So, after like 8 months of dumbphone only, I’ve given up.
It wasn’t one majorly annoying thing, but just a non-stop death by a thousand cuts. Modern life really requires at least possession of one of these stupid little rectangles, and if you don’t have one, you get slowly nibbled to death by the ducks of modernity.
So, rather than redouble my efforts to bend the world to dealing with me wanting to be a bit of a luddite weirdo, I’ve given up and just… bought an iPhone SE and paired it with an Apple Watch 8 I already had.
See, the thing I really didn’t consider is that I pretty much already had the ideal dumbphone: this AW8 is a cellular version.
It does phone calls, text messages, and has sufficient ties to modern services (music, podcasts, audiobooks, maps, etc.) that it is, by itself, a 60% solution. And just for perfect clarity: there’s a lot of things wrong with the watch that make it not an ideal device, with the biggest one being really not fantastic battery life.
For everything the watch doesn’t do, I also have the phone, but the phone isn’t strictly required, and I can simply leave it at home when I don’t want to deal with all the modern smartness and just rely on the watch.
For sure, it’s not a cheap solution since an iPhone and a cellular watch is a giant investment even if you go for the “cheapest” versions, and I’m paying for two cellular plans (though, with US Mobile it’s $96/year for each so, relatively speaking, still pretty cheap).
I think it’s really cool you tried it out for as long as you did.
Are you “all in” on smartphone now that you know it’s essential?
I still strongly dislike a lot of the dynamics around them.
They’re still privacy nightmares, they’re still running black-box software that’s not auditable and doing who the fuck knows what in the basebands, and they’re still covered in sensors running apps that are trying to scrape every byte of that data to profile you and sell that data to anyone who asks.
But, ultimately, I was spending too much time trying to stand on a principle that wasn’t really doing anything (I still use computers, and the websites of most of the apps I was using before, and still having a huge amount of data ingested since I didn’t live in a cabin in the woods) other than making my own life more complicated and causing shit like missing invites to things because my phone just didn’t get the SMS, or resorted the arrival order, or failed to download a MMS message or whatever whereas everyone on a modern phone was like, fine.
So I won’t say I’m all-in, or that I like them, or that I’ve even changed my mind that they’re little spy rectangles that are making us all stupid, but uh, too much in modern life is making the assumption you have one to completely unplug without losing an awful lot.