Cell Phones and a Sense of Proportion.

I recently read a review of the new iPhone 16 on interest.co.nz and I'm afraid I've been  driven to an old guy rant: my apologies.

But...

I spent my working life in the technology manufacturing industry - power supplies, network hardware, uP controlled systems.

As such, I really just don't get the fascination with attention-vampire phones that now look like bags of close-to-pointless geegaws you have little control over and can't get rid of, with the bonus of built-in location and activity tracking that treats you like an information-generating product.

And an entry level price of $2200, rising to in excess of 3 grand?

I don't like how necessary phones have become to things like travel (try and use Air BnB without one), and how status conscious the whole thing has become. The whole phone unboxing video sub-culture is a mixture of sad and and bewildering, and sadder still that people now invest so much of their identity and activity in a piece of anonymous technology that exploits them.

Given the computational power of even relatively modest phones outstrips the use needs of most people, it's like using a Maybach limousine as a daily driver. Given that mismatch, just how much victims of marketing have we become? 

I'm about to dump my Samsung phone becasue of the annoying bloatware and nosy behaviour while I was travelling in Australia. The thing that made me decide? Android Auto's quivering eagerness to load my contacts across to a rental vehicle if I make one wrong keystroke when I get in to a car and need to connect for the one thing I do need: maps. While I've disabled it repeatedly, it keeps reappearing after updates, along with "safety" apps that want to track everything you do, and that Google still tracks you, even if you turn off your location history. I suspect Apple do the same.

The plan is to replace it with a Pixel 7a or 8a, with GrapheneOS to de-google the thing, even if the hardware is still hugely overpowered: and it is about 1/3 the cost of a new iPhone.

Wish me luck.