I mean, it’s a phone. And what do you use a phone for nowadays? You are never too far away from a laptop; you still hate sending texts by tapping on glass. You are trying to use Twitter less; hell, you are trying to stay off all “apps” because you want to chip away at the tower of books that threatens to overtake your bedside table in height.
And yet, you have many serious complaints about your old phone. Your old phone had terrible battery: it would turn off in the middle of light jogs, it would require a cable in the middle of the day. Your old phone tried very hard to be attentive and responsive, but it always seemed to come up short. Your old phone had a couple chips and scratches that could no longer be chalked up to patina or wabi-sabi. (Your old phone’s camera lacked the ability to capture bokeh, too, which admittedly was less important.)
And so you buy a new phone. It is extremely expensive: this is the thing that proponents of the new phone tacitly agree not to discuss, or to softly paper over by divvying the cost into months or days or hours spent using the phone. (“If you use it three hours a day for two years, it costs two quarters per hour!”, they say, and you wince at being the kind of person to whom such arguments are persuasive.)
Thankfully, then, it expensive. The new phone is a treasure: it is a perfectly polished stone. It is equal parts sleekness and density. The new phone knows your face but gets confused when you are wearing sunglasses, which I find extremely endearing.