So my work-provided iPhone 6 is now unlocked. I don’t know what made it possible but for whatever reason, I asked for it and they did it and pop goes the weasel, I now have an unlocked phone capable of going abroad.
This changes things.
First off, I don’t need a different phone to be able to go to London and still be able to take good shots. I will probably buy a Three SIM right off the plane and be good to go – no need to buy a notional phone that doesn’t exist yet. I also have an external battery case for it, one that’s over 3000 mAh capacity. Since I won’t be syncing it to the Mac while out of the country, I can just leave the case on it and recharge it through the case with any micro-USB cable, which in turn means that I will almost certainly be just bringing a power brick, the iPhone, and the Kindle as a reading tool on the trip. The test is going to be in Hawaii – I will just take that loadout electronically, nothing else, and see how things go.
Which should be fine, honestly – I took the iPhone and Kindle to Japan for a couple of weeks and there wasn’t a problem. That means one cable and one charger, and no messing with an external battery pack, and I just have one thing to fit in my pocket and be done with it. Which is what I wanted out of a new phone. And really, that’s it, isn’t it? We got LTE in 2012, we got fingerprint readers in 2013, we got ApplePay via NFC and big Android-style phone sizes in 2014. Short of providing us with a one-handed phone again, the only thing left for the iPhone to give us in 2016 is enough battery to make it through the day, and as I’ve said elsewhere, the existence of the Smart Battery Case for the iPhone 6/6S is as much as a tacit admission that battery life has become a problem. On the 6/S Plus, the phone is big enough to hold a battery big enough that all day use is a done deal, and on the 4-inch phone it’s possible that the screen won’t be so big that the battery bleeds out. But that 4.7″ phone is in the sour spot, and the 6S more even than the 6.
But now that’s not going to be a problem. Because nobody does phone contracts anymore, and there’s no need to re-up the phone every 24 months just because that’s the upgrade window. Maybe you’ll want the new phone after two years, but as long as the battery was okay, you could buy an Apple Watch and give your iPhone 5S all the powers the 6S has. So I have a sneaking suspicion that the notional iPhone 7 (which history forecasts should be announced around Labor Day sometime) very well may not have anything that makes it worth replacing a viable iPhone 6.
Amazing what you can accomplish by just unlocking the device and separating phone and service. Welcome to the 21st century, America.