No scotch & iPhone
I bought an iPhone and feel nothing. I bought an iPhone and don’t know why I did. It had been 3 years? I first wrote about the iPhone when I bought a 3G, back in 2008, and wrote 2,000 words about how well it paired with scotch. You set up your new iPhone while drinking scotch. You contemplate the mere concept of an iPhone with scotch.
You are stone sober for this one. Setting it up feels like walking into a therapist’s office. There is no wonder, only the vague frisson of dread where you know you’re sort of required to do this every so often, and yet you’re also blowing $1,300 that you definitely don’t have for a thing that is purpose-built to psychically hijack the entire human experiment.
You’ve come to view your iPhone more as a portal than as a tool. You use it to play the video game that is your life. You answer emails with patience & grace. You hold space for your friends. You try to go on dates. You load news sites, because you’re dumb.
When everything is hitting at full strength, your iPhone becomes a way to summon real, actual humans into the real, actual backyard that everyone is universally stunned by. When things are harder, your iPhone acts as a mostly useless bucket of apologies for fractal societal collapse. You come to live for the moments when people text back.
There is functionally no difference between the new iPhone and the old one. It’s bigger. The camera is better. There’s no SIM tray anymore. It loads stuff on 5G. The sides aren’t rounded. Something Apple calls the “dynamic island” is blobbing around the selfie cam. That’s all you can discern, really. It used to be that new iPhones were radically different from model to model. This one feels, three years later, like a nip & tuck.
The biggest difference is in the case. People don’t remember you, but they remember the case, which is a green & black Bailey Hikawa blob that draws stares and gawps in almost every setting a person can think of. You use Apple Pay and hold up the line. You put it down at a party and enter Case Chat® for a half-hour. It’s ergonomic, you say, having practiced this for two years. I can stand it on its side while watching movies in the bathtub. This phone is new, so nobody really has cases for it except for Apple. You get one of the stock ones in “sunglow,” because someone deeply close to you says, once, that ochre is your color. It’s a case. Fine. You prepare yourself for the general public asking what happened to the old case, which is as big a part of your personal brand as anything.
A lot of people worked very hard to build this thing. There’s the obvious “everybody at Apple” bit, of course, but there’s also the materials that got mined, the factory that assembled this, all of the chip technology. At one point, you google the name of the town that your shipment originated from, and discovered that, due to the ongoing situation regarding COVID-19, they have been on lockdown since March, an entire factory city to make iPhones, hermetically sealed from the rest of the world, from their families & friends. This feels illegal. The words “slave labor” pop into your head. An instant later, you shake your head and the words pop back out.
The new object cultivates an instant sort of intimacy. It’s an iPhone. You know how to use it. You invite it into your life for a while, and you use it every single day. As you load the contents of your old iPhone onto your new one, you think about the odd relationship you’ve had with this thing. Your old iPhone now feels like a worn pair of sneakers that you’ve taken around the world. You know it’s time to say goodbye, and it’s just stuff, but it’s stuff you really lived in & through, and so it is never just stuff, but something deeper, and you don’t quite know how to articulate that.
What else do you touch every single day, without fail, for three years? What else do you think about keeping topped up with charge, like it’s some sort of surveillance Tamagotchi, in the background as you live the entire rest of your life? No amount of scotch can convey the emotional connection one builds with their phone. You seem to care more about this than others, but maybe others just don’t want to talk about it. Perhaps we’re all going through the same sort of relationship with our phones, separately, in silence, and we’re a little ashamed of it. It’s just a phone, one thinks. The phone can break, and you can replace it. Nobody cares except for you.
All of your data is transferred, now, and you’ve started getting messages on your new phone, so it’s time to wipe the old phone, throw it in a box, and mail it back to Apple, for them to do whatever with. Six days later, they pay you $300 to say goodbye to an object with which you’ve cultivated some sort of baffling intimacy. As you walk away from the UPS Store, you wonder what the idea of a “forever home” is.