iPhone Is About Like an Average Fifteen-Year-Old

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

Even though I am retired, I am always at work on multiple projects - usually involving writing - and I feel like I am on a schedule with deadlines that I have to meet.  Two days ago I had an unusually large pile of work waiting to be accomplished when I suddenly discovered that my iPhone was having problems.  A few months earlier it had quit connecting with a cord charger and I had to go out and buy an electronic charger that the phone laid on top of in order to charge.  Two days ago that suddenly quit, leaving me with no way to charge my phone.  (The problem was with the phone, not the charging device.)

I wouldn't have let that throw me except that I have been trying to get an electrician to come to my house for several months, and he had promised faithfully that it would happen last week - so I could not be without a phone just in case he actually did call to set up a visit.  (He never did.). It took three trips across town and the better part of an entire day to finally decide that I had to get a new phone - and then to get that phone bought, set-up, and learn enough basics to where I could operate it.  The work that I had scheduled for that day never got accomplished.

iPhone is now out with version 13, but I was able to trade my relatively new (less than two-years-old) SE for a new iPhone 12.  (None of that jargon means anything to me, I just needed a phone, and that trade-in was the cheapest option.)

Yesterday all of the problems set in, and I got my son in Kansas City on the phone (somehow) and he patiently walked me through my many questions and concerns.  In a few weeks I will have the intricacies of the new machine down to the point where I will know how to make calls regardless of the obstacles that the phone decides to throw into my path.  I hope.

Personal phones are, of course, a leash, and to remind myself of that reality I carry mine at the end of a lanyard around my neck.  Its weight is always tugging at my neck attempting to force me to bow down to the magnificence of the iPhone.

This morning Alexa told me that iPhone debuted on this day in 2007, so I looked it up and found this blurb:

After months of rumors and speculation, Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone on Jan. 9, 2007. The device, which didn't actually go on sale until June, started at $499 for a 4GB model, $599 for the 8GB version (with a two-year contract).

It wasn't the first cellphone - even I had one before that, but it quickly became the one everyone wanted and it set the standard for all of the other companies.  Today they all take pictures, maintain schedules, arrange meetings, play music, movies, and games, set cooking timers, and even act as flashlights in emergencies.

And they are all on contracts that never end and fold nicely into your monthly phone bills.

When I was growing up you paid five or ten dollars for a phone, took it home and plugged it in, and it lasted a lifetime.   You paid the phone company for the service.  Today the price of a phone is just one aspect of a litany of expenses that all seem to wash together:  phone, insurance, phone service, wi-fi, cable, special subscriptions - all of that and the government can use our cellphones to track our exact locations whenever it wants.

I can remember Lily Tomlin poking fun at the monopolistic high-handedness of Ma Bell (AT&T), but now those times are beginning to seem like the good old days!

Today is iPhone's birthday - its 15th - and as many parents will attest, a fifteen-year-old can be a real pain-in-the-ass.  From my experience at least, iPhone is certainly meeting that standard.