New iPhones are faster, cooler and crazy-expensive
I was thinking of getting a new cellphone but apparently I’m going to have to take out a second mortgage on the house.
Apple released their new line of iPhones this week, and while they have plenty of new bells and whistles, what really caught my attention was the price: cheapest of the new devices — the cheapest — is $1,029. The most expensive, an iPhone XS Max with a 6.5-inch display and 64 GB of memory, is $1,999. That’s a lot of nines and one rather conspicuously absent two. For a phone.
My first car was less than two grand. The computer I’m typing this column on was less than two grand. My TV was waaaayyyy less than two grand. I’ve never paid two grand for a bike — my one occasionally dumb extravagance — or even a vacation. The down payment on my first house was more than two grand but only because I borrowed money from my parents.
I certainly have never, ever come close to spending that kind of cheddar on my own phone, never mind one for the kids. They’re lucky they don’t get stuck with a tin can, some string and some old keyboard buttons glued to the side.
Which isn’t to say the new iPhones aren’t nice. They are bigger (though my current iPhone 7 barely fits in my pocket as it is). The camera is better (I already have thousands of photos and videos I don’t know what to do with). And the tech guts are supposedly faster (which is cool, I guess).
But even at $2,000, it will inevitably have things that annoy me. My current phone doesn’t have a headphone jack and that was big nuisance until I forked over another $250 to Apple for a solution (the AirPods headphones are, admittedly, amazing). The latest versions get rid of the ‘Home’ button, but not having this would break my brain and leave me all kinds of discombobulated for months.
I would also feel weird carrying around something worth that much money in my pocket. One of Drew’s Laws is that the amount of time it takes to lose / ruin something is inverse to the amount of money spent to acquire it. If I spend more than $50 on a shirt, I will spill mustard on it the first time I wear it, guaranteed. Dollar store tees, meanwhile, stay pristine for generations.
The day I spend $2,000 on an iPhone is the day I drop it in the mall toilet mere moments after buying it, guaranteed.
In reality, I’ll do what I always do when it comes to phones: buy last year’s latest and greatest model, the one everybody was freaking out about just a few months ago but is now apparently so much digital trash.
I’m pretty sure it will fit into the mall toilet just fine.