Time, not Money

We have a new iPhone in the family. My previous prediction was that Apple will come out with a series of phones, and I’ll upgrade from my iPhone 7 Plus to whatever the large 4G model will be. Apple is certainly run by smarter people than me. They released no non-5G flagship phones. I took up an offer by Chase to use my accumulated credit card points to buy an iPhone 12 Pro. After a long six week wait, followed by a whirlwind shipment from China, the new phone was in my hands on a Monday, snug like a slightly bigger iPhone 4S. Sadly, it’s a small phone. Smaller than I had anticipated. I had reasoned that the Pro is 6.1 inches, my wife’s XS Max is 6.3, and the Pro Max is 6.5, so perhaps the Pro Max would be too big for us. But I didn’t factor in the form factor change – this 12 series is slimmer and taller, giving it the extra length in an awkward fashion. My thumbs genuinely collided on the very first day of using the phone and I knew I had to give it up. So, I’ve “upgraded” to my wife’s XS Max and she gets the shiny new phone with the epic camera.

After 4 years of owning a non-FaceID phone, I’m finally on one. It feels weird. I miss TouchID. It was wonky, but not as much as FaceID. I’ve gotten used to unlocking my phone without looking at it. I’ve gotten used to unlocking it with my hands down, so that by the time I face the screen, it’s ready for use. This doesn’t happen with Face ID. Even with the speed at which it unlocks, a habit built over four years will take some time to change. I do enjoy tap-to-wake. Someone created a jailbreak tweak for my phone to use the same. Raise to wake works wonderfully but I’ve always wanted tap-to-wake. Apparently, it is a software feature that Apple kept away from TouchID phones. I understand now why they did that. TouchID doesn’t need tap-to-wake because you can wake it by resting your finger on the TouchID. So you don’t need to keep the entire screen “awake” all the time to register taps-to-wake. This feature of the TouchID is simply not available for FaceID devices, so Apple almost had to bring in tap-to-wake. In once sense it’s a regression, both in ease-of-use (because TouchID doesn’t need you to look at the device) and in the options to unlock, which Apple should do something about by introducing a side TouchID button.

I do enjoy animoji a little, but it’s only to the point of being a novelty. My family has moved past iMessages. We use WhatsApp and Telegram. So animoji, while an curiosity for me when it came out and wasn’t available to me on my older phone then, is now just another feature I can’t care about.

We (meaning the missus) watch this vlogger who moved from London to Paris within this year. She’s a fashion afficionado, spending exorbitant sums on buying handbags and fashion goods at a cadence others would balk at, while real rich people would scoff at. I think she buys a good three-four expensive handbags a year, which makes her a favorite on this luxury goods stores. Apparently, luxury goods is a market you have to buy into. You have to prove your loyalty to the brand by buying smaller, more readily available goods before you’re allowed to buy big ticket items upon invitation. She often flaunts her invitations to buy Hermes bags. As if spending your own money needs approval from the seller.

She claims that she spends her own money, received from endorsements and influencer deals, instead of milking her parents’ sprawling medical care business, which she was destined to be a part of before she veered off that path to go into fashion blogging. I take that with a grain of salt. While she was in London, she was living rent-free and grocery-shopping-free with her sister, her husband, and two kids. Not sure how one pulls that off. Now that she’s in gay Paris, she seems to be living rent-free by mooching off her elusive and wealthy boyfriend. Still, not sure if anyone can afford what she does on her influencer salary. She doesn’t even resell her bags!

In one particularly telling video segment, she talks about how she washes her cashmere sweaters and tops in a regular washing machine, with cold water and soft detergent. She said (I’m paraphrasing), that many people have told her she should get all those clothes dry cleaned, but if she were to do that, she would be spending all her time on getting them from the cleaners and back, and never have any time to wear those clothes. As soon as I heard it, I pointed it out to my wife. She didn’t say money, she said time. She doesn’t think sending clothes regularly is a waste of money, but time. That there is the mark of a rich person. To her, the cost of this operation is better measured in time. I take her squawking about how she’s living off her own salary with even more salt now.

When I changed my phone, I also tried to move my Apple Watch to the new device. It forced me to update to WatchOS 7. I’m loathe to do that, but this is a new watch and as such, I reckoned it wouldn’t die from the software update. It did not. In fact, I got a few nice new watchfaces and features. Now, my watch detects that I’m washing my hands and counts down from 20 seconds. Though it never seems to do that when I’m trying to show the feature to my brother or my wife. Once, I stopped washing before 20 seconds and the watch gave me a passive-aggressive message about how washing my hands for 20 seconds is a recommended practice. Since then, when I finish on time, it gives me a “Well Done!” and a haptic feedback.

It’s been a while since I posted publicly on my blog, and I had all these thoughts swirling around. So instead of killing them and tossing out some short-hand tweets, or making them their own posts, I decided to make one long, meandering post, experimenting with separators to see how it goes. Let me know what you think about this format!