After years of owning iPod touch models that were only useful near Wi-Fi, any kind of cellular data was a major improvement. 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. 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. There wasn’t any big jump in processor, hardware design, or display density (as with the iPhone 4) or new software features like Siri (on the iPhone 4S). The iPhone 5 isn’t even that notable in the history of the iPhone, offering a marginally taller display from the 3.5-inch panel previous iPhone models had offered. Until then, I subsisted on carrier-subsidized Razr flip phones and inherited, indestructible Nokia candy bars. Not only was it my first iPhone, it was the first phone that I went out and voluntarily spent money on, period. I’ve owned a lot of iPhones in the last 10 years, but the iPhone 5 was the first.
