Dear iPhone 4s,

I never bothered to name you because I didn’t think that we would be together for that long. I thought you were temporary, a mere substitute until I received the iPhone 5s for Christmas. I could not have been more wrong. The four years that we spent together were interesting to say the least. In the beginning, when we first met, everything was so new and beautiful. Your operating system was brand new and gloriously fast compared to my old flip phone, and I had never experienced the genius of the smartphone before – the world was my oyster.

Oh, but the times we had together soon turned bittersweet. I came to learn the evils of Apple when the iPhone 5 was released, about one year after we met. Not long after, everyone had the newest iteration and I was left in the dust with you still chained to me by a two-year contract. I didn’t mind it, though. The new phone wasn’t different in many aspects and I was certainly doing fine with last season’s model. Slowly though, the accessories and products that supported you were less and less readily available for purchase. Your charger wires became frayed and Apple no longer sold them; Amazon became my new best friend. Then, I experienced the disappointment of 3G service after the advancement of 4G LTE was soon a regular commodity of my friends’ and parents’ lives – talk about your first-world problems.

“I’m getting the iPhone 5 soon, right?” Those were actual words spoken out loud by me. I said that in front of you, like a selfish and insensitive child. Why couldn’t I have been grateful for what I had, instead of griping that my parents had decided to not satisfy my every whim like those of so many of the people I grew up with. What you must understand, iPhone 4s, is that you were not inadequate for my needs. What had happened was I had contracted a disease that seems to be quite common these days. The symptoms of this disease are often not felt by the victim, but rather the people around them. Surrounded by people who were constantly getting new things and going to fabulous places, I began to feel left out and obsolete, which, I’m sure, is how you felt too.

After a while, though, I accepted your faults as quirks. You took a full three minutes to load a single Snapchat and your camera quality was just abysmal but the photos came out blurry enough to seem artsy and remove blemishes. You stopped accepting music from iTunes, which prompted me to start using Spotify which is amazing, so thank you for that. And by the time you loaded Colgate App, the cruiser had come and gone, which meant I ended up walking more, which was needed exercise and obviously beneficial to me.

This Christmas, my years-old complaints were finally resolved. My mother took me out to an Apple store and purchased a brand new iPhone 5s, now hilariously cheap because of the release of the iPhone 6/6 Plus. It’s clean, fast, sleek, light, and everything I thought it would be…and I don’t even care. This letter is to tell you that I’m sorry for giving into my sickness, to affluenza. You were perfectly fine, but in this day and age everything is about being better and newer, and materialism has never been more prevalent. You represented my resistance to societal pressures and I was proud of you.

Thank you for all that you did for me, it was and always will be more than enough.