I’ve had the same phone for the past five years, an iPhone 13 Pro which I bought for two reasons: * My previous phone’s (iPhone 12 Mini) battery was worn out and had become worn out super quickly * I wanted the LiDAR sensor for the work I was doing at the time Anyway, it still does everything I need in a phone (which isn’t all that much), but over the last several months the battery wasn’t lasting a full day on the rare days when I went out, which is of course when I most need the battery to last. New iPhones are stupid expensive, even decent low-end Android phones are stupid expensive (and would need me to switch out a lot of my infrastructure/ecosystem buy-in, costing even more), and so of course it’s not too expensive or difficult to replace the battery yourself. So I bought iFixIt’s battery replacement kit, and the other day I replaced the battery. The final step of replacement is to charge the phone to 100% and then allow it to discharge to 0% to finish calibrating things, and with the new battery, the dang thing lasted for over two days on a single charge. It’s also back up to its full performance, or at least it feels snappier (I didn’t think to take any benchmarks before and after, though). With any luck this phone will continue to last me for another five years. I’m so done being an enthusiast for phones. I also ended up finding my old iPhone 6S and giving it a charge, and if it weren’t for it no longer supporting the latest Apple ecosystem stuff (including my Apple Watch and my HomeKit setup), it’d still be a perfectly usable device even today. I used to buy a lot of cellphones to play with and swap between. They were generally pretty cheap and things were always evolving and fun and weird. Here’s some highlights from my phone journey: * My first cellphone was the same Nokia 3390 that everyone had in 2001. I bought it because it was cheaper to get a cellphone with a minimal plan on Voicestream (which would later be bought out by T-Mobile) than it was to get a second phone line, when the town I lived in at the time still hadn’t gotten any broadband service. * I bought the original Danger Hiptop which was the first mass-market smartphone. It had a lot of promise but had too many problems to continue on with, mostly due to service unreliability. For example, the way it handled its “always-on” connection was by always being “dialed in” to GPRS and wouldn’t allow incoming calls to interrupt that session. Also remember how original iPhone users ended up getting gigantic GPRS call logs? T-Mobile did it first! * I got the N-Gage QD, not to play games on but because it was an affordable Symbian phone. It was pretty good! Then it self-bricked on a daylight savings change and I ended up recycling it because I couldn’t figure out how to get it out of a bootloop. * Then I had a long series of Ericsson/Sony Ericsson phones. The R520m was pretty good. The T28 was even better, and I used that one for years, including as a GPRS/Bluetooth modem for getting online with my Tapwave Zodiac. The T610 was amazing although I ended up going back to the T28 for some reason. At this point I was using an iPod for music. This was normal. * Then I switched to a Palm Treo 600 which was a bit more convenient than my two-device setup, but still used the iPod for music. * And then when I worked at Sony, the W580i came out and it was incredible. Small phone that would sync all my calendars and contacts, had a pretty okay (for the time) mobile web browser, _and_ a pretty good music player! This was my daily driver for years, and I looked down on the iPhone with derision because the W580i could do pretty much everything the iPhone did, _and_ had user-installable apps and a fitness tracker and supported stereo Bluetooth headphones. Plus its T9 was actually faster and more accurate than the iPhone’s on-screen touch keyboard. * When Android came out I was definitely Team Android for a while, aside from a brief foray into the original iPhone, which I found to be clunky, annoying, and super unreliable (which was mostly AT&T’s fault, but that was the only carrier it worked on at the time). Notable phones that I tried included the HTC Magic, the Nexus One, the Galaxy Nexus, and a bunch of random crappy Android phones that were the included ones in the various cheap-ass phone plans when I was trying to minimize my telecom costs * For a while I tried going without a phone entirely, and used an iPod Touch, a mobile access point, and a shoddy Twilio setup. It was a frustrating mess and just got people making fun of me. But I thought it was a worthwhile experiment, but I ditched it when the iPhone 6 came out. * The iPhone 6 was okay, but I ended up upgrading to the 6s the next year because it wasn’t quite up to scratch even at the time. It didn’t help that I’d underestimated how much storage I’d need for both photos and music. * Since then I’ve stuck with iPhones; I’ve had the 8, XR, 12 mini, and 13 Pro. * I’ve also had a few Android phones as spare devices for mostly developer and app-access purposes. I have learned that I really do not like Android anymore. Anyway. Sometimes I get tempted by some of the ultra-lightweight/minimal “dumbphones” out there, like the Dumber Mini and Clicks Communicator and the like, but none of them actually do the handful of things I actually use my phone for, and my hot take is that the way to get a simpler mobile device without a lot of app-based distractions is to not install apps unless you really need them, and to disable immediate notifications wherever possible. It’s still not perfect but I also just don’t really find myself being hooked on my phone to begin with. Because for all the phones I’ve had, it’s always just been a passive device most of the time. Anyway. I plan on running this iPhone 13 Pro into the ground. It does everything I need, isn’t loaded with shitty AI, has a great camera and the least-bad mobile music player I’ve used, and even upgrading to a newer iPhone would mean having to replace a bunch of my accessories and it wouldn’t give me any more capabilities than what I already use. The only real limitation I have is that it’s only a 128GB model so I can’t load my whole music library onto it, but my ridiculously-complicated smart playlist setup takes care of that, and maybe someday I’ll have a better option anyway. I balked at spending $1000 on a phone in 2022, but I haven’t had to spend anything on new phones since then aside from the $50-or-so total to replace the battery, and $200/year (so far!) is the best dang value I’ve ever had in a good phone. I suppose it’s possible Apple will drop support for this phone in a few years, but even then it’ll probably be a while before it stops working with everything I need it to.