First world problems

On September 6, 2025 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocy9 Comments

My current phone is an iPhone 14 Pro Max. Apple is a few days away from announcing the iPhone 17, and my phone has reached the point where on most days I have to charge it for a bit while I’m at my desk or doing something else; the battery isn’t getting through a full day reliably any longer. I used to replace my phone almost every year more or less whether I “needed” to or not; I’ve gotten out of that habit with the last few phones as they’ve gotten steadily more expensive.

So here’s my dumb problem: I don’t really want an iPhone 17 of any particular stripe, although it’d be highly unlikely that I would order anything other than another Pro Max. Not because I’m thinking of switching back to Android– I am Apple’s bitch now and forever, and am too thoroughly tied into their ecosystem to even seriously consider switching– but because their foldable phone is rumored to be coming out in 2026.

Rumors for the price of the foldable iPhone have ranged between two thousand and two thousand five hundred dollars, and that’s before whatever tariff fuckery might happen between now and next September.

That’s … a hell of a lot of money. And it’s even more money if I spend the $1200 or whatever I’m going to pay for a 17 in between now and then. And it’s also money that would be spent on a first-generation Apple product in a category that, so far, phone manufacturers have not exactly been covering themselves in glory with. Foldable phones are tricky as hell, and from what I’ve seen so far no one has really nailed the tech yet.

Now, for a sensible person who doesn’t have a spending problem, this isn’t actually a hard decision. I hold onto my current phone until it’s genuinely untenable to keep using it; if that’s before the Fold is released, well, that sucks, but it happened, and if the Fold comes out and I don’t like the price or something else about it (or they delay it, or the rumors are wrong, or or or … ) I just buy whatever the equivalent of my current phone is at that time.

That’s the sensible approach. But the sensible approach ignores the fact that I’ve been fighting off the newshiny for three years already, and I am maybe more sensitive than I should be to being annoyed by my phone– part of the reason I have a Pro Max is that I don’t like having to think about battery charge pretty much ever– and, like, September is the month you buy new phones. I recognize that all of this is stupid; that’s why I titled the post the way I did.

I could, in theory, try a smaller phone for a year, instead of buying the most expensive phone in their lineup. What would that be like? I don’t even know. But it would cut the pain a little bit if I decide to upgrade a year later.

Anyway. I have no common sense, but that’s why I have readers, who I assume are smarter people than me. What say you? Put up with bullshit for another year assuming I’ll want to trade up in 2026, upgrade but with a less expensive model so that it’s not as big of a hit in a year (worth pointing out: the trade-in will get me money back) or assume that I’ll manage to talk myself out of spending laptop money on a phone a year from now and just get the phone I’d be getting if I didn’t know anything about the Fold?

In which I cave

On January 22, 2025January 22, 2025 By Luther M. SilerIn GeekLeave a comment

Dammit.

You might remember a few months ago where I went back and forth endlessly for a little while about watches. My existing Apple Watch was starting to have battery issues and I was getting tired of constantly having to pay attention to my wrist. So I ordered a nice analog watch and committed to a less connected life. Or at least I tried to.

So, yeah, I went and bought a new Apple Watch today. I’m not, like, throwing the old watch away, or anything like that, and I think I’ll continue to wear it on days where I need to dress up a little bit, but I’m going back to the Apple Watch for daily wear.

Why? Turns out the Apple Watch was useful for way more than just notifications, and part of it is definitely my fault for picking the wrong watch if I was going to walk away from a smartwatch. For example, I went super minimalistic on the new one– no visible numbers, no date, no complications at all.

I don’t think I realized, at the time, just how many times I look at my watch in a typical day, and just how often I am capable of forgetting the date in any given day. I am, as it turns out, not very bright! And I also write, with no fear of exaggeration, somewhere in the neighborhood of 20-30 hall passes each and every day, all of which must have the current time and the date on them. And that means that 20-30 times a day I’m forgetting the date and needing to look at my wall clock.

And I probably should be embarrassed about this part, but with no numbers at all it takes a second or two to parse the exact correct time on an analog watch. I’m not sure if “a second or two” makes me slow or not, but when it happens over and over again over the course of every single day it makes me regret at least not buying a watch with numbers around the outside. I didn’t think it would make a difference at the time– I can tell time on a clock– but if I’m writing a pass I want to be done writing the pass immediately because I have more important shit to be doing. Even just a couple of seconds each time adds up.

The analog watch had no light on it, and it turns out that I frequently want to look at my watch in the dark.

(I am not buying a digital watch that isn’t a smartwatch, by the way. I realize that a number of those issues could have been solved with the same kind of digital watches that have been available since I was in fourth or fifth grade. I just don’t want one of them.)

I use a data-heavy watch face, too, and it turns out that I frequently want to know what the temperature outside is. That image to the right there is my current watch face, and I genuinely after four months was unable to check my urge to look at my wrist every time I wondered what the temperature was. The Spotify song-identification app comes in handy a hell of a lot, and that’s my calendar in the top left. I feel like I had one more piece of information on the old Apple watch– my activity circles, maybe– and I might go back to that after a while, maybe instead of the Messages icon, since I’m supposed to get notifications anyway. I don’t need that on there all the time.

Driving and using a map app with the watch on is significantly easier and safer than using the phone, and my car isn’t new enough for CarPlay or something similar.

But yeah. I feel like four months with an analog watch should have been enough to cure me of my bad habits, and it wasn’t, and on top of that I was constantly missing notifications that I wanted to get– like texts from my wife to come help her with something, for example. I kept my phone muted because I can’t stand getting a beep or a chime all the Goddamn time, and the vibrate on the actual phone itself wasn’t strong enough (and hasn’t been on any phone I’ve owned for probably a decade or more) to consistently make me notice it if it was anywhere other than on a hard surface or in the pocket of a pair of jeans. I’ve had comfy pants on for most of the last several days. I haven’t noticed a single damn notification through the pockets of those pants.

So yeah. Back to being tethered to technology, I suppose. If I get annoyed with my wrist buzzing at me all the goddamn time I’ll figure out what apps don’t need to ping the phone and go with that. But the analog watch experiment is done, unfortunately.

On the new newness

On October 25, 2019 By Luther M. SilerIn Television1 Comment

After several years where I was reliably getting a new phone every single year and basically coming to terms with the fact that I’d become That Guy, I waited three full cellphone generations– from the iPhone 7+ I’ve been carrying around forever to today– to upgrade my phone, and finally caved and came home with an iPhone 11 Pro Max in the Midnight Green color. I told myself I was going to wait until I could walk into the store and walk out with a phone, and that happened today. What ended up getting me to jump was the massive improvement in the cameras– I’m super psyched about getting to play with the new triple-camera setup, and the damn phone is gorgeous, to the point where for the first time I’m getting a clear case. It’s currently in my bedroom transferring all of my settings and apps and photos from the original phone, a process that was originally projected to take two hours, then 24 minutes, so I figured I had time to come out into the living room and write a blog post before going back and checking on it.

This was a long and interesting week; I was out of my classroom for two days at that rarest of beasts, a really interesting professional development opportunity, and I had parent-teacher conferences Wednesday night, which was the busiest I’ve ever been at PTCs– I had a line out my door for two hours and fifteen minutes– and then I had a parent-teacher conference for my own son on Thursday. Today most the kids actually had a recess as a little reward for surviving the first quarter, and a dozen or so of them organized an honest-to-God, flag-waving-and-chanting impromptu gay pride parade (!!!) on the soccer field. This is the first year of my career where I’ve had more than one or two kids who were conspicuously and un-selfconsciously out of the closet– there are a lot of 8th graders in my building who are somewhere on the QUILTBAG spectrum and don’t seem to give a damn who knows it.

A genuine oddity: they exist alongside the rather large contingent of more typical 8th-grade straight boys who enjoy nothing more than ceaselessly calling each other gay, and yet I have never once— and I’m watching, God damn it– seen any anti-gay bullying of any of the actual gay kids, and there are at least two boys in the 8th grade who are gay at twenty feet, if you know what I mean. I’ve never seen anyone call either of them names, even the kids who are quickest to toss “gay” at any of their straight friends.

So there may be several posts this weekend, is what I’m getting at, depending on whether I decide I want to talk about these things more. The training, at least, will probably get a post tomorrow or Sunday.

In which I demonstrate restraint

On September 10, 2016September 9, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek4 Comments

I am… not immediately pre-ordering an iPhone 7? Like, for real? This is a thing that’s not happening? I don’t understand; I currently own an iPhone 6, and before that I had a 5. I re-order my phones when a new number comes out. The 7 is out, or at least it’s about to be. And yet I paid my phone bill this afternoon, meaning that I went directly to the very place where one might go to order a new iPhone, and yet somehow there is no new iPhone with my name on it either beginning to be shipped to me or being manufactured for my eventual ownership.

I’m confused. I’m New Tech Guy. I’m Ooh Shiny Guy. What the hell?

Actually, I know the answer, if I’m being honest. I’m perfectly happy with my current phone– the upgrade to the 6 from the 5 was a no-brainer because of the bigger screen, and I’ve got no complaints about it, no matter how hard I try. And I will have complaints about the 7, because one of the ways I use my phone a lot is in the car, with the phone plugged both into the auxiliary jack on my car stereo and the… well, power thingy. I don’t mind the idea of ditching the audio port in general, but it interferes with how I use the phone in my current car, and the phone gets a lot of use as an audio device in my car. I don’t often use headphones one way or another, so the idea of eventually spending $140 on a wireless set doesn’t appeal. I’m not gonna whine about it much, but right now this change doesn’t work for me.

Additionally, from what I’ve seen the best change to the device is the camera, and the biggest change to the camera is on the Seven plus. The two-camera thing looks really cool. Being able to shoot bokeh photos with my phone seems really neat. But I’m not sure I need (well, okay, need has nothing to do with this, I’m not sure I want) the bigger phone that I would need to buy in order to get the better camera– and, again, I have no complaints about my current phone, which includes the camera. I love the idea of a better camera but I don’t really need it right now.

So… am I, like, maturing or something, or is the fact that I’m thinking new car, then new phone so that my phone can interface properly with the car a sign that I’m actually a bigger idiot than I was before?

(Oh. Let’s not talk about the new Apple Watch until I have hard data on the battery life. As soon as I don’t have to charge it every single night, I’ll jump ship. I love my Pebble, but I’m waiting for Apple to catch up in a couple of key areas and then I’m done.)

Why not, one more

On September 22, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn GeekLeave a comment

Click for massive embiggenation.

The weather has been, with the exception of a brief rain squall yesterday afternoon, absolutely perfect for the last couple of days. Fall is my favorite season and has been for a long time; clear, cloudless sixty-two degree days are the reason why. It’s going to be warmer for the rest of the week– mostly upper seventies– but there’s no real chance of rain for several days so it ought to be really pretty around here for a while.

A very brief review of the iPhone 6: it is, once again, too damn slippery, meaning that I had no choice but to put it in a case. I don’t like phone cases, particularly on phones that clearly have had some effort put into their design, although Apple’s official case (I got the red one) is cut out at the bottom so that you can see some of the gold. It ends up having a sort of Iron Man colors effect, which I kind of like. Unlocking my phone with my thumbprint is fantastic. (Yes, it’s hackable, if a thief is very patient and willing to go through the 25 steps necessary to steal and transfer my thumbprint. Somehow I’m not worried.)

I feel like the glass on the front of the thing is more fun to touch than the glass on my previous phone. I’m aware that that sentence may not seem like it makes any sense. I’m not sure I understand it either. But I like holding this phone more than my last one. And I prefer the larger size, although I deliberately didn’t order the 6 Plus because there are limits to how big the screen of a phone should be. The camera is rather improved over the previous one, as I think you’ve seen already. And it’s fast and the screen is gorgeous and sooner or later Continuity and Apple Pay will start working and blah blah blah phonebrag.

The main disadvantage is this:

My wife took one look at my phone and said “Your phone has whatever face.”

“What?” I said.

“You know, like the emoji,” she said. In other words: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And now I cannot stop seeing that. Every goddamn time I look at the phone. Arrgh.

A thought

On September 19, 2014September 19, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek2 Comments

Changing phones and changing phone service providers is incredibly annoying when you have two-factor authentication turned on for every device and service you have.

There we go

On September 19, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek8 Comments

Been waiting all day for this baby.

A couple of things

On September 18, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

Went ahead and installed iOS 8 on the old phone despite the fact that the new phone shows up tomorrow. No particular feelings about it at the moment; cosmetically it’s about the same. I think I’m going to grow to like the predictive text feature and the HealthKit app scares the crap out of me.
I am fully aware that every employed person in the world thinks that their job is either entirely bullshit or at least contains elements that are bullshit, but I swear to you that there is no bullshit more bullshitty and lame and insulting than education-related professional development. It cost a thousand dollars plus just for the hotel rooms for my team to attend this required PD today and within fifteen minutes of the start of the thing they were asking grown people with Master’s degrees to stand up in front of a roomful of people and put napkins on their heads. I have decided I am going to start to be actively rude when asked to participate in this sort of nonsense. My salary costs taxpayers too much for these fuckers to waste my time.
That said, the beds at the Hilton Garden Inn in Fishers, Indiana are outstanding. I want one in my house. And the sheets, and the comforter. I have seriously never slept so well in a hotel bed. I didn’t want to get up this morning at all.

Tomorrow will also be quiet, as I’m double-shifting and won’t have time to write, and right now I don’t have an early morning post scheduled. However, big thing coming on Saturday to make up for it.