Dead phone
After my iPhone gave up the ghost, I came to a big life decision: I need to decouple from my handset.
I’m a lucky guy. In my 25-odd years of being a tech obsessive, only a handful of things gave up the ghost on me.
There was an iPod whose hard drive broke, a MacBook whose hard drive broke, an amplifier that I broke (there was no hard drive, sadly), and… that’s about it.
Until this weekend. When my phone broke. And, lord, the experience made it clear that I need to make some changes in my life.
I treat my things with care. I’m so careful that among the five iPhones I’ve owned over the last 14 years, none of them has had so much as a cracked screen. The worst thing I’ve experienced was an iPhone 8 with a busted battery, and that still lasted a regular work day.
Then came this weekend’s horror.
I’m still unclear about what happened. I woke up, used my phone for a bit, put it on charge, and then the touchscreen stopped working. No matter what I tried, it remained unresponsive.
The first repair shop I took it into had no idea what was going on and suggested I took it to Apple. So — in shorts, a hoody, and panic — I furiously pedalled to the Apple store.
While the people there were lovely, the diagnosis wasn’t. They had no idea what was going on. The options were to replace the screen, which costs around €400, something that could rise closer to €700 if there was an issue with the logic board, which seemed likely on account of the phone’s behaviour.
This pricing is deliberate bit of prickishness. An entry-level iPhone 16 Pro Max starts at €1,479, a regular Pro at €1,229. This is close enough to the quoted figures that it’s clear Apple wants you to replace, rather than repair.
I was stuck.
Normally when I buy a phone, I’ve either been saving up for it, or it was part of a payment plan. Here, though, I was staring down the barrel of almost €2,000. It was as though I was James Franco’s leg in 127 Hours: stuck between a rock and a, uh, rock.
Returning home, I didn’t know what to do. I needed a phone that day, but spending that much on what felt like a whim seemed borderline criminal.
Thankfully, I dodged making an actual decision. As I returned home, my partner asked a simple question: “Don’t you have an old phone?”
And, dear reader, I was fortunate. I did. Hopefully, it’ll last me until the iPhone 17 drops in the autumn of 2025, giving me the grace to save up some money and get a bit excited.
Much of this is beside the point though. The real reason I’m writing is because this experience was a cruel eye opener; I’m utterly dependent on my phone. So much so I was close to spending thousands on a whim.
I was aware of this reliance beforehand, but understanding something intellectually and actually knowing it are two different things. When my phone stopped working I was hit with the cold, hard reality that huge swathes of my life are bundled up in the device.
Whether it was internet banking, logging in with two-factor authentication, or even pulling up a boarding pass to head home for Christmas, I was lost without my phone.
I’ve become a useless bit of man junk.
So I made a vow: I’m going to decouple from my phone. The days of being a single device dude are done.
And the work has begun.
There’s no way I can really get rid of my phone entirely, it’s just too useful, but what I can do is try and stop it being the centre of my orbit, the bit of tech everything flows through.
I need some resilience. I need to branch out. I need to think of my life more like data. But in a less sad way than that sounds, promise.
If something’s important, I don’t save it in a single place. Instead, I spread those files across different locations. This should be echoed in my technology use too.
Hardware-wise, I’m looking into a BOOX Palma 2, which is a “dumb” e-ink device, somewhere between a phone and a tablet. Something that can play music or access email on the go.
On top of this, I’m close to updating my Apple Watch with one that has a cellular connection, meaning I can make calls and use directions if necessary.
Then, there’s the software side. I’ve already started moving away from text message verification into other methods. For example, using Google Authenticator as a 2FA service, and ensuring it’s loaded on an iPad as a backup resource.
And know what? It’s been exciting, a chance to escape the omniscient pull of my phone. I mean, let’s be honest, monotheism is boring, give me all kinds of cool gods and spirits and nymphs and the like.
Gadgets are just like that.
Listen, I didn’t want my phone to break, to be hit with this realisation, but, in a way, it’s a relief. I saw the error of my ways. I’m too reliant on a single device that I have little control over.
Maybe 2025 will be the year of Paltrow-inspired conscious uncoupling, but rather than Chris Martin, I’m breaking free of my phone.