Part 0 - Why.jpg
Whenever I think about buying some new piece of electronics I play a game of compromise in my head. I weigh up pros and cons, and more often than not I reluctantly stick with what I already have. It’s not about brand, availability or money. It’s about features. Consumer products are no longer evolving. In fact, in many ways they’re going backwards.
The first smartphone I ever owned was a Samsung Galaxy S5. It ticked all the boxes. It appeared reasonably sturdy, had a removable battery, headphone jack and Micro SD card slot. Most importantly it was cheap. This was in 2017, at this stage the phone had already been on the market for around three years and was starting to appear in clearance sections and discount bins.
I hadn’t wanted to get a new phone at all, I was long accustomed to my friends calling me a Luddite for holding onto my so called “feature phone”. But I was living in a new city and needed an easy way of navigating my surroundings. The fact I could use it to run Tinder was an added bonus.
For a while everything was good. I replaced battery once when It started showing signs of serious wear and changed out a series of incrementally larger SD cards. Both of which required less than a minute of delicate fingernail-prying. In my infinite wisdom during the endless lockdowns of 2020 I decided it was time to buy a new phone. After hours spent reading countless advertisements disguised as blogs I decided that the Google Pixel 3 seemed like the least shit option.
The Google Pixel 3 ticked most of the boxes I needed it to. Like the Galaxy before it, the Pixel was also reaching the end of its production run so retailers were starting to liquidate their stock of the device. There was a problem however. No headphone jack. Google, In their infinite wisdom and quest to not do evil things decided that wired headphones were collectively holding humanity back and axed the feature. ”Fine, whatever” I reasoned to myself “I’ll Duct tape the adapter to my headphones and move on with my life. I’ll be laughing all the way to the bank with my unlocked bootloader and wireless charging.”
It wasn’t until I’d already bought the phone that I realized I was also giving up the luxury to expand my storage as well. The sixty-four Gigabytes of storage soldered to the motherboard is all you get. I had simply assumed that a Micro SD card slot was implicit in the design. I’m already inserting one chip (the SIM) in there, what’s another between friends?
The word from the sewing circle is that one day soon phones might not have any ports at all. This isn’t as preposterous as it might seem. Qi (Wireless) charging has been a staple of flagship phones for years. Bluetooth for many more years before that. With the advent of eSIM the only thing you might need to put into your new phone is your Google or iCloud account details.
I’ve repeated this same situation countless times with almost every piece of consumer electronics I own. For every new feature that I want I must also give up something else. Pay the pound of flesh. “Do I want a new TV that has a better panel, better resolution but tracks everything I do?”. “Do I want to play this videogame but infect my computer with malware?”. And finally - the reason that im writing this - “Do I really want a new laptop?”