Preorders for iPhones began at 5am.
I’m still deciding if I want to plunk down the cash for a new phone. Indeed I’m wondering if I want to pre-order one instead of seeing it in the store in person.
I know I want blue. I’m pretty sure I want the smaller of the two phones although the telephoto abilities of the iPhone Pro Max are intriguing. I just don’t think I could get comfortable with the size of the Max. I still like being able to put my phone in my pocket.
Sacrificing that ability for 5x telephoto versus 3x doesn’t seem like a good tradeoff for me given how little I use telephoto in general.
My current phone is 512GB. It’s served me well at that storage level, I do take photos regularly and with the resolution of the new iPhone being 4 times that of the current iPhone I wonder if bumping the phone storage up would be a good idea. Or is that something I can kick down the road a bit? It’s $200 extra.
That pushes an already expensive phone into the stratosphere. Then again, at these prices? What’s another 200 bucks? It’s improbable that this will be my last iPhone, given that I tend to replace them every 3 years. My estimated remaining lifespan is 10+ years so maybe there’ll be 3 more iPhones in my future.
My perspective on that kind of thing is changing. The other half made choices that meant he had what was just barely serviceable in the last 5-10 years of his life. I was the one that forced him into buying better things than just “serviceable”. He fought me on his Apple Watch and flat out refused to get an iPhone that used facial recognition.
Because he played harp, his thumbs and fingers were always torn up a little. As it turns out, just enough, that fingerprint scanners in iPhones and iPads more often than not, wouldn’t work.
It wasn’t anything he complained about, but I couldn’t help but notice he made his life more difficult than it had to be. It saddens me that the last few years of his life, he might have been more frustrated by devices and tools meant to make his life easier. When I bought his last iPhone, I should have gotten the one with facial recognition like mine.
Thinking like this has changed my perspective some. I’ve always gone for nice things within some kind of boundaries. Now, I’m looking at things from the perspective of does this make me smile, does it make my life easier or reduce frustration? If it does, then It’s worth it to spend a little extra cash. Especially since I’m aware, the road ahead of me is shorter than the road behind me. Why shouldn’t I enjoy myself?
The computer I’m typing on right now, is a marvel. It’s small, powerful, and has great battery life. In low power mode, the battery life is crazy long. Most of what I do these days is completely unaffected by running in low power mode. So yes, I spent a bloody fortune on this machine, but it meets all the requirement stated above, and probably will not be replaced in the next 5 years and possibly this is the last computer I’ll have.
I’m usually startled at how fast this computer really is when I plug it in. Low power mode turns off when it sees incoming power. Mostly it’s the speed of some applications loading. But when I’m using something like Final Cut, or the Affinity Suite of applications, I really notice. I’m sure I’d notice the speed using Photoshop if I could afford to use Adobe products anymore. $55 a month for access to Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and the other Adobe products seems excessive. If I was a student it would be $20 a month, but if I was a business it’s $85 a month. Wow! Must be nice…
I miss the days of being able to purchase the Adobe Creative Suite outright and deciding if I needed to upgrade year over year.
That being said, Affinity does a great job of replacing Adobe. I just noticed that most of the benchmark tests aren’t referring to Photoshop rendering speed anymore. I hadn’t thought about Adobe for at least a year, maybe two. That’s a pity, I used to use their products all the dang time. I haven’t even looked at the Adobe Font catalog for more than 5 years. I used to always be shopping for some cool unique font.
Ahhh apparently Adobe is doing subscriptions on fonts too. Guess What? The subscription is obscenely expensive!
I guess Adobe really did cut themselves right out of the general public’s awareness when they got too pricy for individuals to maintain copies of their products. I’ll have to make sure that all of my previously purchased fonts are securely stored somewhere because I won’t be able to replace them going forward.
I’ve found some font houses are still in business. Of course, looking at the various font houses, I discovered two fonts that I really liked. At $200 bucks a piece They may be a bit too rich for my blood, but at least I could buy them without a subscription.
From Typography.com, is a very beautiful typeface. As fonts go, it’s not inordinately priced. This is the problem I have with subscription services especially for fonts. It looks like paying one year of Adobe’s subscription price would greatly exceed the cost of purchasing both of the fonts that I’ve just found and liked.
As an individual, I might only need or want 2 fonts. So having subscription access to 1000s of fonts does me no good whatsoever. That being said, I know that I’m an outlier. Most people don’t think about the font they’re using unless it’s hard to read.
Being in the printer and printing industry for as long as I was, I look at fonts very differently. For example, Requiem (above) is elegant, and beautiful. There are features in the font that are very old school having to do with ligatures. I suppose I look at fonts as functional art. Moreover a beautiful font is art that I get to look at and use everyday on my computer.
I digress, I do wonder though if I still have any of the Adobe Type Manager 3.5” disks around that contained my font library. I’ll have to keep an eye out for those as I’m cleaning up.
This is how I lose entire days… One connection leads to another in my head, and then another and another until I realize I’ve learned a lot but haven’t gotten anything done.
I’ve decided that I’m preordering the phone…
Hmm, apparently not! Something is very odd with the Apple site. Apparently, they’ve got another hit on their hands…