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 lo...