Almost two years in, I’ve made my peace with the six inch phone. The iPhone 16 Pro will get most of the good Apple Intelligence stuff in iOS 27, I like having the telephoto camera, the battery life is still mostly manageable, and most importantly, it serves just fine as The One Device. My iPad mini is mostly for Sunday nights in the shed now, to be used for music and radio streaming, and while the iPhone 13 mini is still dearly missed – and has a special case on it so I can plug it into USB-C instead – the fact of the matter is that the rest of the world has long since moved on to Big Phone and there’s nothing to be done about it.
As I approach the two decade mark on this blog, I am struck by how much of that time has been the chase for the One True Thing – the quest to stop having three or four of everything that each do 80% of what I want and have the one thing that does 100%. With the phone, it finally settled on the iPhone 16 Pro. With the pen, it finally settled on the Machine Era brass field pen, retrofitted with a navy-ink Pilot G2 refill. With the watch…well, you can’t expect an Apple Watch to last forever, but the Ultra 2 that I got almost three years ago performs like a champ with no signs of stopping or losing support. I haven’t been able to pare down the raft of blazers, but if I’m not trying to nice it up, my gray American Giant chore coat and the black fleece that goes under it can be mixed and matched for 90% of my workaday outerwear needs (if only I needed outerwear more than four months a year!) and after years of being all over the place, I mostly use only two Yeti tumblers any longer: a 16 oz at work and the Moon Dust 20 oz at home, where the textured handfeel is a reminder that I’m not at work and can unclench for a bit.
It’s remarkable the difference metal makes. Won’t shatter if you drop it, won’t leach microplastics into your testicles, and that 20 oz size is perfect for morning coffee, evening pints, or refilling with Coke Zero from one of the 3/$5 bottles on sale at Safeway right now. The metal watch feels better on my arm. The metal pen is a comforting weight in the hand. Even the Swiss Army tool, souvenir of Switzerland even though I didn’t buy it from there, is gold-toned Alox and has only the three things I ever really need: bottle opener, scissors and box ripper. And when one of the metal lightsabers goes on my belt, for whatever reason, it’s hanging from a simple piece of aluminum that slides over the belt and holds a Covertec wheel in place.
It was probably fifteen years or so ago, after reading William Gibson’s Zero History, that I became fixated on the idea of having things that last. In the case of the mechanical watch and the Machine Era pen, the originals would still be doing fine if I hadn’t lost them through neglect and inattention. (For that matter, so would the first Moon Dust Yeti.) It drives home the point that even when you defeat planned obsolescence, you have to take care of your stuff and be mindful of it and not lose track of it, like the perfect blue Uniqlo casual blazer that I paid $30 for in NYC in 2012 and have since bought half a dozen other blazers trying to replace. I know I probably can’t buy the one phone for the rest of my life, but it would sure be nice to try.
And when you’re done spending money on stuff, you can put it into experiences, whether that means a plane to Kenya or a jug of a new cask mild or a new book of history. Or at the very least, if things start to go south, you already have all the things you need to get by. Of which…