I have had a horrible realisation. I don’t need a new iPhone. But it’s worse than that. I don’t need a new phone of any sort. If I was rocking a Samsung, or Pixel or any smart phone released in the last four or five years, as long as I could replace the battery … I wouldn’t need to upgrade.
This is an awful, shameful thing to know about yourself, but I had been creeping up on awareness for a while now.
A simple battery replacement on his iPhone 6S Plus is all this columnist needs.
The eye-watering price tag for the latest fondle slabs from the blessed fruit company did surely hurry me along to revelation, but it was an instance of calculated generosity that pushed me over.
I replaced the battery on my old iPhone 6S Plus a week ago. With nearly 750 charging cycles on the clock it was, as the iMinion from the Genius Bar told me, “about to be consumed”. They sounded both horrified and impressed by that. Apparently not many batteries survive in the wild long enough to be “consumed”.
Mine had been gradually losing its grip on the world and it wasn’t unusual to run that bad boy down to a near zero charge by mid morning. But the iPhone maker is running a discounted battery replacement program for older models until the end of the year and 39 bucks got me a new one full of fresh apple juice.
It’s like having a new phone.
Minus the lazy two grand I’d have to shell out for my preferred model.
And here’s where we open the Book of Revelations.
I’ve realised that most of what I do on the phone is relatively passive consumption. I read. A lot. And I listen to music, audiobooks and podcasts.
The functional apps I open most frequently are my banking, fitness and various transport applications. None of them are massively processor-intensive operations.
I use the camera a lot, but even though it’s now obsolete, it remains a pretty good camera. Tim Cook once assured me that it was the 'best camera Apple has ever made'. I did not doubt him.
Just as I don’t doubt that the tech on a two- or three-year-old Pixel or Galaxy would seem magical to anybody 10 years ago.
So if my phone works really well — and it does with that new battery, thanks Tim! — and I don’t need to run a space program or fight a small cyberwar with Russia, which I don’t, yet, why would I drop two grand on a new handset?
I don’t deny they’re beautiful and science fiction marvels of imagination, design and hard engineering.
But this old phone of mine, like a loyal hound, has done me great service. I love it. And I cannot see a case for sending it to the old phone farm just yet.
I’ve changed, man. I don’t even know me anymore.
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