iPhone 14, Two Years Later: Does It Still Hold Up in 2026?
The chip and software have aged well. The notch and charging speed have not. Here is whether the iPhone 14 is still worth buying today.
The iPhone 14 has quietly become one of the more interesting phones in our current lineup to revisit, not because anything dramatic happened to it, but because nothing did — and in a market that moves this fast, "aged uneventfully" is itself worth examining. Two years on, with the iPhone 15 and Apple's newer models sitting above it in the lineup, does the 14 still make sense for anyone, or has it been quietly outclassed by cheaper phones that have caught up?
What Held Up
The core experience — the thing that actually determines whether a two-year-old phone still feels good to use day to day — has aged remarkably well. Apple's A15 Bionic chip, the same silicon (in a slightly upgraded variant) used in the iPhone 13 Pro the year before, remains comfortably fast enough for every mainstream task: multitasking, gaming, photo editing, the works. This is really the core promise of buying an iPhone specifically — Apple's silicon tends to stay relevant for longer than the Android flagship chips it launched alongside, and the 14 is a clean demonstration of that pattern holding up in practice.
iOS updates have continued arriving on schedule, and Apple's multi-year update commitment means the iPhone 14 isn't at any near-term risk of losing security patches or major OS features the way a budget Android phone from the same year likely already has. The camera system — a 12MP main and ultrawide pairing that was never the headline spec even at launch — still produces reliably good photos in most conditions, because Apple's computational photography pipeline (Photonic Engine, introduced with this generation) does a lot of the heavy lifting regardless of the sensor's raw resolution number.
Battery health, two years in, is the area where real-world results vary most by individual usage and charging habits, but Apple's battery health monitoring in Settings gives owners a clear, honest picture of degradation rather than hiding it — a transparency feature that's easy to take for granted until you compare it to manufacturers that don't offer anything equivalent.
What Shows Its Age
The most obvious gap between the iPhone 14 and its own successors is the Dynamic Island — the interactive notch cutout Apple introduced with the iPhone 14 Pro and has now brought to the standard iPhone 15. The regular iPhone 14 kept the older-style notch, which by 2026 standards looks visibly dated next to almost every current flagship, Apple's own included. This is purely cosmetic and doesn't affect functionality, but it's the single most obvious "oh, this is the older model" tell at a glance.
More substantively, the iPhone 14 shipped with a 20W-class charging ceiling that hasn't improved with age, and in a market where competing Android flagships increasingly ship 65W-90W fast charging as standard, that gap has only become more noticeable over the two years since launch — an empty-to-full charge on the 14 takes meaningfully longer than on most of the Android phones in our current lineup. The display, while perfectly good, caps out at 60Hz, a spec that was already becoming a minority position among flagships at launch and is now a clear step behind almost everything else we review, including phones costing considerably less.
How It Compares to What You'd Buy Instead Today
If you're shopping today with the iPhone 14's original launch budget in mind, you're now choosing between a two-year-old flagship with a dated notch and slow charging, or a current-generation phone in a similar price bracket that likely offers a higher refresh-rate display and meaningfully faster charging, even if its long-term chip performance may not match Apple's silicon longevity. That's a genuinely close call that depends heavily on how much you personally value display smoothness and charging speed versus Apple's ecosystem integration and update longevity.
Compared to buying a current iPhone 15 instead, the calculation is more straightforward: the 15 addresses essentially every complaint above — Dynamic Island, faster charging (though still not class-leading against Android), and A17 Bionic performance headroom the 14 doesn't have. If your budget allows for the newer model and you're committed to iOS regardless, there's little reason to specifically seek out a 14 today unless the price difference is substantial.
Our Take, Two Years Later
The iPhone 14 makes the case for Apple's whole "buy it once, use it for years" pitch about as well as any phone we've revisited. It hasn't become bad — the core experience of using it day to day remains genuinely solid, and the chip performance and software support are non-issues even now. What's happened instead is that the rest of the market moved past it on the features Apple was already behind on at launch: charging speed and refresh rate. If you already own one, there's no urgent reason to upgrade unless the notch and 60Hz screen genuinely bother you day to day. If you're shopping now, it's a reasonable budget pick only if the price gap to a current model is large enough to justify accepting specs that were already dated two years ago.
The Resale and Trade-In Angle
One thing that consistently favors the iPhone 14, even two years out, is resale value — iPhones as a category hold their value significantly better over time than most Android flagships, and the 14 is no exception. If you're the kind of buyer who trades in every year or two rather than running a phone into the ground, that resale strength meaningfully changes the real cost-of-ownership math in the 14's favor, even accounting for its aging charging speed and display refresh rate. An equivalent two-year-old Android flagship, even a well-regarded one, will typically have depreciated considerably further on the used market over the same period, which is worth factoring in if you're weighing "buy used iPhone 14" against "buy a similarly priced newer Android phone" rather than comparing purely on day-one specs.
This is also part of why buying a used or refurbished iPhone 14 today, rather than new, is arguably the most sensible way to own one at this point — the depreciation curve on Apple devices tends to flatten out noticeably a year or two after a newer model launches, which is roughly where the 14 sits right now relative to the 15 and Apple's more recent releases.