Every Other Generation

The rule was simple: skip every other iPhone. Buy the full number jumps, let someone else debug the S models and the incremental updates, wait for the thing that actually moves. It seemed like discipline when I made it. It seems like self-punishment every time someone shoves their phone in my face to show me what their camera can do that mine can’t.

Still on the 4. Not the 4S. No Siri. No, I don’t talk to my phone. Yes, my photos are noticeably worse than yours. I smile when you point this out. It’s not a real smile.

Apple announced the 5 for September 12th, and everyone is running the same quiet calculation—need versus want versus afford versus the uncomfortable suspicion that you’re just buying the feeling of having the new thing. The answer to most of those questions is obvious. The honest answer to the last one is always yes. You know it won’t fix anything. You go anyway, or you don’t, and you tell yourself a story about either choice.

I thought about the iPad. I thought about a Kindle. I thought—briefly, not proudly—about whether the money might do more good somewhere it actually mattered. Then I thought about the cracked corner on my iPhone 4 I’ve stopped noticing, and the battery that gives out somewhere around three in the afternoon. The 5 it is, probably. Or I wait for the 6. That’s what I always say.