It’s been three weeks and I haven’t even thought about my SE in that time. Which makes sense, because you really can’t have more than one phone these days and the AirPods Pro make me feel like I have a new angle on the whole ecosystem. Plus having decent battery life is everything, although I have to admit, I’m curious to know whether the RAM issues that finally got fixed in iOS 13.2.2 might have fixed the battery on the SE. But it’s not really worth going upstairs to sort out the drawer I chucked it into.
No, the thought process now is back to the Apple Watch. Because the news that Google is buying Fitbit has made the Charge 3 untenable in future: a vector for the exfiltration of personal health data into an ecosystem and a company that is absolutely not trustworthy of it. And despite the plethora of flaws in Apple these days – manufacturing indentured to China, Cook cozying up to Trump, the complete failure of anything remotely resembling QA in Cupertino – having an Apple Watch to charge every damn night beats shipping your step count, heart rate and sleep cycle to the Beast of Mountain View.
The problem here is that my Series 0 was a colossal bust. I wanted it for the heart rate monitoring, at a time when there wasn’t really a good alternative and I was panicked after what was arguably a panic attack at a time of great stress (and boy was I a wuss about what constituted stress in 2015, in retrospect). And it was slow, almost useless with third party apps, and stopped getting updates, and there’s very little to suggest that the delta with the Charge 3 is worth paying. Or was, anyway, until Google.
But the experience suggests to me that you can’t necessarily expect five years of watch updates. You don’t know when it’s going to get cut off (unlike the iOS ecosystem, where five years sounds right; my iPad mini 2 from Christmas 2013 did not get the 13 update at age six). Looking at the Watch options, the Series 3 is right out; pre-aged two years is a bad investment. So it’ll have to be the Series 5 (or more likely 6).
What gets interesting at this point is that i have thought in the past that an Apple Watch with LTE service would make a fine shutdown night device and alternative to one of those limited-use phones. And it would! But the problem then becomes “how do I add this watch to work” and I don’t know if such a thing is possible. And it’s not time yet for me to pay for my own phone service. (Although I have almost decided that maybe I should get this iPhone from work unlocked in case of spontaneous travel to London at some point. Hell, if Brexit puts the pound on par with the dollar it would be foolish NOT to go.)
Maybe this is going to happen next year. Maybe I’m at risk of laying down close on $2000 for new Apple gear in late 2020. But I’m not gonna lie, having 2FA and temperature on my wrist would be kind of cool again. And maybe the iPhone 9, so-called, would be phone enough. But the only thing I can say for sure is that in retrospect, crunching my SE in the first class seat was the hand of God and I was foolish to spend money to replace it.