & more. Many Youtubers operator their channel with just a smartphone as the camera! Whole full length movies have been captured using iPhones! The iPhone 12 mini seems like a good one & Meg says the camera better in all ways than the camera on her 16 SE that still works. I plan to keep my iPhone SE2 for a few more years, until iPhone 14 or beyond!