Earlier this week, Apple began a clearance sale on the iPhone SE, its nearly three-year-old, 4-inch smartphone modeled after the iPhone 5S, at a $100 discount. It was the second round of recent sales after an initial batch sold out the previous weekend. And like any budget-adverse tech journalist with an impulse buying compulsion, I felt this was the appropriate moment to hop on the backup phone bandwagon. So I bought one. (Unfortunately, it sold out quick, again.)
I’ve always appreciated the classic 5S design, with its overtly rounded corners and its sturdy, not-so-delicate dimensions. It never felt like it really required a case, and its smaller screen and more comfortable, one-handed use is something I’ve thought far too much about as I’ve ferried around an iPhone X and now an XS over the past year and a half. Plus, it’s got a headphone jack.
I purchased a space grey model, with 32GB of storage, purely because I want to pop my nano SIM into it on nights and weekends when I don’t want the full, 5.8-inch iPhone XS screen taunting me to open Instagram and Twitter two dozen times in an any given hour. I plan to keep Spotify, Google Maps, and maybe a few reading, podcasting, and news apps on it, but nothing else. No Slack, no Twitter, no Instagram… none of that. I want the phone to function mostly as a phone, instead of as the always half-open window into a digital life I’d rather leave behind when I shut my laptop down every evening.
More broadly, I’m trying to figure out if the problem is mostly me, or mostly my device and the apps I use. (Or equal amounts of both.) Because no matter how well-meaning Apple and Google’s approaches to mindfulness can seem, both companies profit in one way or another from your continued and never-ending smartphone use, be it through ads on a Google Search window or the persistent, nagging feeling that you might as well upgrade to the newest iPhone for fear of being left behind.
The inspiration here is not a novel one. Since renders of the original Light Phone hit Kickstarter way back in 2015, the minimalist phone movement has cycled through various stages of nostalgia for the pre-smartphone era, when flip phones reigned supreme and the BlackBerry was about as featured a device as you could buy.
The most recent collective yearning to dial back our complex relationship with technology was around the new Palm phone, a tiny 3.3-inch phone that piggybacks off your Verizon number. Almost everyone I’ve talked to about the device seems to agree that they’d buy it in a heartbeat if it were widely available beyond Verizon (and perhaps a little cheaper than its current $349.99 price). The immense interest in the device was yet another sign that the minimalist phone movement is here to stay.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/26/18197785/apple-iphone-se-screen-time-digital-wellbeing-smartphone-addiction
https://adstoppi.com/blog/the-iphone-se-is-the-best-minimalist-phone-right-nowMore blog here
Comments
Post a Comment