I used to struggle with talking about new technology I acquired, what and how much I should say about it. I didn’t want to seem to be bragging, and I was always very aware of how fortunate I was was to be privileged so I could have the new technology at all. My thinking has changed a lot over the years, not about how fortunate I am, but, rather, that I have every right to talk about my life just as anyone else does. I’ve become hyper-aware of how short life is, and I don’t intend to waste time second-guessing myself.
This all first came up when I got my iPhone 5c in 2013, my first brand new iPhone (my previous two were hand-me-ups from Nigel). I was also pretty sure that the 5c was my first new phone of any kind since 2005.
I had that phone for nearly four years, up until Nigel got me the iPhone 6 in 2017. That phone was a major step up for me—twice the storage space as my 5c (from 16GB to 32GB), which mattered because I was always running out of space on my 5c, something Nigel was well aware of, and part of his motivator.
Nigel bought an iPhone 6 for himself some months earlier, and after about a year the battery died, a flaw that the 6 was notorious for, and bought himself an 8 not long after I got my new phone. He chose that one specifically because it was the last model with an actual home button (starting with the 9, the button was a virtual one on the glass screen). I still have that phone, and it’s still connected to what was his phone number (now mine), but I may not necessarily keep either.
My own iPhone 6’s battery died some months after Nigel did, and I kind of panicked. I felt that I desperately needed a phone with my own number on, but I was planning to upgrade to the new iPhone because it could use dual SIMs, meaning I could have both phone numbers on one handset. I don’t remember why I hadn’t bought one already (maybe they weren’t available yet), so I actually considered buying a cheap Android phone to tide me over. Instead, I bought an iPhone 7, the cheapest new phone that was still available.
The 7 was a reliable and good phone since 2020, but it wasn’t much advanced from my 6, except that it used fingerprint technology to unlock the phone and to use some Apps that might otherwise demand a password to use. It had the same 32GB storage space as the 6 had—and I was running out of space until I decided to buy additional iCloud space from Apple (which is actually pretty cheap—especially by Apple standards…).
My specific motivator to get a new phone now was that my mother-in-law asked me if I had an old smartphone she could have so that she could use the Covid Tracer App to scan the QR code, which I also talked about yesterday. The stars having aligned, I ordered the new phone—eventually. It still took me weeks to do.
Originally I dithered between the cheaper iPhone 12, then the 13, and the 13 Pro. I finally chose the latter because it was the top of the line, but cheaper than the 13 Pro Max, which is physically bigger. I didn’t feel I needed the Pro Max because the screen of the Pro was already bigger than my 7’s (as shown in the photo at the bottom of this post). I wanted the Pro mostly for the cameras, the best yet in an iPhone, and better than the regular 13’s. My hope is that by getting the top of the line now, I should be able to use the phone for several years. We’ll see.
So far, I really like the phone, but it’s taken some getting used to. It uses facial recognition to unlock the phone, and at first it had trouble recognising me if I was wearing reading glasses. It now seldom has any trouble, but sometimes I need to move my head a bit, and that works. It can’t recognise me if I’m wearing sunglasses or a face mask (both of which makes sense), so in those cases I can use my unlock code instead (useful when I’m outside a shop and needing to scan the Covid Tracer QR code before I enter (especially because I have to continue to wear my mask once inside).
The way it operates is also different, mainly because it uses the newest version of iOS, and it’s different from what I was using, not the least because my old phone had the home button, which has been gone for years. I’ll adapt.
I haven’t had much chance to use it to take photos yet, apart from the selfie with yesterday’s post—something I had to flip manually before posting to the blog because the new phone was set-up to take front camera (on the screen side) photos backwards, like a mirror, and I had to Google how to fix that.
And that’s my new phone story, based on everything that’s come before. I’ve once again been fortunate to be able to upgrade my phone, and I like it. The only honest thing to do, I think, was to acknowledge both.
In this photo (taken with my elderly iPad), it's pretty obvious that the screen on the iPhone 13 Pro (left) is significantly larger than the on my old iPhone 7 (right), despite the phone itself not being much bigger physically. They did that by, among other things, removing the home button (in the black bar at the bottom of the 7's screen), and by introducing the infamous "notch" at the top for the camera and other stuff, all of which had been in the big black part at the top of the 7. Because my lock screen photo had to be scaled up to fill the depth of the new screen, it was cropped on the sides for the 13. The photo up top is of the partially unboxed 13 Pro, taken with my 7.
No comments:
Post a Comment