I swear I have not gone full phone hipster, whatever that would look like.
Phone #1: My first cellphone, a Samsung M320, purchased for $40 in 2009. Yes, I still have it and yes, it still works (for a bit before the battery sputters out). Its main use today is to act like a communicator from the original Star Trek, so I can flip it open and say clever things, like, “One to beam up.”
Phone #2: My iPhone 12, purchased for a lot more than $40 in January 2021. It still works fine, though the Liquid Glass update kind of killed any desire I had to use it.
Phone #3: The replacement for Phone #2 and my newest phone, a Samsung Galaxy S26. It’s the base model and seems nice enough after I adjusted the settings to my liking.
As I’ve mentioned before, I have an iPhone 12 I bought in January 2021, making it now a little over five years old. This is the longest I’ve ever had a phone that didn’t plug into a wall outlet.
But late last year it started exhibiting an annoying issue (that also had an unintended perk as a side effect): It stopped passing through phone calls.
I can make calls the same as always, but when someone calls me, they get sent directly to voicemail. Often, I don’t even get a notification that a call has happened. If my phone does ring, the caller gets sent to VM while I stare at a not-actually-happening call where the time on the call never advances past 0:00.
The perk is it saves me from ever having to take a call, which is nice in a 1990s-no-cellphone kind of way.
But it is not helpful when someone, like a doctor, needs to call me.
I tried various ways of fixing the issue, but always felt it was likely bad hardware. I’d resisted two final fixes:
Updating to iOS 26
Doing a full erase and reset of the phone
I’d already ruled out the second option, because I’d just rather get a new phone at that point, and I’d resisted the first option because I deeply dislike the look of “Liquid Glass” and the bugs and weird, unwelcome changes made in iOS 26.
But then I thought, it’s up to 26.4.1 now, and I knew all the steps to take to tamp down the (IMO) ugly look of the new UI design, so I went ahead and updated.
It made no difference. The phone is still broken.
But so I’m not just griping, as fun as it is, here are the steps I took to minimize the look of Liquid Glass, with most of these settings found, logically, in the Settings app:
Under Display, I changed Liquid Glass from Clear to Tinted
Under Accessibility:
Display and Tex Size: Turn on Reduce Transparency
Motion: Turn on Reduce Motion (this one is essential to cutting down the insane bounciness they added to everything)
Lock Screen > Customize: Set the clock from Glass to Solid
This mostly reduces the home screen and other app pages to looking like before, except with the weird glassy outlines on icons, which look terrible and you can do nothing about. This also doesn’t affect the awful choices Apple made in its native apps, like Apple Music, an app that was already pretty clunky and now is somehow even worse. But it’s mostly tolerable after making these adjustments.
41 apps now need updating. For a while it was 40, then dropped to 39, then went back up to 40, and now it’s 41.
To me, this is the most interesting game I have on my iPhone. How many apps can get queued for updates before something forces itself? I suspect I will find out soon.
In Apple-adjacent news, Jonathan Horst, who got kicked out of Linus Media Group because his YouTube channel Mac Address was too clever and different, is back with a new channel called Think Different. I like his style and approach (though not his newly shorn head). His first video is a delightful rant against Liquid Glass and flat design. Good stuff.
The urge to update apps on my phone has pretty much vanished. I’ll only update now if something breaks.
There was a spike in the last day or so. I’m guessing a lot of apps have received updates recently to deal with various iOS 26 shenanigans (I am still on iOS 18). I’ll probably at least look at the updates soon, because it’s a good way to remind myself of apps I may not even use anymore and can uninstall.
My phone history, apart from what we now quaintly call “landlines” began in 2009 with a Samsung flip phone and effectively ended in January 2021 when I bought an iPhone 12.
Samsung M320 (it cost $40, which seems surreal now)
iPhone 4
Samsung Galaxy S3
iPhone 5c
iPhone 6
iPhone 8
iPhone 12
Other than the dalliance with the S3, you may have noticed an early pattern: I got a new phone pretty much every year. Then after the iPhone 6 I skipped a generation. With the iPhone 8, I skipped two generations (the 10 and 11–the 9 never existed). And now, I have skipped four generations, with the fifth about to launch next month.
The main reason is phone tech improved. They got faster, got much better cameras, and starting around five or so years ago reached a point many would consider “good enough.” Everything since then is iterative, not revolutionary, in the same way computers get better or TVs improve. You only notice the differences if you go a long time between upgrades.
My current phone, which debuted in September 2020 and which I purchased in January 2021, is reporting 83% battery health, yet there are days when I plug it in before bed, and it’s still at 90-95% charge, because most of the time I don’t use the phone at all.
I rarely check social media, which I have largely abandoned save for Mastodon, anyway. I message a few people, take photos here and there, check the weather, make actual phone calls very occasionally and not much else. I never play games on my phone. I don’t read on it, nor write long messages. I may occasionally scan my email. Sometimes I use the calculator. I’ll add food to the grocery list.
I actually stopped using the Photos app after Apple’s misguided1Misguided is apparently now Apple’s north star when it comes to design, especially for software revamp in iOS 18.
Basically, my phone is just a tool I sometimes use for certain things. I’m not one of those people that must breathlessly check the socials every time I get a free nanosecond. I am content to amuse myself with my own thoughts. Since getting my “good enough” iPhone 12, the tech lust to get a newer phone has disappeared.
The cause hasn’t been helped by Apple crawling up its own butt and becoming a terrible company in the past five years, either. I would not buy a new iPhone at this point, even if they scrapped the shockingly misguided2See? UI refresh known as “Liquid Glass”.
Or Liquid ass if you go by Apple’s original YouTube thumbnail:
Apple eventually uploaded a new thumbnail.
Anyway, this leads to the question I pose in the title of this post: When am I getting a new phone?
I think it will come down to a combination of things, most likely something like this:
When Apple stops supporting the iPhone 12 with updates, which will probably happen in a few years, though I have no immediate plans to update to “iOS 26” because of the awful aforementioned Liquid Glass revamp. Even here, security updates would probably extend the life of the phone to 2028 or 2029, years that once existed only in bad near-future science fiction.
When battery life becomes unacceptably poor. I think this may take a good while to happen, especially with my usage.
If I find a deal on a new/newish phone that is too good to resist. I have no idea how likely this is, but it ain’t happened yet.
I decide my iPhone 12 cameras are now potato quality (they already are if you zoom in at all) and can no longer tolerate them. This is actually not very likely. I have an actual mirrorless camera for taking good photos of things.
Looking over the list, it seems I’m likely to keep cracking wise about my iPhone 12 for some time yet. But we’ll see.
I occasionally joke on this blog about Tim Cook being irate at me for not upgrading my iPhone 12. I bought it in January 2021, so it’s now just over four years old and, with Apple’s yearly releases, it’s officially four generations behind the newest, sexiest iPhone 16.
What am I missing by not upgrading?
Better battery life
Faster processor
Better cameras
An action button. For action!
An overengineered camera button. For accidentally taking photos you didn’t mean to.
Some different colours
Apple Intelligence (it took a lot of self-control to avoid putting sarcasm quotes around the word “intelligence”)
Excluding the dubious features of Apple Intelligence, the only thing I’d really notice and appreciate in a new phone is the improved camera, and even then, without moving to the pro model with the telephoto lens, the camera in the iPhone 12 is still perfectly cromulent.
The battery health of my phone is 83%, which is edging closer to where Apple suggests getting a new phone battery. But it’s still plenty for me, given how light my phone usage is. I don’t do social media on my phone, I take few calls, snap a few photos and do some texting. I don’t play games or run processor-heavy apps.
And then there’s the whole question of whether I’d stick with Apple or jump over to Android. Sadly, those are really the only options, unless you want to go full dumb phone and party like it’s 2006. Which I sometimes do.
Part of me, the part that still gets that techno lust urge, wants to get a new phone, but really, I can’t justify it in any meaningful way. So I’m sticking with my iPhone 12 for now.
Sorry, Tim.
P.S. Tim, you suck. And not in the good way, in the kissing-the-ring-of-fascists way.
UPDATE, October 10, 2024: I manually updated after checking this morning and finding the phone had not updated on its own yet again. I kind of wished I'd waited, though, because I'm curious if the phone would have never updated again without me forcing it.
For the past few days, my iPhone 12 has been sending me notifications about an impending iOS update. Just make sure the phone is locked and has enough power, and it will happen automagically, it says (this is the state my phone is in when I plug it in to charge every night as I go to bed).
It never happens.
But like a scene from Groundhog Day, the notification keeps repeating, promising an update tonight.
Maybe tonight will be that night.
Update Scheduled. I believe you, iPhone1I don’t believe you at all, you dirty filthy liar!
In previous times, I’ve always ended up tapping Update Now, but this time I think I’m going to wait and see what happens if I don’t intervene. I’m feeling adventurous! Updates on the update soon™.
The iPhone 12 doesn’t have any kind of optical zoom, it digitally “zooms”, which just gives you a mess of pixels vaguely in the shape of what you’re pointing the camera at.
Today, I saw a beaver resting near the Cariboo Dam. It was not especially far away, but not especially close, either. The 250mm telephoto lens on my Canon EOS M50 would have gotten a nice shot.
My iPhone 12 produced this brown ovoid blob with maximum zoom:
Here’s an original iPhone (3.5″ display) next to my iPhone 12 (6.1″ display). And keep in mind, the Plus/Max phones are 6.7″ displays:
My phone does have a case, which makes it look slightly bigger
If you look, you can see that the display is even tinier, thanks to the chonky bezels on the top and bottom. I still kind of miss the home button though (or more to the point, Touch ID, which was later added to it). And when I hold the original iPhone in my hand, my thumb can easily cover the entire screen without any straining, which is nice. I can more or less do the same on my iPhone 12, but it involves stretching and the phone shifts somewhat precariously as I move my thumb around the display. It’s not really meant to be a one-handed device.
While the original is definitely not as wide as the 12, the change in height is far more dramatic. This makes sense, since we have not evolved wider hands in the last decade.
It was fun to hold an original iPhone (I had an iPhone 4 in 2010 and while it had flat sides, its dimensions were pretty much the same), now I just need to find my one surviving 30-pin cable to see if it will power up (I do not have huge hopes for this).
The Verge1Not singling them out, since every tech site will have the same vapid article had an article on what to expect at Apple’s next event, revealed today to be on September 12, 2023. They said there would be a new iPhone announced. You know, like what Apple has done every year for the past million years. The new phone will have stuff and blah blah blah.
I mean, I’m not expecting dramatic innovations in smartphones, especially from Apple, a company that gets more conservative and convinced of its own brilliance the richer it gets, so I suppose my complaint (because let’s face it, complaining is what I am doing here) is how the announcement of a slightly improved iPhone is still an “event” at all. I know, the hype machine must be fed. Everyone does it. But it just feels so tired and late stage capitalism-y. Look at the new shiny! Buy it even though you don’t need it! Watch Tim Cook continue to show the fire and emotion of a bucket of water! You’re going to love it, it’s their best iPhone ever! And so on.
I have an iPhone 12 and I think the only thing that would make me upgrade to something newer is a super fantastic camera. It can’t be just super, or fantastic, it must be BOTH! And then I may consider getting a new phone.
