cimorene

My phone and

waxjism's phone, which are Oneplus 5T twins (but hers is the red special ed.) are coming up on their 4th birthday in a month, which is creating increasing fear about when they will have to be replaced. My dread is largely driven by the knowledge that phones keep getting larger, and I hate that: the [Google+LG] Nexus 4 in 2012 was the perfect size for a phone (the screen was like 5.3"); the 5T is 6.4 or something like that, and nearly every comparable replacement on the market is 6.5+".

So anyway, last week my phone failed to receive some text messages without displaying any sign that there was a problem - I only knew because they were 2-factor authentication messages. They appeared as soon as I restarted it, but it's a worrying problem. A phone that doesn't receive communications has got to be replaced. So I started trying to learn about the current offerings from reviews and articles. (Initially hoping for some indication that a better option - that is, similar features but smaller - would be coming along in the near future, but on the contrary, they're still just getting bigger probably and unless you're in the Apple ecosystem you should probably forget about it.)

I learned some things!

I learned to my dismay that Apple has introduced a mini version of the iPhone in the last two years (even smaller than the Nexus 4) - at the flagship end, so full of excess features and at a pricepoint I wasn't considering otherwise, but even though this is technically the fourth year since Apple introduced a smaller iPhone (a midrange one called the iPhone SE), no Android manufacturers are following suit: I read several articles on the subject and everyone seems to think it's unlikely to happen because of market forces and manufacturing costs. I've never considered an iPhone and this isn't enough to make me, but knowing that only Apple is making phones the size I want infuriated me. I'm much more angry at the market in general than I was when I just thought that nobody was making them at all. It's like the universe is fucking with me.

It's surprisingly hard to make a decision when one option is your favorite color, but the other one is cheaper and better in every conceivable way. Like, the adult choice is obvious, here, but - it's so hard to picture myself with this other, not my favorite color phone instead of the one that's my favorite color! Ugh.

Then this morning I said to Wax, "On the one hand, once something costs over 300 euros, another couple of hundred won't make that much noticeable difference. But on the other, I could buy the cheapest option and take the 200€ difference and also buy a new dutch oven, and you'd definitely notice that difference." And she laughed so hard that I ended up walking away, but later I had to come back and ask, because this statement seemed logical to me. "I guess from your reaction that there's something wrong with my logic," I said, "but I don't know what it is, so could you maybe explain it a little?"

"That's not how money works," she said, still laughing.

"I mean... that's how I've always thought of it... and it sounds normal for how my mom or my sister would talk about it..."

"You don't magically have 200 more euros than before just because you didn't spend it on something that you didn't need anyway," said Wax. "But I mean, you can do it. You can buy a dutch oven if you want to. But not because of the phone." (Decision on the dutch oven is still pending.) (I mean, I guess I knew that already, in the sense that I could have bought a dutch oven before without asking her, even before the phone issue came up, and been confident she wouldn't be upset about it.)