I traded my iPhone for a flip phone and I regret nothing!
A little over three years ago I bought my second iPhone. The 5S model. My 4S no longer had available updates so I upgraded. For three solid years, the 5S worked great for me. I took awesome pictures. I navigated road trips. I dabbled in all the social media platforms. I jammed out to great music.
Interestingly, just before the Apple battery scandal showed up on the news, I noticed some changes in my iPhone. After a full night of charging, I used Google Maps for about 30 minutes and the battery fell to 65%. I closed out of Google Maps and opened the camera. After a couple quick pictures, the phone died. Completely dead. No warning that the battery was getting low. No low battery signal showed up on the black screen. And the battery level still showed 65-freaking-percent! How could that be?
As soon as I got home, I put the phone on the charger for a few hours. Nothing. The phone did not start up. The low battery signal did not show up. Nothing happened. Frustrated, I took the dumbphone to the AT&T store to see what they could do.
“You need a new charger,” the lady told me.
“Ugh. Okay. Fine.”
So I bought a better brand name charger. It seemed to work. No more sudden blackouts. But the battery life still wasn’t the same. Even with minimal usage, the iPhone needed charging by early evening. And by minimal usage I mean texting, checking email, and probably checking the weather radar. No music. No videos. No games. No aimless scrolling through social media.
A few months later, another issue arose. Memory storage. I was “running out.” So said the iPhone. Deleting pictures pains me, but I had to. I deleted apps I didn’t use as often. I “offloaded” a few other apps. And I still didn’t have enough storage for a system update or a few more pictures.
What the hell?
So I looked at the breakdown of the iPhone storage. (Side note: my iCloud storage has been full for at least 6 months so there was no hope of offloading apps and pictures there) The breakdown showed pictures, apps, music, and data taking up about 1/3 of my 16GB. Less than 1 GB was unused.
The rest of my iPhone’s storage?
SYSTEM.
2/3 of my meager 16 GB were being taken up by Apple’s own bullshit! I couldn’t reload my iXpand app to save all my pictures because there wasn’t enough room. I couldn’t delete any more apps because there weren’t any more to delete. I was in quite the pickle.
Apple was trying to force me to buy a newer model iPhone. Can you say “MONOPOLY?!” After all the crap I’d already been through and heard about with Apple, I sure as hell was not about to drop $800 on a new iPhone. So as a big f*** you to Apple, I happily bought an LG flip phone for $20 and a huge headache was gone by the wayside.
Besides, I’ve never had a flip phone! I’ve had the old Nokia brick of a cell phone with the ugly green backlight and that snake game. That phone was a champ!
So here I am reminiscing the stone age with my swaggy flip phone. And you know what? I don’t miss my iPhone one bit!
