It’s going on three months with the iPhone X now, and I had a realization over the weekend. Namely, I’m too stuck into the features of the iPhone X to comfortably give it up for the SE. I like having the AMOLED screen and no bezels, and I like having the top of the line camera. It’s still just a little too big to be a little too big, and the display of the SE doesn’t feel too small for anything but Kindle reading, but it’s like my old NGS boss said all those years ago: at the end of the day, you don’t want two phones, you want one phone. I suppose I should just be grateful that my employer hasn’t gone down the road that most of the rest of this Valley has: not only do they not provide a phone, they don’t even compensate you for the business use of your personal phone. So I may as well milk this while I can.
Thing is, too, now that the Kindle app has been updated, there’s more text on the screen of the iPhone X than there is on my actual Kindle Paperwhite. Which is still the preferred device for shutdown night and plane travel and the like, but especially when I can use white text on a black AMOLED display, there’s no great drop-off in functionality using the iPhone X as reading material instead. Which is great for those early morning bus commutes (and how grateful am I that I can commute to and from work, however slowly, without resorting to Caltrain now?) or anytime I’m left with time to kill and no desire to bleed my battery out refreshing RSS and the Twitter accounts I should really kill.
Of course, the flip side to the Kindle and its app is that you’re pot-committed to Amazon. Which is the way of things. Platform lock-in is the entirety of the Silly Con Valley business model these days. By way of making up the difference, I’m trying to do my best to get away from Amazon for buying atoms. Bits, I can reluctantly live with, just because I don’t want to keep accumulating things in the house – but actual physical stuff? One, I don’t need that much more of it, and two, I’d rather obtain it by patronizing an actual brick and mortar business. I came to it too late to be a proper New Year’s resolution, but maybe that’s the goal for after my birthday.
Because the problem is, Amazon has sort of become Google for stuff. Because the web and search engines aren’t particularly good at actually digging through shitposts and scam sites and the detritus of an unregulated environment, it’s just easier to go with The Everything Store. It’s not only Amazon, either; if you try to buy a new cap from the SEC Store or the San Francisco Giants store either one, you’ll just find Fanatics.com as the backbone for both of them. And ironically, if you actually want that New Era 5950 Low Profile cap, you’ll find more options there than you will on New Era’s own shopping site. The easiest thing in the world is to just open Amazon, search for whatever thing you want, and check the box to filter for “Prime eligible”.
And yet…two day shipping for any old thing? Is it really better to spend the fuel and the cardboard to send one pack of razor blades than to just walk into CVS? Especially when, more and more, it seems like Amazon’s employment model is “Wal-Mart, but less generous”? Is it possible to add Amazon into the list of avoidables? I can mostly get through life without Google…except I need that burner number in Google Voice, and everyone uses YouTube to distribute video. I could divest myself of Amazon…except the Kindle basically has the e-book market by the nuts. I’m shut of Facebook…except for Instagram as my main social media outlet and WhatsApp for international cross-platform communication since everyone else uses it. (Seriously, look at the likes of Path or Peach or app.net or Diaspora or micro.blog if you want to see the prospects for wooing people into a second social media outlet.) And to be shut of these other things, I have to go all in…with Apple. Who at least deals in cash on the barrelhead for goods and services and doesn’t make their money whoring out your personal data…for now.
So for the time being, I’m gonna sit on the SE just in case a trip abroad appears out of nowhere in 2018 or something goes seriously pear-shaped at work, but I suspect it’s not going to see a lot of use other than to make sure it stays updated. But if a newer, better SE drops, it might be hard to resist. And if an X-Minus drops…that’s happening. Somehow.