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My life through my phones

Decision To Leave

After 6 years, I’m finally going to retire my iPhone 7. It’s still about as good as it was the day I got it, except the battery lasts shorter than the average Youtube video. There probably aren’t many people still using fingerprint scanning on their phones to use OMNY on the NYC subway. I’ll no longer be special.

I’m not proud to admit that I opted for an iPhone 12, because there’s a podcast episode of me that was recorded sometime in the last two years where I went on a rant against Apple, vowing never to buy their products again. It happened after yet another key on my butterfly keyboard (the 2017 MacBook lineup seems to be the equivalent of the 2000 NBA draft class) fell off, like teeth in a mouth infected with periodontitis. Not only did the so-called Genius Bar attendant tell me I would need to pay $500+ to replace the whole keyboard, but he even lectured me on how I’d already gotten 4ish years out of this laptop and after a certain point, customers need to take responsibility for taking care of their things. Mind you, this is the infamously crappy butterfly keyboard that was so infamously crappy that Apple had to issue an extended warranty (which I’d just missed out on). I’m really no stickler for service. People who leave bad Yelp reviews because of subpar service are divas. Is the food good, yes or no? But I kind of caused a scene at that Apple Store, and that night on the podcast, I called Tim Apple a “cunt-faced motherfucker.”

But hey, an iPhone 12 for the same cost as replacing my battery is practically stealing from Apple, right? I’ll get back at them another way, one of these days. Anyway, this all made me think of all the cell phones I’ve used in my life. A late adopter, I didn’t have one until I started college. We had a family cell phone that I’d occasionally use when I went out with my friends in high school, but that was still a rare occurrence.

They say you never forget your first. And until the end of my days, this LG CG225 will always be my favourite phone (I thought I still had it laying around somewhere, but maybe not). Sometime during college freshman orientation, I went down to the big Providence mall to the Cingular store, which was what AT&T was momentarily known as back then for some reason. This little thing’s text ringtone—or lack thereof—would haunt and torment me for the next three years. I’d wait for its chirp all day and night, and sometimes it’d come, only for me to find out it wasn’t a reply from the cute girl in my class whom I’d decided to fall in love with for a month, only to soon forget why afterwards. After a depressing 21^st birthday, I ended up throwing this device against the brick wall of the international relations department. Poor thing fell in the snow and my friends tried to retrieve it, but I told them to leave it behind. The next morning, I scrambled out of bed with the dim hopes that the phone was still there. Even if it was, surely it was destroyed? No, despite having its back casing torn off, the tough little fucker still worked. It served me well until the end of the year. Imagine today’s smartphones withstanding that kind of trauma. Sorry, little guy.

I don’t even know if this Nokia 1110 was the phone I had in St. Petersburg. I just typed in “Nokia 90s phone” and this image looked close enough. Russia had invaded Georgia less than a year ago, but people were still kind of optimistic. Or maybe I was just being delusional because I’d always wanted to go to Russia. In a kind of semi-preparation, I’d started taking Russian classes as a sophomore, and now, I was actually there. It was my first time in Europe, too. Every young person probably has a summer where everything just clicks, and that was then for me. Heading into my last year of college and filled with regrets that I’d wasted almost all of time, I needed to know new people and new experiences were still out there. There’s a reason St. Petersburg is one of my favourite cities and I feel lucky to have been able to spend time there before we decided to loathe Russia again. Not me, though. I love Russia and Russians.

This LG KS360 was a weird phone, which was fitting because senior year was a weird year. Memorable, but still weird, with everybody both mentally checked out yet also desperate to make the most out of the final year of the best years of their lives (or something like that). This phone was decent enough, except it couldn’t really make calls because the sound didn’t carry well. But it had a cool slide-out keyboard (Samsung should bring this back once they master the clamshell smartphone), so I would write long texts instead. It was definitely the most unique phone I’ve ever used. Short-lived but indelible, just like senior year.

The Samsung Galaxy S2 was my first smartphone, and I used it during the two years I spent in Seoul between college and law school. The technological leap could be read as an apt metaphor for my maturation leap in that time, when moving back in with my parents let me shed the effects of having been in the four-year rat race of college. It was during this time that I first began to write seriously, got into a serious relationship, reconnected with my parents after realizing I was wrong to have wanted to figuratively (and literally?) run away from them via college. This was an amazing phone and I probably could’ve used it for a decade if I didn’t have to leave it behind as I returned to the U.S. for law school. 

The HTC One V was the worst phone I’ve ever used: small, laggy, and disproportionately heavy because it was metallic. It wasn’t as if law school was the worst time in my life, so the analogy doesn’t quite work. No, I would’ve had to have used a phone that was fine, functional, and forgettable. This was the first phone I ever used dating apps on, so there’s that. I would lose it in a non-violent mugging on a Friday after Thanksgiving, in broad daylight, as I made my way to the school library from my apartment in West Philly. I gladly handed it over. That guy did me a favour.

Now that I had a morally justifiable reason to splurge a bit, I went for a top device in the Galaxy S3. Oddly enough, it was way worse than the S2, mainly due to its battery. It not only couldn’t hold a decent charge after just a year, but unless I inserted the charging cable just right, it also wouldn’t charge at all. This phone was with me as I finally entered full adult life with a 9-5 job, income taxes, learning to cook, going on dates at wine bars… The most vivid memory I’ll always associate with this phone is me huddled over it as it tenuously clung to its charging cable in my windowless law clerk office in Trenton. Our computers only allowed us 30 minutes a day of browsing anything that might be deemed fun, so how else was I going to do my daily Redditing?

The iPhone 7 was my work phone given to me by the big law firm that had been my ticket to NYC. I chose to also use it as my personal phone because I didn’t want to carry two devices or pay a phone bill. Why not give the dark side a try as well, after all these years of using Android? When the firm fired me after almost 3 years for basically being too much of a slacker, I had no ill feelings at all. They’d way overpaid me anyway. Plus, I’d gotten a free phone out of them too. And I’d keep using it long afterward, to multiple next jobs. In one of those jobs, I’d get fired again, only to be re-hired by the same employer in a mea culpa a few months later, which I accepted but only as part-time and WFH (see, I was doing it before it was cool). But I never did end up working back there because that COVID thing happened just a couple of weeks before the re-first day. The next couple of years would be full of free time, because of either full-time or partial unemployment. For the first time since those two years in Korea, I could write (and read) as much as I wanted. This was also the phone that I got into countless Twitter wars in during the heyday of Plan A, circa 2017 to 2021.

And now, my iPhone 12 will soon arrive. For all my anti-Apple sentiment, I confess that the cunt-faced motherfucker’s company does make a great phone. It will probably last me at least another 6 years. I have to wonder how much my life will change in that time.