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It has been brought to my attention that some of you might have devices older than 22 months. Imagine my horror at the discovery of such atrocious, nay, selfish, conduct. For my part, the last phone I replaced was over 80 months old. (Horrors!) It was perfectly fine until a vital button stopped working, and the cost of repair approached the cost of replacement. Of course, I committed another crime against bean counters by paying cash for my replacement. This I immediately regretted because dozens of new fancy features on the phone caused it to launch sirens during holy Mass, refusing to mute or turn off the way the old model would have. (Alerted to these problems, I wasted an hour or more learning how to configure my new marvel of technology to function the way my dilapidated 80+ month old device had functioned out of the box. It turned out that shipping the glisteny thing with the power button configured to switch between ringtones was not a winner with this consumer. But I digress.)
The new phone does nothing of value to me that the old phone did not. And given my awareness of how many new features of the phone are of use to intelligence communities antagonistic to myself and my interests (that would be all of them, it appears), I turned around and popped a few dollars for a flip phone.
The 22 months "stuff" comes from CNBC:
Heather Mitchell, 69, retired and living in Tucson, Arizona, is content with her phone even though it is old by smartphone standards. “My Samsung Galaxy A71 is six-years-old. It’s hanging in there surprisingly well for a jalopy. I’ve had issues with it, and still do, but they are minor,” said Mitchell. “I love Samsung phones, but can not afford a new one right now. A new phone would be a luxury.” The average American now holds onto their smartphone for 29 months, according to a recent survey by Reviews.org, and that cycle is getting longer. The average was around 22 months in 2016. While squeezing as much life out of your device as possible may save money in the short run, especially amid widespread fears about the strength of the consumer and job market, it might cost the economy in the long run, especially when device hoarding occurs at the level of corporations.
Apparently, my approach of using a device until it becomes a brick by way of natural causes is outré. Imagine my embarrassment. Buy a phone, Heather! Tim Cook needs a new pair of shoes!!!
Heather is simply not fulfilling the role that CNBC and Breitbart and Samsung and Apple and the rest have in mind for her. ("Bad, bad Heather!!") Sure, her phone places and receives calls, texts, and plays messages, but it is practically useless without this season's Apple AI features. Or so I'm told.
With Trump's 50-year mortgage scam, we are reminded that economic policy involves the next scheme to increase our debt ratios beyond all reason or sustainability. It's a problem that just a few months ago he was promising to solve in a useful fashion. But now that he has new friends, he has changed sides. I can only imagine Trump's outrage at my paying cash for my devices, cheating those sterling folks at the finance companies out of roast giblets at the holiday table, and hurting his economic numbers. Maybe I'll go break Bastiat's window to make up for it.
If you suspected that your fellow man was scheming to suck every last dollar out of you by hook or by crook, then you might not be entirely wrong.
This holiday season, poke those rogue intelligence communities in the eye. Buy a flip phone and drop that smart thing in a Faraday sack to hide in the back of your sock drawer. See how long it takes before you actually "need" it.
And a raucous bah humbug to you and yours this holiday season.
Discussion (69)
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I've never had a smart phone. My current flip phone is only a few years old, but the one before that lasted about a decade, maybe. I'm pretty sure I was using that one before 2007. The one before that? 1994, perhaps? I guess I am not doing my part for the economy.
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I like my iphone 13 mini. It does pretty much everything I want, and I can turn off most of what I don't. I used a credit card to pay for it, then paid of the credit card at the end of the month. I like the small size and shape, that fits in a front pocket, but apple has no plans to make phones this small in the future, so I pretty much intend to keep this one until it dies. I find making calls, storing notes, sending & receiving texts, mapping functions, weather reporting, and checking to see if places are open using the Web to all be useful. OnStar Guardian is also useful. SPAM texts from friendly young women who want to get to know me and drain all my financial accounts are less than useful, and Apple requires you to do the hokey - pokey to block unwanted texts.
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We just replaced ours after 3-1/2 years, mainly because the batteries were not holding a charge for very long. Just got the Samsung model closest to the ones we already had, so not much change.
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When Mrs. Tabby and I most recently got new phones (July, 2021), we had quite a bit of difficulty getting across to the young salesperson that we did not want a phone service plan that "entitled" us to new phones every year or two. We wanted to buy the phones outright and then have a phone service plan that provided talk, text, and a relatively small amount of data per month at the lowest recurring monthly fee, as we were likely to hold these phones for a long time. The salesperson just couldn't believe that we wouldn't want the latest and greatest new phone on a frequent basis.
Mrs. Tabby has never broken a phone, and I've broken only one in 17+ years of carrying one. So, we aren't motivated toward new phones by breakage. When the batteries on our current phones degrade to the point they don't hold a charge for long then we might consider replacements.
I was (uncharacteristically for me) a relatively early adopter of a smartphone, as I found it useful when I traveled on business. Despite (or maybe because of) working in a technology business, I am usually a late-adopter of new technologies in my personal life. I am now retired, so I don't use a phone all that much. We are finding though that dealing with certain businesses and other organizations almost requires the use of the organization's "app" on a smartphone.
These days when I read some of the articles about new phones and their new features, I find myself thinking either, "I can't imagine an aspect of my life that would be easier because of that feature," or "that feature would be too intrusive into my life, and I'd insist on disabling the feature."
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They try to wear me down with all of the places one has to turn off the voice recognition/command/surveillance features. The AI-in-hardware stuff being pushed today is a flat out show stopper. All the voice data is transmitted by the device and any data not in my physical possession is fair game according to even the domestic intelligence community. (The IC has avoided having to defend this policy in court so far, to my best knowledge.) Microsoft made it plain decades ago that the vendor and the user had competing interests and the vendor could in no way be expected to provide their customer user transparency into how they and their information were being exploited. The user is often the product even when they are a paying customer.
I suspected that Ricochet members would tend to defy the customer behavior management ploys of our corporate overlords, I am happy to be confirmed.
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