sometime in november, i thought i had enough of my mini. “I need a 120Hz OLED screen,” I said. “The camera button,” I said.

so I bought an iPhone 16 Pro. and life was good.

but not for long.

mistaps on the screen while trying to use apps.

playing music errantly while pulling my phone out of my hip pack.

putting my phone into my hip pack. or anything, really.

the keyboard, now powered by Apple Intelligence™, producing hilariously made-up words evey.thrd.wrdb.i.Type. 1

unexplicable slowness.

intense frustration while trying to shoot a photo of a bird in a zoo behind a fence because the world’s most advanced camera software does not let you do manual focus. 2

list goes on.

my usage pattern hasn’t changed much since my last foray into the mini-verse. this phone is still a e-mail packin’, bird-identifyin’, language-teachin’ supercomputer. (i even browse the web on it less now that i use android-powered e-readers for this purpose.)

so imagine me discovering that my phone is dead before night-time despite spending most of its life in my hip pack. every. other. night. i don’t even have slack on my phone! 3

what i didn’t realize until a workout session wherein i threw my Apple Watch Ultra II a small distance out of anger is that my phone wasn’t the only source of my unending fountain frustrations with technology writ large!

i quietly seethed in anger every time i used apple pay on my watch and had to very gently rotate my wrist to avoid picking the wrong card by accident.

visions of gathering all of my computer wares, packing them into boxes, organizing them neatly by their inspired “GOD, SHIT, FUCKS” per minute and lauching them as high into the sky as possible with a trebuchet were summoned every time i invoked siri by simply flexing my wrist backwards a bit (despite wearing the watch upside down to have the corwn face away from my hand!).

i’m not an angry person. something had to be done.

after spending an hour thinking through a transition to android and realizing “wait, that’s actually worse,” i remembered that the iPhone mini and normal-sized Apple Watch existed. not long after realizing this, I angry-traded my Ultra in for a Series 10 and ran to Amazon (which I had feelings about) to buy two minis, as my iPhone 12 Pro for work was also numbered.

i’m back to mini everything. i have to charge my watch and phone every day because the world is now designed for Pros and Ultras. but I am happy. 4

in all seriousness, it is disappointing that options for “simple” users who don’t live in their phones are so scant. people who Do Real Work™ without watching endless videos or social media feeds exist. there are literally dozens of us. and we’ll pay damn nearly anything to have a modern device in a 2018 form factor.

the best android phone should not be an iPhone 13 mini, but he were are.

  1. The keyboard uses a local GPT-2 model instead of a Markov chain for word prediction. But don’t worry, it is still incredible at guessing exactly what you didn’t what at the worst possible times. Link. Apple Intelligence uses locally-installed and Apple-trained models and cloud-based AI services via Differential Privacy to give you notification summaries that are not always, but often, completely fucking wrong. And genmojis. insert they are the same picture meme ↩︎

  2. I paid for Halide to work around this. It’s great software, but you can see the amount of hacking those poor folks do to work around Apple’s API limitations. You can see edge detection being done when you use Halide’s portrait mode, and the results aren’t as good. It also loads more slowly, thanks, no doubt, to API restrictions. By the way, did you know that you can’t change the default camera that you slide left to from the lock screen? Totally not evidence of anti-trust. No sir. ↩︎

  3. Android has had Work Profiles for ages. At least ten years. It works incredibly. You can literally have a separate container for work stuff on your phone that you turn off when the day is done. Meanwhile, Apple’s version of work profiles is buying a whole ass separate device, which I, begrudgingly, ended up doing because WFH has all but extinguished the last vestiges of work-life divide and I had to re-draw the line somewhere. ↩︎

  4. There’s a difference between having a phone that is advertised as having a long battery life but ultimately doesn’t and a phone that is well known for having shitty battery life. I knew that charging more was a cost to minifying my life, but it’s a known cost that no-one tries to hide. Funny enough, this is how I’ve felt about iOS and mobile computing in general lately: lots of big expectations that mostly work but fall short in extremely. Maybe I’ll write more about this. upsetting ways. ↩︎