If you’ve spent any amount of time perusing my books, you’re likely aware that both of my main characters have something of an Apple obsession. I honestly had no idea that my own love for that technology had percolated down into my writing; it took one of my beta readers asking me if I was getting paid for a product placement before I realized what had happened. (Full disclosure: I’m not.)
My wife and I recently traded in our trusty iPhone XS devices a few weeks ago for the 14; unlike Sean Colbeth, I don’t find it necessary to rush to the Apple Store annually and get the latest gizmo each September. I do keep track of them, though, and was aware that the latest ones had far better battery life. Considering how much we use our smartphones these days, I’d become acutely aware of how lousy your day can be when your phone runs out of juice. A year ago, my friend and I were celebrating our milestone birthdays at Disneyland; I started the day off with a fully charged phone, only to find that by lunch time the darn thing had dropped to forty percent. Between the app the theme park requires us to use now, taking a ton of photos and doing other more mundane activities (like, oh, checking my corporate email while on vacation), my iPhone had cried uncle and curled up into a digital corner.
Fortunately, Disney is aware of such modern concerns and had several of those smartphone battery vending machines scattered about the park. After locating one, I spent the rest of the day with my iPhone seemingly on life support, plugged into this short six-inch tube that was far too large to fit into any pocket. Any embarrassment I felt about toting this thing around like some sort of toy poodle was offset by seeing every fifth patron doing the same.
(I have a friend who is a die hard Android fan to whom I told this story some time ago; he smiled and told me the folks who weren’t charging on the fly had made a better choice in the smartphone department. Sadly, I have no way to dispute his claim and have had to live with the ribbing ever since.)
Fast forward to this year and, with my newly purchased iPhone 14 in hand, I eagerly did my second annual birthday trip to Disneyland with my friend. I had high hopes this time around that I would make it through the day without needed to, essentially, jump-start my phone and I was not disappointed. After a full fourteen hours hopping around the park, my new device had barely broken a sweat — or dropped below 75% on the battery meter. Oh, there were a few quirky moments, to be sure; for example, the much lauded 5G network doesn’t appear to be everywhere it’s purported to be. (To wit: I had full 5G coverage on the runway at LAX, but barely one bar of LTE inside the terminal. How does that work, exactly?) Nor, it seems, am I able to figure out how to get a good night photo of the moon even with all of the nice on-screen help. It seems I am doomed to scour the online help from Apple to determine where I’ve gone wrong.
I’m also in awe at how much storage they managed to cram into my new phone. My impression of volatile storage was formed back in the days when hard drives measured five inches by two inches by a half inch and barely held forty megabytes of data; the very idea that my new phone has half a terabyte (that’s 1,000,000,000,000 bytes versus 40,000,000 bytes for those of you who are visual) in such a small form factor just completely blows me away. At least I know I can snap photos without compunction — well, until my cloud storage fills up; I suppose there are limits, after all.
Hopefully this new 14 will last at least as long as my XS did; to help hedge my bets, I did also purchase the sort of case that is the equivalent of wrapping the phone in bubble wrap. It wouldn’t do to crack the display — I’ve done that once before and was immediately miserable. With care, though, I might just make it to the iPhone 18 or 19; I wonder what sort of storage those future phones might offer?
I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s over 3tb…