My iPhone is the Least Important Part of My Apple Gear

 

My iPhone is the Least Important Part of My Apple Gear

This “smart phones are dying” song is silly

Anthony Lawrence (Pcunix)

APPLE

A broken iphone on a pillow. Adobe Firefly image by author
A broken iphone on a pillow. Adobe Firefly image by author

Have you read all the angst about the death of iPhones? About the boring prospects of the iPhone 15 due this fall? About production troubles due to shortages or problems in China? Or how about those stories saying that the Pixel or the Nothing phone are just as good or better than the iPhone?

I don’t care about any of that. I joked about it recently, saying that Apple could make a Phoneless iPhone to avoid imminent insignificance.

This is my more serious post on the Death of Smart Phones.

Not my main sidekick

I hardly ever use my phone other than for CarPlay and taking a very few pictures. Unless it's too far away, I will answer calls and make calls on my iPad. Yes, the phone needs to exist, but I seldom hold it in my hand to use it.

My phone could be a box with minimal functions: making calls, taking pictures, and CarPlay. I don’t need any other apps on my phone. I seldom need the screen either. Ideally, the screen would be some magic yet to be invented that would let me see and control with my eyes and gestures, like Vision Pro but without the headset. Contact lenses perhaps, powered by our salty tears.

Or a direct brain interface, as Elon wanted — maybe still wants, but he’s been thwarted on that for now.

That stuff is coming. Even I, 75 years of age, might see it before I die. Might not be able to afford it after our dear leaders cut the legs off my Social Security, but I might get to gawk at it and maybe point back here with a “See? I told you so!”

Smart phones aren’t dying

If you or I lose our phone or run over it with our car as our oldest daughter did a few years ago, we’ll be replacing it. If we are already Apple Ecosystem Entrenched, we will be replacing it with an iPhone, because Nothing and anything else will never tear us away.

But otherwise, sure, phones are pretty much fungible, even if you do frequently grasp it in your clammy hands while hypnotized by Tac-Tic or whatever it is the Cool Folk are doing today. One is as good as another in the same pricing tier and the low end is cheap enough that a lot of us could easily afford to sport Apple and a Droid, though I personally don’t have enough pockets for that.

What your phone *looks* like certainly will change. We already have very crappy not so smart glasses that could be driven by something the size of an iPod case in your pocket. The first successful iteration of such a device will be clunkier, I’m sure, but almost certainly before I shuffle off a lot of people will have swapped their phones for something like that.

Not a thin rectangular thingy anymore, but it will still be a smart phone, feeding you the same stuff, though perhaps in 3D. Maybe it will be good enough and cheap enough to kill off TV screens, freeing up space in our living rooms, bedrooms, and even some bathrooms. Yet fundamentally, it will still be a smart phone.

So I’m not dumping my Apple stock, even though it dropped hard recently. Nor am I buying a Nothing or anything else, because I’m Entrenched and I speak Latin better than I speak Android. I’m not buying an iPhone 15 because my 14 Pro is good for a number of years to come.

And I’m not going to fret over dying smart phones.

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