Good Enough (Premium)

In the days before we left for Mexico City, I started putting aside the devices and other things I planned to bring there. Among those devices would be some number of phones, complicated by the fact that I had recently switched to a Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra to review. I knew I would bring my Google Pixel 8 Pro, if only for comparison purposes, and I have an older Pixel 6a with a Mexican phone number and eSIM that would need to come along as well. But what about the iPhone?

I don’t think I discussed this in my preview or first impressions articles, but to better afford the Galaxy S24 Ultra, I looked at my existing phones to see if it made sense to trade any in. And one did, especially, the Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max that I purchased and used last Fall ahead of getting the Pixel 8 Pro: Samsung was offering higher than usual trade-ins, especially on newer iPhones, and I could knock $700 off the device’s $1300 asking price by trading it in.

Granted, I need to keep an iPhone on hand, if only for testing purposes. But in an interesting coincidence, we had bought the kids iPhone 15 Pros for Christmas, and I still had their previous phones, iPhone 12 Pros, here, though I had intended to sell them via Gazelle or a similar service already but hadn’t. My son’s iPhone 12 Pro is in rough shape, with a cracked glass back. But my daughter’s phone was lovingly cared for, with a screen protector and a like-new case, and it is flawless.

It is also curiously … interesting. In part because it’s like-new, and in part because it has a much smaller bug-eyed camera array than more recent iPhones–Apple went off the deep end with the overly large camera lenses starting with subsequent models–there is something really special about my daughter’s white iPhone 12 Pro. I had factory reset it and my son’s phone when they upgraded, but the two phones were just sitting in a drawer waiting for me to remember they were there and sell them off. And as I looked at it, and turned it around in my hands, it occurred to me that I could just keep it. That trading in my newer and more expensive iPhone 15 Pro Max made sense. It made the Galaxy S24 Ultra purchase make more sense, certainly.

So that was the plan, for a while. I plugged in the iPhone 12 Pro to charge it–via a Lightning cable, grr—and then stepped through setup, bringing it back from the dead. And I factory-reset the iPhone 15 Pro Max, expecting to send it off to Samsung and whatever aftermarket afterlife they had planned for it. The Galaxy S24 Ultra arrived, I started using it and writing about it, and I wondered when a little box would arrive so I could ship my iPhone 15 Pro Max off. (I later looked it up and discovered that Samsung expected me to use the box the Galaxy S24 arrived in.)

And then days went by. We often sit in the living room at night, watching TV or, on Fridays or Saturdays, listening to music, and I always have at least one phone with me, and sometimes a laptop or iPad. I spent a lot of time with the white iPhone 12 Pro during a week or 10 days there, and I kept coming back to how nice the device is, how it’s this perfect combination of size, shape, and function. It’s a few years old, obviously, and I’m sure in my daughter’s case, it was slowing down and in need of the reset I eventually performed on it. But it was one of those perfect things. There’s just something special about it.

In that brief period, I had this glimpse of an alternative life in which I treated electronics and personal technology products the way I treat other things, like clothes: Something that I would use until it made no sense to do so, even past the point where it made sense.

I can’t tell you how many times my wife has come to me from the laundry, holding up some worn or even torn t-shirt or other item, and telling me, “It’s time to say goodbye.” I had a jacket that I finally got rid of last winter that I’d had for over 20 years, I had long-ago lost the removable insert that made it work well in the winter, the zipper was broken and held together with a paper clip, and the reflective piping had long ago all worn off. But it fit, and I loved the thing. My wife had tried, several times, to replace it with something newer at various Christmases and birthdays, but to no avail. But ragged and tired, it finally succumbed. And I still struggle with its lackluster replacements. I actually miss the thing.

But this iPhone 12 Pro is not ragged or tired. It’s in like-new condition, almost a perfect thing that had been loved and cared for and will last some number of years more until the endless tide of evolution finally obsoletes it as Apple stops adding new features and, ultimately, stops supporting it. But that is for the future. Today, this iPhone will keep working. It’s not just viable, it’s desirable. I was rather looking forward to using it in Mexico, had bought a new low-profile case, and I was already shopping around for an eSIM to put in it.

And then my email dinged, bringing me back to reality.

It was Leanpub, and I had monthly royalties from my books. Royalties that, this month, at least, were enough to cover the $700 that Samsung was going to offer me on trade for the iPhone 15 Pro Max. When books are new and the royalties are higher, that money just goes into a general fund for expenses, but in the leaner months, I just hold the money aside to help pay for devices and other things I need for work. And while $700 is actually much higher than the typical lean month, the timing was right. I discussed it with my wife, and I decided to hold on to the iPhone 15 Pro Max for all the right reasons–it really does make sense for me to have the newest iPhone, if only for testing purposes and, in this case, for comparing to the Galaxy S24 Ultra. And so the white iPhone 12 Pro went back in the drawer, and I brought the iPhone 15 Pro Max back to life, and it came to Mexico with me and the other devices.

But I would be lying if I said I didn’t think about the smaller iPhone while we were away, and didn’t sometimes regret not bringing it. As the weeks went by, I did what I always do when I’m out in the world, I looked at other people’s phones and devices, mentally calculating what it is that people use. Mexico is different from the U.S.: There, it’s all Android phones, aside from Americans and a few rich Mexicans. And I literally observed to my wife at one point that the easiest way to spot an American there, assuming they didn’t start talking (which makes it too easy, Americans are loud and rarely bother trying to speak Spanish), was to see whether they had an iPhone with a Dynamic Island on the display. It was always a dead give-away.

Well, not always. We have new friends, and neighbors, in our apartment building, and we spent a lot of time with them on this trip. One of the pair is an American, and he has an iPhone, and like many of the Mexicans I see there, it’s an older model, almost certainly an iPhone 8, based on its single, round camera. These are still curiously common in Mexico City, much more common than newer iPhones (outside of Americans, at least). Indeed, you can still buy new older iPhones in stores here. But at one point late in the trip, he referred to it as an iPhone X, and I looked at it again, and just based on my own knowledge of iPhones, said, “Yeah, I don’t know, I don’t think that’s an X.” And so I took it from his hand and looked at it more closely. It was definitely an 8, not even an 8 Plus (those have a double-lens setup that looks like Bender from Futurama). But I immediately got that vibe from my daughter’s iPhone. Older, yes. But still viable. Still … nice.

Anyway, we finally came home this past Tuesday, and it was quite the experience to fly with nothing but a laptop bag which, in my case, had all those phones in it, plus two laptops and a few chargers and other extraneous items like earbuds and passports and the like. And in unpacking the bag the next morning, I opened the drawer next to my desk. And sitting there, taunting me, was my daughter’s nearly perfect white iPhone. Beautiful.

It is entirely coincidental–no, really–that this is an Apple product, too, but I noted in my Apple MacBook Air 15-inch M3 Preview that I would likely have purchased the thing immediately had we been home when Apple announced it over a week earlier. But I ended up waiting, in part because I wanted to reacquaint myself with the entry-level M1-based MacBook Pro I’ve been using for testing purposes since it was first released in late 2020. This MacBook is the older pre-M2 design with just two USB-C ports, a glorified MacBook Air, really, and it has only 8 GB of RAM, which was not enough in 2020 and laughable in 2024. But I don’t use the Mac full-time, of course, and it’s served as an interesting comparison point to what’s been happening in the Windows PC world. Especially Windows on Arm. We all know that story.

The M1 MacBook Pro isn’t exactly right for my needs, let alone perfect: In addition to the lackluster amount of RAM, its display is only 13.3 inches in an era in which I prefer larger 14- or, (even better), 16-inch displays, and using it day-to-day would not be ideal. But like the white iPhone 12 Pro, there’s something there. It is an iconic design of sorts. And the battery life is off the charts.

Anticipating the 15-inch MacBook Air that will now allegedly arrive on March 27 or 28, I’ve started using the 13-inch M1 Pro more, and I am again struck by how life would be so different were I not doing what I do for a living, if I didn’t have this need to continually move forward with the market. I’m intrigued by this life I can’t have. It’s the same reaction I have when using a Chromebook, which is increasingly viable, or in using Linux, another endeavor I dabbled with in Mexico City but will now turn to with more emphasis, using dedicated physical PCs and not virtual machines (VMs). The timing feels right.

Ultimately, these devices aren’t so much perfect as they are good enough, a category to which no product maker aspires. And yet, there’s nothing wrong with good enough, no shame. It is, after all, good enough. I look forward to someday embracing good enough. Not in the sense of a reviewer per se, but just as a person, as a user.

Someday.