Please Don’t Buy a Gold Phone

Apple released an ad for the iPhone 5s and went all in on the gold. Not as one option among equals—as the aspirational choice, the one the camera lingers on, the one you’re apparently supposed to want. And I kept watching it thinking: what kind of person actually buys a gold phone?

I have an iPhone—the previous year’s model, in black, and I love it, genuinely, more than I probably should. It fits in my pocket, does what I need, I have no complaints. But a gold one? That’s not a color choice, that’s a personality statement, and the personality it’s announcing is one I want no part of. It’s the phone equivalent of getting your car wrapped in gold vinyl. Or ordering a gold debit card. Or taking a gold marker to a plastic bag from the discount supermarket. The effort involved in that much ostentation—the active desire to make something cheap look expensive—is what gets me. It’s not even the taste. It’s the trying.

Apple spent years building an aesthetic around restraint. Aluminum and glass and white plastic and the occasional matte black. Clean, minimal, the kind of design that announced its quality by not announcing itself. The gold model undoes all of that. It says: yes, we can do premium, and we’ll prove it by making the phone look like a piece of jewelry from a shopping-channel midnight special.

Somewhere out there, someone is reading this and thinking I’m the snob. Maybe they’re right. But I’d rather have a phone that looks like nothing special than one that’s working this hard to look like something. The black one disappears into the day. The gold one wants to be noticed. Those are genuinely different worldviews, and I know which one I’m on.