Is it worth migrating to an iPhone 17 from an iPhone 13 mini

If you are using 13 mini 17 gives a good battery, Apple Intelligence, good audio quality good display ratio, so you can happily upgrade to iPhone 17

I am a power iPhone user and a technologist and extremely happy and up-to-date with state of the art AI on my iPhone 13 mini which is my only primary phone. In fact even my backup phone which I haven’t unboxed yet is an iPhone 13 mini. You don’t need Apple Intelligence or at least I don’t because I am a ChatGPT plus subscriber so I have state-of-the-art constantly updated AI access with zero latency because it’s iPhone 13 and not iPhone 17. Besides ChatGPT plus keeps on adding these apps and other connectors that you can integrate with your ChatGPT account such a Gmail, Google calendar, expedia.com, Spotify etc. etc. and very regularly they keep on adding a whole bunch of additional apps and connectors inside the ChatGPT settings that you can connect to ChatGPT and thus use ChatGPT as a single conversion tool/app. Unless you actually use the display which means you are cited it makes no difference about whatever display resolution iPhone 17 may have over iPhone 13, it does not matter. It’s totally unrealistic to expect anywhere close to “decent“ sound quality from any handheld device beat iPhone 17 or iPhone 13 because handheld device speakers such as on smart phones are expected to be pretty low quality just because of the fun factor and the fact that it’s not the primary goal to serve audio files. Not to mention things like taste, and hearing are extremely subjective so someone who may totally notice a difference in audio quality from the phone speakers between iPhone 13 and 17, while the next person if I no difference or in fact my might even notice an opposite difference as an iPhone 13 audio to be better than a iPhone 7. Last but not the least it really sucks that all the phones available from Apple after the minis are so big and bulky and I love absolutely love the fun factor of the iPhone 13 mini. The difference in the camera pixel account and all that is really theoretical because of a human brain can’t barely tell the difference and for all advanced camera usage that blind people like me use be for AI or capturing photographs or whatever, there is zero negative impact using the iPhone 13 mini camera. Finally regarding the battery drain, any GPS app Running on your phone actively when your phone is not connected to power is gonna suck your battery. You really have to ask yourself if it’s worth blowing tons of extra cash and dealing with that heavier bigger form factor is worth it just for a little bit of extra battery life when using GPS without connected to a power outlet. Personally for me, absolutely no and I am a heavy GPS user. also know whether it be an iPhone 17 or iPhone 13, if you’re using GPS actively using a GPS app when not connected to power in addition using a Bluetooth earpiece or headset, Bluetooth drives significant additional battery drain on the phone. My personal recommendation would be to examine your GPS usage behaviors and find and adopt means to optimize your phone battery.

Iphone 13 mini has 2406 while Iphone 17 has 3692 MAH capacity. You may get updates for another couple of years. Also, buying a powerbank can reduce your anxiety a bit.

Using all kinds of app using different browsers and basically pretty much using my iPhone in all kinds of scenarios, I have never ever () had any issues at all with lag between my gestures on the screen and voiceover speech. That’s a no issue. As of now there is a severe limitation on what on device AI can do on smart phones that you do not need the Internet. And this is simply because all that on device AI does is installed an AI model directly on the phone memory and that is what whatever on device AI you are using access to give you some AI capability. Needless to say even third-party cloud based AI models such as MISTRALNLLAMA ((some version of it) required 1.2 TB of space just to install the model. This is an impossible amount of memory on smart phones. They are much smaller sized cloud based AI models but even they require at least a few hundred gigabytes of memory where they need to be installed. All of this is certainly true for third-party AI models. For example Apple Intelligence is an on device AI model but it’s a first party AI model and I’m pretty sure it also occupies some amount of memory on the phone although I don’t know how much. However it’s been very featured under rich so far and all the demonstrations of composing a letter or a paragraph in different style etc. can be effortlessly done inside the ChatGPT plus app and then put simple flex copied and pasted in whichever other app you might want that paste it. Updates, these guys I think are just talking about security updates and while privacy in security have a value and everybody seems to be talking about it, sure as possible for my phone security to be broken into there’s like anything is possible in the universe. Is it probable? No it’s not probable and statistically insignificant and personally I don’t make any choices based on improbabilities. just because 4 to 6 or more down the line my phone which is an iPhone 13 mini starts to get fewer updates from Apple has insignificant correlation to the performance of my phone. kiss point with all the recent propaganda and singular idea that Windows 10 will no longer be supported and then Microsoft is gonna stop supporting any office suites prior to 2020 or 2021 is also extremely misleading. I have a couple of computers and one of them is on Windows 10 and has a lifetime license of office 2019 professional. Using some basic precautions I have immunized this window stand computer from the doom and gloom news about Windows 10 not being supported and so on and expected to be putting beautifully along with all my third-party apps installed on it for years to come until I accidentally (heaven forbid) knock a glass of water on the keyboard or something. I fully expect to continue getting all firmware and GUI front end updates to all my many third-party apps on my iPhone 13 mini and have them perform beautifully for years to come.

The main selling point of new iPhones is camera, camera, camera! Better zoom, better night vision, all that. The only reason that matters for us is for apps such as Seeing AI. We aren't taking vacation photos and things like that constantly, so the camera factor is less important.
Battery is absolutely important, but that can be offset by having a portable battery pack. Something which will generally last you years anyway, at a fraction of the cost.
One of the selling points of the 17 lineup, at least among the Pro models, is the new thermal cooling system. Coming from a 15 Pro, it makes a huge bloody difference. But if you aren't regularly taxing your 13 Mini and if it doesn't get too warm, I wouldn't bother. Keep in mind that the warmer your phone is, the longer it is, the more that can potentially degrade your battery.
Apple Intelligence was already mentioned here, so I'm not going to get into that since you've already said you really don't care about it.
In terms of the voiceover jamming issue you mentioned, that's almost certainly a software issue, not a hardware issue, and one that a phone upgrade isn't likely to fix.
I would try testing voiceover on a call in other scenarios if you can, just to see if the behavior is a constant. If it is, perhaps make a dedicated post here. I myself have not experienced this issue.

I am using an SE 3 running iOS 18.7. I have an older SE 2 running iOS 26.1. Both devices are dated, but both meet my needs. Granted the SE 3 does better on battery than the SE2, but my point is your 13 mini should last you a few more years so long as you take care of it. My SE 3 is essentially your device inside the housing of an iPhone 8. 🤷