Sometimes, in idle moments, I think about what it would be like if I were actually able to retire someday. A small walkable village somewhere in the west of Ireland, or even on the coast somewhere between Pacifica and Aptos, maybe. And I think that I would need the AppleTV for things like BritBox and PBS and Disney+, and my Kindle for reading, and maybe a HomePod that i could ask for music from Apple Music or SomaFM or maybe even RTE, depending…
And then I start to think about what I would need from the phone in that situation. Music? Well, a good bit of the local stuff I rely on could be on an SD card converted to MP3, and Twitter is dead and half my friends are barely on social media in any way that can’t be managed by group chat, and…could I get by with a modern Nokia flip phone? And my hand strays toward the order button until I realize I don’t have a personal SIM to put in it any more, let alone an excuse for it when the iPhone is work phone, personal phone and shutdown night phone all in one. And then it occurs to me to think about how many phones I went through in that span between late 2000 and mid-2007, and how many more I wanted and never got hold of, and how stale the world of phones is, and…
Did the iPhone actually ruin everything?
I’ve made much of the fact that the phone crossed the finish line ten years ago. Yes, nicer screens, yes better camera and faster networks, but what new features have descended on phones since NFC payment and different biometric unlock? (This is a good spot to point out that the Moto X not only supported swipe or PIN login, but NFC-based login where you could tag a sticker on your desk or a little clip on your pocket to unlock the device, something I haven’t seen anyone else ever adopt…and lest we forget it took 7 years for Apple to mostly approximate the feature set of that original Moto X.) The iPhone 13 mini which I intend to ride to its death does everything a little better than the original iPhone SE that it eventually replaced as my personal phone, but what does it do that the SE couldn’t (albeit slower or fuzzier, I grant you)? And what did the SE do that the iPhone 4S couldn’t? That 4S, free as a warranty fix in the spring of 2012, had Siri and shot HD video and had GPS and was one-handable.
I guess MagSafe? Maybe? MagSafe isn’t bad, especially for a battery booster, but then, I used to carry a SonyEricsson Z520 that went four days between charges. I also used to carry an iPod alongside it, but now, in a world where I don’t get out much and don’t work remotely…would it be enough to say “hey Siri, play the St Patrick’s Day Essentials playlist on Apple Music” and let the fabric thing on the desk do the job? If I lived in a place where the pubs all had their own trad – or the carefully-curated Pandora stream at Trials – maybe?
In the end, the biggest thing that made the old tools viable is that they only had to be a phone, or a Kindle, or an audio player. The new phone has to be everything, but it also has to be a lifeline in a world where all of the Castro Street Dining Consortium have moved away, and Vox is a news site instead of an LiveJournal successor, and the only way to digest news is second hand through foreign podcasts. Technological solutions to social problems don’t exist, more’s the pity.
It would feel nice to think you could still get by with a flip phone, though.