Requiem for Dying Electronics

After three years of reliable companionship, my headphones finally died last week. They were twenty dollars on Amazon and they lasted for three years, I call that a life well-lived. Like Horatio Alger and Taylor Swift, they lived all the way up to and beyond their potential.

My new headphones arrived this week (a Father’s Day gift from my wife). ¹ We can only hope they fill the shoes of their predecessor.

This seems to be something of a plague among my electronics. The plague of the simultaneous timeline. My computer — the eight-year-old MacBook on which I’m typing this — is making increasingly obvious hints that it’s not long for this world. More and more frequently, it starts up not with an Apple logo, but with a question mark. I don’t know what the question mark means (an oncologist once told me that you should never google your symptoms) but I can’t imagine that the question mark is a good thing.

With luck, this laptop will last the summer; through the next draft of this big thing I’m writing. Without luck, it’ll fade to black as I’m trying to post this. I’m stuck in a common rock-and-hard-place here, between the golden past and Apple’s carnivorous march into the future. My iPhone — a six-year-old iPhone X — has now totally rejected its charging port like a body rejecting an organ. It only charges on one of those magic little pads.

This is not a complaint, and it’s not anything as sentimental as a celebration of life either. Six years is an admirable lifespan for an iPhone. Especially since Apple designed the iPhone to drop dead after two years (a scheme which the $383.3 billion-a-year company paid $113 million to settle in 2020).

But I’m also not complaining because, truthfully, I love this last stage of life for my iPhone — the Hospice of my devices. My iPhone can’t really do anything. It gets hot and shuts down after a few minutes of running multiple apps. It runs out of battery almost immediately and so it has to charge constantly. And I like not having it around. I like only being able to pick it up off the magic pad to text somebody.

I’m tech-skeptical anyway — off Instagram and Facebook and TikTok and on Twitter only rarely and begrudgingly — it strikes me that having all those things right there in your pocket is a bit like that scene in Dumb & Dumber when Lloyd busts out “the most annoying sound in the world.”

I don’t know who the first guy was that decided we should all have computers in our pockets, but they should have thrown that guy out the window. There are a number of people at Apple (the BatteryGate guy, for example, the entire team behind the new VR goggles), who should have been thrown out of windows.²

But the point I’m trying to make here is a bright one — it’s this uncovered joy and the timeless middle-class satisfaction of frugality. Sure, I was bummed about my headphones. And I hate to see my MacBook go but I paid $1,500 for this thing eight years ago. That averages out to $187.50 per year. Worth it. But again, I like this phase-of-life. This knowing: alright, you can only run your phone for like two minutes. So, if you need to learn something on Wikipedia, you’d better learn it quick. You can sit down at your computer, sure, but you can only open a Google Doc on Safari or the whole laptop might just hiss itself out of existence.

I’m sorry, I’ve become to speculative. Here’s what this looks like in the real world.

Last week, I took my kid to the Aquarium of the Pacific. Now, usually, I’d be on my phone regularly. Not constantly, but regularly. We’d stop at the seahorses and I’d go down a Wikipedia hole on seahorses. Spectacular creatures: half-snake, half…underwater-horse? Where do they live? How big do they get?³ I need to know everything and, with a computer in my pocket, I can. But with a dying computer in my pocket, I have to make those choices. You have nine-percent battery left. You can either become a seahorse expert or keep enough juice on your phone to take pictures of your kid petting the cownose stingray. You always choose the pictures — memories, in this instance, beat out knowledge.⁴

Occasionally, people tell me to get a new phone; when I just shrug and say I’m fine with my ailing electronics, they look at me a bit sideways. The way you look at those people who admit proudly that they prefer ‘room temp’ tap water. I think, more often than not, my attitude is interpreted as fondness. But, oddly enough, that’s not it at all.

I don’t feel any attachment to my phone or MacBook or headphones. And taken as a standalone observation, it’s a bit strange that we don’t feel attachment to our devices. Even among millennials — the first digital natives — we are attached to our cars and I have sentimental ties to certain neckties and my wooden rosary and my guitar but iPhones and MacBooks come and go and are not missed once they are gone.

Why is that? What, for example, did you ever do with an old phone? You probably know you’re not supposed to throw it in the trash. (It turns out that this thing you’ve been half-addicted to; this thing that’s been in your pocket constantly, once dead, is only a black box of hazardous waste.) So what do you do with it? You put it somewhere and forget about it until you clean your closet every three (or six) months. Once in a while you see a cell phone recycling box, you tell yourself to remember and you forget immediately. An iPhone is one of those things that moves with you from apartment to apartment even after it’s broken. I suppose that’s the phone’s way of getting back at you, isn’t it? An anchor, even a broken one, is always an anchor. But on the verge of death, with only enough juice for one more text or one more picture, it inhabits its obvious design: a tool.

1. A few notes on headphones:

A.) I have to buy those old man headphones that go over my ears because I have cauliflower ear in both ears, which, though occasionally useful has largely been an annoyance.

B.) it was easier to buy the old man headphones before Apple decided to take the hedphone jack out of the iPhone. Before, I could just buy them at Best Buy. Now I have to order them online.

2. They’re not all bad at Apple, by the way. The ‘let’s make the phones waterproof’ guy deserves a raise.

3. Once we got home, I did go down a Wikipedia hole on seahorses. The biggest one (over one-foot-long!) lives in the waters off New Zealand.

4. Obviously, the dying phone forces you to be present too. But that’s implied. And it’s too basic of a millennial notion — being present — for me to spend much time drawing out. There are plenty of wellness blogs where you can get that.