Oh, smart phones. What have you done to us?
I used to have a slight tendency to be one of those self-righteous Luddites who resisted new technologies in defense of the old. I had a flip phone in high school, and I kept this flip phone well into my 20s. For my tunes, I even used a cheap “gift” mp3 player that my mom bought me for Christmas, and dang that thing lasted forever. But in my mid-20s, several friends told me about Project Fi, Google’s attempt to enter the cell phone service market, and it was pretty dang cheap and didn’t involve all those hugely restrictive contracts, so I decided to give it a go.
My first smart phone was a Nexus 5X, and I paid around $330 for it. Recognizing the downsides to my Luddite ways, I decided this time to go big or go home. The Nexus 5X hadn’t been out for very long at all, so I bought it, and for one of the first times in my life was at the top of the technology curve.
Of course, this wouldn’t last, but I hardly noticed. I guess having a fingerprint scanner was rare at the time, and I really enjoyed being able to login with that, but I otherwise didn’t use the phone for very much. Maps pretty much revolutionized my life, but that was about it. The rest of it was convenient, at least when it wasn’t being distracting.
There had been a time when smug commercials touted that “there’s an app for that!” concerning pretty much everything, and this often appealed to the egos of anti-Luddites who thought they were superior for adopting new technologies and believing that anything and everything was the “wave of the future”. Forget that “app” was just a fancy marketing term for “program”, and most apps actually sucked, you can’t expect smug, tech-savvy idiots to understand that, and idiots there were. Microsoft did the stupid of designing Windows 8 in tablet form because they thought that cell phones and tablets were the future of everything. Then they had to massively correct course with Windows 8.1 and Windows 10. I interviewed about 5 years ago with a guy who was convinced that smart phones would become people’s wallets and ID cards in the very near future. I even knew a guy who made fun of me for having so few apps on my phone, but having a ton of apps on his phone didn’t prevent him from being dirt broke, so I guess those weren’t so helpful after all, huh? Yeah, you like that, huh?
[in a very real sense, if technology isn’t making you money, saving you money, or saving you time, it can only rely on the merits of aesthetics or fun to have any claim to actually improving your life]
So my smart phone lasted a long time, but then I took it jogging in 90 degree heat a few times. It started acting very weird, would shut off at odd times. Then one day, it just stopped turning on. It turns out there was a known motherboard issue that caused this. I had thought the phone was great, so I was sad.
Worst of all, when my Nexus died, I felt desperately vulnerable. Funny how that happens: not too long ago, nobody had these, and things seemed to work out pretty well. I suspect they’re still great for calling emergency services, but what else would be truly pressing? The Pixel 2 had been out, and the Pixel 3 was well on its way, but these were running around $600. Holy crap! I was NOT going to go out and drop that much money on a cell phone. But only so many phones worked with the Project Fi sim card. I got lucky. I found an original Pixel in stock at a store in Aurora, drove there, old flip phone in pocket in case of emergency, and paid another $330 for a good phone. Popped that sim card in, and I was back in business.
What happened? $300 to $600, from one version to the next? Look, I don’t know. Maybe the materials were astronomically better quality. But probably not. Probably, the Pixel product team realized they could increase sales by nearly doubling the price because humans are idiots and think that something is inherently better quality simply because it costs a lot. They’re not always wrong, but they’re not always right, and there are plenty of companies that try to snooker people using this tactic of charging exorbitant prices. After all, with iPhones and Galaxies selling for around $1,000 at the time, how was Google going to compete without their own massively-overpriced, piece-of-shit phone for technophiles to show off? You have to win those people over, and, strangely enough, you don’t win them over by undercutting the price of the competition by a large margin: you shoot for just being a little cheaper, which is hilarious, because while $800 is cheaper than $1,000, you’re already paying a lot more than you need for a cell phone, so the $200 you save by going cheaper pales compared to the fact that you’re in the market for such an expensive phone in the first place. The iPhone taught us that people actually enjoy spending huge amounts of money for luxury products. It’s not much of a luxury product if you don’t massively over pay for it, right?
I’m being mean. I’m sort of sorry and sort of not.
Speaking of iPhones, almost every iPhone user I have ever known has experienced the dreaded cracked screen. After over a decade, you’d think Apple would have have fixed this by now, but it’s like a right of passage, a sign of high prestige, to have experienced this. I guess it’s like saying your Maserati goes through tires too quickly. “By the way…I have a Maserati“.
Now, I exaggerate in almost all of my blog posts, because it’s fun and it helps get my point across, but in complete honesty, for most of my friends, their iPhone is just a thing, it’s just their cell phone, and most try to keep them as long as they can. Credit where credit is due. Still, it’s mind-blowing to me that some people will pay $1,200 for a new cell phone. I just spent about that much on a boat-load of OEM Toyota parts for my car, important parts that won’t need to be changed for another 10-15 years once I’ve installed them. That’s how you spend $1,200, in my opinion, not to “upgrade” your phone for one or two tiny new features.
Truth is, there isn’t much new that smart phones can do. When they first came out they were revolutionary, but now people are used to them. As always, they can be great tools, or they can be great distractions. Technology can be a double-edged sword like that. Apple somewhat recently came out with their fancy camera that can take good pictures at night. This might have been handy during my first backpacking trip this year, when an almost full moon just absolutely lit up the valley I was staying in. But let’s be honest, I didn’t necessarily need a good picture of that. Those cameras are mostly for people trying to prove how awesome they are, which is just a side-effect of the social media world we live in. Before long, cameras like that will be cheap and common and you can get a few good pictures of moonlight for memories’ sake, but mostly the only people buying them now are serious photographers and people who like spending $1,200 on their vanity. But perhaps I’m not being fair. I guess you could potentially be spending $60,000 on a sports car, in which case I’d vote for the iPhone instead, hands down. Regardless, vanity is expensive.
A good cell phone can call emergency services, send text messages, use navigation, and take pictures. Turns out a lot of modern flip phones can do this as well. Don’t think I haven’t considered it. I guess email is handy and social media is handy, too. If I’m playing a video game and get stuck, I can grab my smart phone, use the browser, and look up a solution, but I also find dumb things to look up throughout the day, and it’s sort of OCD and annoying. But my Pixel is still going strong, so I hope it lasts a lot longer. And lucky for me, Google Fi (as it’s now called) has greater compatibility with other phones, one of which runs about $200. So if I ever really need a new one in a hurry, that’s probably the best option. Screw that $600 $800 Pixel 4 crap. They have some other options, too.
It’s not that expensive phones are evil. It’s just that people get really sold on them when they don’t add significantly more value than their cheaper counterparts. And that’s why it’s mind-blowing to me how much people spend on smart phones. Does it make calls and texts? Does it have good navigation? Can I take pictures and check my email? If so, then I’m good. I just don’t get it. Yeah, the Pixel has a slightly different navigation than the Nexus did. But that’s just the developers trying to make it seem like a different phone, when it really isn’t.
Don’t get snookered. There are better things to spend your money on, your life being one of them. That’s all.