["Open Mike" is the weekly Editorial page of the vertical magazine that is TOP. In it, we dip a toe into the filtered-but-not-very mind of Mike.]
-
The significance of this is explained eventually
herein. Read on. Photo by Georg Sander.
I'm actually thinking, actually really thinking, of not getting another iPhone.
I've recently given some longtime e-friends who know my predilections and peccadilloes—longtime readers, that is—maybe including you—a bit of a surprise: I moved on from ICE cars. Decisively, like Ctein moved to digital and struck his darkroom. No more stick shift allegiance, no more Miata-is-the-answer-to-every-question, no more naturally-aspirated-engine or rear-wheel-drive oversteer purity, no more blather about exhaust notes and le pur sang and petrolhead lore, no, none o' that from here on out. I'm quite certain I'll never buy an ICE car again. I would propose a rather radical reason for this. EVs are better cars. Period and end of sentence. Throw out all the blather and disputation about cost, ecology, infrastructure, politics, efficiency, everything. All of it. EVs are better cars.
That's a big enough tech-bro sea-change right there. But not only that, I'm also thinking about...an Android phone.
Does the apocalypse approach? Do birds fly backwards in a purple sky? What about the old unshakeable never-say-die Apple allegiance, the "my-first-Mac-was-the-first-Mac," the cozy fishbowl of the integrated Apple ecosystem, all that? This could be a shock to your conception of Mike-ishness, and, coming so soon after my defection from internal combustion...well, I hope I'm not rocking the rowboat too much.
Skip three
I have an iPhone 13 Pro. It's been fine. Normally I've updated every three cycles, skipping two. But this Fall the iPhone 17 will be announced, meaning I will have skipped three cycles. Plus, my battery is getting iffy. That's because "it's that time." But for the first time, I'm not looking forward to it. I'm not dreading it, exactly, but I feel resigned rather than inwardly excited.
Here's the thing that started the snowball rolling downhill: Siri is stupid. There is no way around this. My friend Dan and I play pool most Monday mornings, and typically talk a good deal about music. Matters of mild dispute and questions of fact come up lots, and despite the fact that Dan has an old Android phone the screen of which is permanently tinted magenta, his phone aces Siri seven times out of nine when verbally asked questions. I've recently taken to asking him to ask HIS phone something instead of merely asking the same question of mine. He'll get an answer, whereas Siri won't understand the question, or will give me an amusingly nonsensical answer, or will require me to type something out...whatever. He casually asks his phone stuff that I wouldn't even attempt to ask Siri, because I know better. I'd be anticipating the usual bollix.
Apple is behind. It took me a while to wrap my mind around this if I'm honest. I accepted it only because the realization is unavoidable.
Here are a few other things that I'm assuming, or that have been bugging me:
First, Apple will want a hella lot of money. You just know the big-screen iPhone 17 with the good camera (both of which are important to me) is going to cost way north of a grand. Apple loves to soak my wallet. They farm money—that seems to be the thing they care most about now. That was fine back when I thought I got value for it...I liked Apple, and that was the way it was. If I had to pay more for it, well, so what, then I did. I got value in self-satisfaction and seamless integration and a cool form-factor, and that was enough for me. But recently it seems like there's nothing to get excited about. It'll be just be another phone, pretty much like the last phone. Another button here, another functionality there maybe, but nothing to knock glassware off the shelves. For some reason it seems like Apple stopped innovating around the time the Pandemic started. It's just the same old products in the same old wrappers. They don't even look that good any more—the designer left the company. Or rather, they look good, but in the same old way. The CEO doesn't visit the design studio every day like Steve did; Steve loved products and Steve loved design. The new guy just sits in his ivory tower atop a giant heap of gold coins plotting how to get more. When he already has too many. Which is his business, except that he wants my gold coins. And I ain't got that many.
Know what else Steve did? He kept thinking up ideas for new products. Some weren't such good ideas, others were great, others looked like they wouldn't succeed but did anyway. But he kept coming up with new things. What's been new lately? Yes, my current Mac Mini is the best desktop I've ever had, of my 17 or 19 Macs or whatever it is. They do iterate and improve. And the goggles (Vision Pro) are new, but they're expensive and some of the functionalities are not quite thought-through. Who wants to watch a movie alone with another person who is also watching the same movie alone? I do like the noise-cancelling headphones (AirPods Max), too. But basically it's just Macs, iMacs, iPads, iPhones and the Apple Watch, same as it ever was. (Current Not-Steve Guy does get the credit for the Apple Watch. But that was more than ten years ago—that's 70 years in device- and dog-years).
That's an oasis ahead
Maybe I'm not making my point convincingly. But have you ever looked at all the exotica you can get in the Android phone-i-verse? Did you know there's a phone with a Leica one-inch sensor?! It has a name I can neither spell nor pronounce, Xiaomi. Did you know there's one you can fold out to make a double screen?! Did you know Google makes phones?! Who knew these things? Nobody!
Well, I suppose somebody.
Here comes the kicker. Old Apple, when it introduced something, actually had them to sell, or at least would very soon. New Apple announces sh*t when it's still vapory and then sits on its own thumbs. And sits. And sometimes, like the charger-pad thingy or Apple Intelligence (a "product" I do not want, would rather not have, and am not looking forward to dealing with, so I suppose that's a win???), never come out at all. They're just describing mirages in the desert air, shimmering on the horizon. Surely they can come up with it; they're Apple.
So what? Well, so Apple is promising that iPhone 17 will integrate EV route planning into Apple Maps in CarPlay. But some of Apple's promises lately are worth tears and a heap of ash. So I know I'm going to expect iPhone 17 to have route planning, and they'll say it's coming, but it will either come many moons late or never come, while I wait, wait, wilt, and grow old. But I said "kicker": the kicker is that Apple doesn't keep stuff updated. Never has, never will. Twenty-eleven Siri still lives in my pocket and gets sklonkered by Google Assistant. Aperture was great, but it was never maintained or updated until it got so wilty it had to be killed (I didn't fall for Lucy and the football on that one). I still miss WriteNow*. (I am the OG.)
So here's what I think is going to happen. Apple will charge me $1,800 plus 8% tax for a new phone. For the phone I paid $1,100 for four years ago, they'll give me $85 in trade, unless they give me nothing. I won't be able to buy the new one outright at Verizon so that I can get the good monthly plan price—I'll have to buy it on time for three months for twice as much, on account of a certain calibrated percentage of customers will forget and keep paying the high price. They'll tell me the camera is improved but I won't be able to see any difference. Three things I already liked about the old phone will be gone, gone. Thirteen controls I already knew how to use and have committed to muscle memory will be changed around for absolutely no explicable reason. End result: four months of d*cking around and a bunch of cash sacrificed to the spaceship, and if I'm lucky I'll get back to...where I am right now. And, insult to injury, even if EV route planning is well implemented in Maps sometime within the current decade, parsimonious Apple won't pinch off the bucks to keep it groomed and up to date, so the functionality will age and fade, even though being up-to-date is the most crucial mission of an EV-charger-finding route planner—and even though Apple could afford to keep it sleek and groomed with less cash than it devotes to keeping the bathrooms spotless in the spaceship. I foresee frustration, in other words.
Great-great-grandmother
Oh, almost forgot—the picture at the top.
A curious fact: my great-great grandmother had an electric car. In 1907. The one in the picture is a restored 1907 Detroit Electric Model D, an automobile brand produced by the Anderson Electric Car Company in Detroit, Michigan. I have no idea if that's the one my great-great-grandmother, Hannah Milhous** Wright Furnas, owned; but my grandmother told me her grandmother had an electric car. She remembered being sent to bed early when her grandmother was visiting, but staying awake at her upstairs window until her grandmother left, and that all she could hear were the tires crunching on the gravel of the driveway. She said this was when she was six years old, which would have been 1907.
It's quite possible Hannah might have been driving herself. My grandmother also said that Hannah Wright Furnas was the first woman in Indianapolis to learn to drive; her chauffeur taught her, on the little lanes that snake and loop around the sprawled-out grounds of Crown Hill Cemetery. My grandmother, who had a prodigious memory, said this like it was something that everyone once knew and that was not in dispute. There is of course no way on Earth to prove it now. But I'll believe it because she did.
Back to Earth now, and the solid ground of fact: I probably won't actually buy an Android phone. Only because I am not the type to be able to manage the transition. Many websites say it's do-able, many videos claim they tell you how-to, but I've never been much good with computers. I've known that all my life. New iPhone, here I come. I'm just no longer inwardly happy about it is all.
Mike
(Thanks to several readers for the "better cars" link.)
*Best word processor ever. "In the opinion of many of its users, WriteNow represented the ideal Macintosh application. It had a simple, intuitive graphical user interface (GUI), no copy protection, and it worked in practically every revision of the Macintosh operating system, including in the Mac 68k emulator on PowerPC Macs and in the Classic Environment under Mac OS X. Its biggest claim to fame, however, was its speed. It was written in assembly language (Motorola 680x0) by a group of developers who had a reputation for producing extremely efficient code." (Wikipedia)
**Yes, that Milhous. Richard Nixon was my sixth cousin. Maybe once or twice removed, I don't know.
Original contents copyright 2025 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)
Featured Comments from:
Maggie Osterberg: "Siri. Oh lord, Siri. Dumber than a box of rocks, and twice as infuriating. But, maybe, a secret comedian. I was in a therapy session, speaking about some pretty heavy stuff in my past and how trauma had impacted my life, and, you know, the usual stuff, when, out of nowhere, my Apple Watch suddenly pipes up with my Irish Siri's voice. 'I'm not sure what to make of that, Maggie.' 'What?' I said out loud. 'I can't help you,' Siri replied. My therapist and I totally lose it, laughing our asses off. That was it for the session!"
Ronny Nilsen: "Have a look at the app 'A Better Routeplanner' for planning you EV trip, no need to wait for Apple, and it's available on both iPhone and Android."
Mike replies: I signed up. I'm all in. I'll use that. Thanks Ronny!
Chris Kern: "The best thing about Apple: the company’s products cooperate to form a coherent ecosystem—iPhones, iPads, Macs, and (with some limitations based on the characteristics of the platform) watches—you have seamless access to your data and application software from any of them. The worst thing about Apple: the frequent churn of user agent features: configuration parameters that are moved from one location to another and bundled applications whose functionality is altered for no apparent reason."
Christer Almqvist: "The salesman at my Apple distributor shares your opinion about the iPhone."
robert e: "Ah, what irony! Or do I mean metaphor? Do you know what else Apple under Tim Cook didn't do? Build an electric car, after trying to develop one for ten years at an estimated cost of $10 billion, possibly in collaboration with VW. (Per Wikipedia, 'Apple car project'). Do you know which electronics company did develop an electric car? Xiaomi. They announced their intention in 2021, started production in 2023 and officially released in 2024, the same year Apple gave up on its EV. The car, the SU7, is a runaway success. Jim Farley, Ford's CEO, had one for six months and said he loved it.
"Unrelated, but, a few years ago, I switched from Google's Maps app to Apple's for driving directions because I preferred the way Apple telegraphed turns way ahead of time, but on a recent cross-country trip, I had to switch back to Google Maps because Apple's directions often seemed a little bonkers."
Mike replies: Strange thing happened to me on my trip: I was driving my old Acura, but had my eyes peeled to see if I could spy any Nissan Ariyas in the wild. Driving to Vermont the directions take you off the expressway and never take you back on, and eventually I saw one pass going the other direction on a New York two-lane. Much later, I'm in Vermont, trying to make the final few miles to my friends' house, and Apple Maps in bonkers mode takes me down a very obscure dirt road that I strongly suspected was wrong. Then, about a mile down this road, Siri pipes up and says, "There is an obstruction ahead. Your route is cancelled. Goodbye," and falls silent. I phoned my friends for live directions. They got me turned around and headed back toward known roads, and then, on this remote dirt road on which I had seen no vehicles at all, what should pass by but the second Ariya I'd seen on the trip. Weird.
Later I was told by several Vermonters that Apple Maps often bails out like that on routes over dirt, seasonal, or steep roads, apparently so no one gets disappointed or stuck and later makes a complaint.
Oh, and when I arrived at the cookout area on Blue Moon, where the group was gathered for their weekly Summer picnic, Siri unexpectedly came to life again and said, "Arrived!"
Kirk: "I use an iPhone XR. It's seven years old. It works perfectly. Consider security before you switch out of the most secure phone system the world has ever known.... If you have a 13 you are two upgrades ahead of me. And I reiterate, mine works perfectly and in no way inhibits my progress or my business. And yes, it works flawlessly in my car via CarPlay. Seven years old. Just sayin'. Sigh, and people tease me for upgrading cameras...."
Eric Chin: "Hi Mike: You may not be aware that Google also has a phone service, Google Fi. It uses the T-Mobile network. You could probably get a pretty good trade-in on your phone if you join the service. I started using Google Pixel phones because you get software upgrades immediately from Google. With the carriers, you have to wait for them to get the upgrade and sort it out for their phones, which can take a long time. Maybe more detail than you need, but the Pixel 10 coming out this year is the last year they're using the current chip architecture, and they'll be changing to a different architecture with the Pixel 11. Since last year, it's nice they now offer the Pro models in two sizes, so you don't have to buy a large phone just to get the best camera."
Robert Roaldi: "I use an iMac and an iPad but I'm still ticked at Apple for letting Aperture slide into oblivion. I still prefer it to anything else I've used. I don't like touch screens or those talking interfaces but I assume they are useful to someone."
Nick: Mike, you're thinking about switching from Nikon to Canon. Every phone is largely the same these days; the top models are roughly the same price and have the same features. Every maker tries to lock you into their own ecosystem, and they all have various positives and negatives. Not to say that your Apple complaints aren't valid, but you'll find just as many issues with a new Samsung or Xiaomi etc., and you will have lost a lot of UI know-how. You are correct of course there is more variety in body shapes outside of Apple, if a folding phone is of interest to you. Otherwise I think it's a grass-is-greener problem. But apart from losing integration with your Mac etc., at least it's an easier switch than camera bodies as you don't have a similar collection of lenses that won't work anymore. Relatively easy to buy another phone for this three-year cycle and see how you go."
John Gordon: "My son, living in Hong Kong in 2018, gave me a Xiaomi Android phone to compare with my iPhone. Technically the Xiaomi was good; the Android opsys not so much. And that version of Android was not upgradable so I quickly returned to iPhone and the Apple ecosystem. But the big news today is that Xiaomi now manufacture some of the best EVs in the world. According to an article in The Atlantic by Patrick George, 'The American Car Industry Can’t Go On Like This,' (14 August), Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford, last year drove a Xiaomi SU7 for six months 'to scope out the competition.' The Chinese-made EV is 'one of the world’s most impressive cars: It can accelerate faster than many Porsches, has a giant touch screen that lets you turn off the lights at your house, and comes with a built-in AI assistant—all for roughly $30,000 in China.' Farley said, 'It’s fantastic...I don’t want to give it up.' Ford is now redesigning its manufacturing processes in an attempt to produce a Xiaomi-competitive truck that will sell for much less than the current F150 EV. Due in 2027."
Thom Hogan: "Advice: replace the battery and fight the 'new phone' battle another day.
"Commentary: You're missing a couple of key points. First, you're assuming today's Siri will be tomorrow's. Pretty clear from Apple that won't be true. Apple has this long-established habit of appearing behind and then doing the better product. That will happen with AI. When is the only question, but I think it's Pournelle's Real Soon Now. Second, the post about Google being a parasite is correct and this should disturb you. The only reason for Android, Chrome, and the search engine are to control and track you, and make you the product to someone else. Apple's products are actual products, not you. AI, for what it's worth, is going to be another eventual monopoly, much like search became. The reason has to do with the economics behind it. The cost to scale is enormous and that cost never goes away; it is ongoing and just keeps scaling. Which means that revenue has to pay the way. Google and Meta see AI as 'the next search/social,' and they have the business model (selling you and your information) that is proven. ChatGPT and many of the others don't have a model that works, and are looking desperately for one. Apple's model is 'sell you more devices that work together' (e.g. AI from your watch can deal with home, car, computer, phone, et al., and vice versa)."
Jerker Andersson (partial comment): "In 1991, a friend and I were in Haarlem, the original, in The Netherlands. We had a coffee break in a small café at the outskirts of town and I put my camera under my chair. Halfway through our coffee, two young men came in and sat down at the table immediately behind me. They talked in Arabic with a few words in Dutch. My friend and I couldn't understand exactly what they were saying, but it was clear they were talking about us. So we decided it was time to leave. After a few steps I heard the scraping sound of a chair from their table and soon I felt a hand on my shoulder. I froze and slowly turned around. One of the young men stood there with my camera in his hand. 'I think you forgot something,' he said, and handed it over. My shoulders went down and it all ended with me paying for their coffee. There's lots of that stuff in this tale. And it's good to have your prejudices challenged from time to time. But hold on to your gear!"
Login
