Shitphone: A Love Story

Extremes, of course, always make for more interesting writing. Still, let's not forget about the perfectly viable middle ground: Where an $80 Shitphone is a hassle to use and an $800 iPhone seems wasteful, a $300 OnePlus One or Nexus 5 will deliver about the same utility at a bit than half the price. As far as I can tell, this will hold true for almost anything: $10 headphones typically won't fit well or sound good, but at $60, a pair of Shure SE215s sounds just as good as $200 beats. A $10k Kia will teach you to hate your commute, while either a $25k Jetta or a $75k Model S will get you to work comfortably -- one of them will just cost three times as much.

It's an interesting testament to an excess of purchasing power that premium brands like Apple, beats (or large parts of the fashion industry) managed to grow to their current sizes. And it'll be interesting to watch how this whole "good enough computing" plays out.

I bought a 'shitphone' last year after I damaged my main one in a fall, but it was mostly still working and I thought that I would be able to repair it (I wasn't). Some things the new phone does significantly better; the camera is slow but turns in surprisingly good images (in sunlight; there's no flash), the battery life is excellent and it recharges super-fast, it feels a bit more rugged and so forth. As the article says, the big downside is delay - I use Android and the hardware in this thing is really not up to multi-tasking, so now I mainly use the phone for texting, calling, and email, occasionally maps or web searches but only when necessary, sometimes as a music player.

At this point I'm thinking about buying a good phone again, because the downsides are an annoyance if I'm busy and need to depend on it for work stuff; on the other hand, I rather like the fact that I spend a bit less time fiddling with my phone than I used to do, and am more engaged with the world and whoever I'm with. This includes the dog; I'm increasingly struck by how many people go to a dog park and then spend the whole time sitting on a bench hunched over their smartphones. I'm seeing more overweight dogs whose owners take them out as a matter of necessity but don't really exercise them, and then give them extra treats out of a sense of guilt. I love that I can put a computer in my pocket and use it anywhere, but I don't want to go back to being buried in it.

I can look up restaurant addresses, read HN, shop for crap on Amazon and REI, play Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup while waiting for a haircut, and send all the texts and make all the phone calls I want. If I run it over or fall overboard with it in my pocket I don't care. With the money I saved I bought the shittiest Garmin GPS available for about $100.00, which I can even use without a cell network. Sometimes my friends complain about the sound on my shitty phone, but I don't care.

Plus, I stare at a computer all fucking day, I know all I need to know about programming for at least the next five years of stateworker career, and I would FAR rather read a print book, go for a sailboat ride, have a dinner party, or dig some vegetables than spend another f-ing second computing even with a really nice screen.

Oh -- I write this on a 12 year old macbook running FreeBSD, which I used for my dissertation, from ~2000 lines of Octave matrix code to typing it up in Lyx/ Latex. Works far better than any new Windows piece of crap for actual computing, isn't occupying space in a landfill, and I have money left over to buy rain gear and boots for getting outside.

It's not shit -- it's manure...

Five years later, almost to the day, I'm still sporting my S2; I just haven't had any compelling reason to change it. It does its job now as well as it did back then, and in some cases actually performs better thanks to software updates. The battery outlasts most of my friends' phones even though it was never changed. The phone itself seems to be indestructible: I never protected it (cases, screen protectors, etc.) in 5 years, it has been through just about everything you can imagine and more, yet the only damage is a vague scratch on the screen I can only see in a very awkward angle and a some slightly chipped paint by the ear piece.

I don't know what makes this phone so particular, but for the same reason I wonder more and more what genuinely makes a lot of the new expensive hardware that particular either. In any case, it will be a sad day when I have to part with this phone.

I can remember exactly the moment I realized the ridiculousness of the overvalued tech gadget. Finally armed with enough money to buy my own computer, I remembered how my parents paid $2,000 for a an IBM with a 200MHZ Pentium Pro [w/MMX], 64MB RAM and a 4GB hard drive. I decided I would never value a tech gadget that highly, and would only pay the bare-bones price. (That idea is probably why there literally became a market called the "barebones PC", computers with random commodity parts pieced together by the purchaser, like a made-to-order self-assembled Model T Ford).

My current shitphone is a $75 AT&T Go-phone with 1GB RAM and a dual-core 1.4ghz processor. I refuse to update any apps for fear they might use more RAM or CPU for some improved feature and make the apps less stable than they already are. I enjoy dropping it onto concrete in front of people and watching their gasps and cringes, only to show them how the seemingly plastic screen remains unblemished. I might be a shitphone sadist.

Or, you know, do what Google did with the Moto G: unspectacular but very usable hardware, no crufty software layer above the OS, at a good price point.

In 2012, I bought a used Nexus One for $30, wiped it clean, and put Cyanogenmod on it. The phone was already two years old when I bought it, and it had scratches all over the place (except, thankfully, the screen itself), but it served me well for another two years.

Recently, the Nexus One finally broke, so I replaced it with a Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini. The previous owner had only had it for 6 months, and it was in an impeccable condition (not a single scratch), so I had to pay a hefty $100 for it. Again, I wiped it clean and put Cyanogenmod on it. It feels twice as fast without all the Samsung bloatware and carrier garbage. I fully expect to keep using the Mini for the next two or three years, at which point I'll probably buy another used phone.

Sure, it takes a fair amount of research and luck to find a phone that has been well cared for. And I obviously won't take any chances with the stock ROM, who knows what it might be infected with? But as long as you're careful, and if you buy locally from ordinary people (not professional dealers), you can get last year's mid-range phone for the price of this year's shitphone. Why get a $80 shitphone if you can buy a non-shit phone for $60? People in wealthy countries switch phones a lot more often than what even the cheapest phones are designed to last, especially if said phones are kept encased in lots of fancy fabric, rubber, and plastic.

In addition, since you're no longer a slave of your contract, you can also save a lot on the monthly phone bill. I only pay $8/mo on average, while everyone else in my country seems to be stuck with $40+/mo two-year plans.

Maybe a solution is to treat your next expensive phone with a modicum of care? My partner and I have each had four iPhones over the same period with one cracked screen, and that's it (and I consider us heavy users). I can't even picture how to make the screen come unglued if I wanted it to...

To cut a long story short I ended up with a "Sandstrom" SDABXRW13 which is PC World (UK)/Dixon's own brand. Ok, it's not a total Shit-Brand but you all know the sort of thing, built-to-a-retail-price but passing itself off as some fancy Scandinavian make, often ending in disappointment after getting it home.

This is it here:

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/tv-dvd-audio/audio/radios/sand...

The reality is that it's a well built, fairly decent sounding portable DAB radio and has exactly the same features I needed as an equivalent Pure, Roberts or Sony, which was going to cost me at the time £80-100 more. It doesn't have tone/eq controls but neither did many of the more expensive brands and to be honest it I mostly only listen to spoken word radio and podcasts, that said BBC Radio 6 sounds just fine.

I've had this unit for three months now and would happily recommend over a prestige brand leader.

But, for effectively $100 I got a quite high end phone. And, it was fun to tinker with it, getting it whipped into proper shape. I may eventually root it and pop Cyanogen or some other ROM onto it, for now, it's a pretty solid phone.

If I hadn't gotten the Fire, I probably would have gotten one of the cheap Chinese imports like the author of this post. I refuse to do a subsidized phone, and $650 for a high end phone seems absurd.

Over the years, I've learned not to buy shitronics.

Not because they have shitty reliability.

I avoid buying shitronics because I run my electronics to the ground.

I'm currently typing this on 9 year old Core 2 Duo Dell that runs plenty fast.

Down in the basement is another Dell about 11 years old that's been running 24/7 for the past 10 years. Unlike my high-end Core 2 Duo Dell, the basement one is a Celeron POS that was a $299 special.

It was slow on day 1 and it is still slow on day 4015, but it keeps chugging along. And every time I use it, I curse myself for not spending a little bit extra for faster machine.

I think this is one of the biggest differences between today and when our parents grew up.

When something was made back then and when someone bought it, it was bought with the expectation that this should last. And it did. It probably still works and could probably be used by you if you wanted to use it. Basically decades (or in some case centuries) of durability.

Contrast that with today. If you buy something this year, servicing it next year will be unprofitable compared to throwing it away and buying a new one.

Take a wild guess at which is the eco-sustainable one.

I wonder if or when the pendulum will swing back and we will try to strive for durability, and just how bad things needs to get before we understand that we need to go there.

Apple simply doesn't give me what I want in terms of features and freedom. I think their products look boring and ugly. So to me, Apple products are shit.