I like reading gadget reviews, but my favourite ones are long-term reviews. Here’s a few gadgets I’ve owned for a relatively long time.
300 days of iPhone 15 Pro Max
My exhaustive review: it’s the first phone I’ve ever owned that I do not think about. It succeeded in doing the thing apple likes to aim for: the “tech” of it largely disappears. It’s very fast, and it truly does nearly everything you could want from a top-tier piece of portable computer.
But I should talk about the camera a bit, which remains good but weird. I get shots I’d never get otherwise with the 5x camera, but I’d never call them great pictures. Zooming in on a photo afterwards always ruins the illusion.
According to my catalogue, I’ve kept 479 iPhone 15 Pro Max photos. My dedicated camera, the M50, trails pretty significantly at 233. So it’s not like I’m not using it as a camera.
I tallied up my 3, 4, and 5 star ratings just to see. The Results didn’t really surprise me:
- 3 stars: 125 canon, 367 iPhone.
- 4 stars: 105 canon, 66 iPhone
- 5 stars: 2 canon, 6 iPhone.
So, I probably keep more “good” photos from the Canon. But sometimes–6 times–the iPhone really nailed it in a moment where I wouldn’t have taken a photo at all. I wouldn’t trade those 6 photos for anything.
Even still, I don’t think about the “tech” of the camera. It has a very opinionated sense of how to “develop” a photo, but so does every camera maker. It’s about finding the aesthetic that works for you.
If I retired the phone today, I’d have paid $8 a day to use it. If I make it another year, that goes down to $4. A third year? $2.30. Four? $1.70. Keep your phone for as long as you can.
800 days of Canon M50 Mark II
I talked about the Canon M50 extensively on two episodes of You Chose Poorly: You S03E02 – I’m Stuck With the Eyes I Have and S04E07: Wrong About Cameras.
I like this camera because it’s small, unobtrusive, and takes better pictures than my phone. I like that I can switch out lenses. I use two: Canon EF-M 22mm f/2 STM and Sigma 30mm F1.4 DC DN. The Sigma takes better photos but is heavier and bigger, but that’s also true of carrying a dedicated camera around. I never regret doing it, but I don’t always choose to. I do know, however, that an even bigger, heavier, better camera would just sit on my shelf more.
1200 days of Armoury A-013 Desktop PC with an NVidia 3070 and 32 gigs of ram
If your computer doesn’t have to be portable, you can spend so much less money and get so much more computer with a gaming PC. It’s required less tinkering than I figured it would, and it handles everything I throw at it.
1300 days of Kobo Libra H20
It’s the first Kobo I’ve owned to make it over the 2 year mark (that was often my fault, not Kobo’s). It’s also the first Kobo to feel better out of a case than in it. I like the larger size screen and how easy it is to get library books and PDFs on the thing.
$0.18 a day and getting cheaper.
2500 days of Nintendo Switch
My exhaustive review: The only console I tell every human being to buy and I’ve been right every year. What a home run generation for Nintendo, for gaming, and gamers new and old. This has been Nintendo’s longest home console generation, and they stuffed it with charming and heavyweight hits on a constant basis.
If my Switch died today I would have paid $0.11 a day for it. Worth every penny.
3000 days of New Nintendo 3DS XL
My exhaustive review: the most delightful handheld gaming console of all time. Still a heavyweight when compared to contemporary handhelds. Lower resolution games lean on our imagination, this trick works if your heart is open to being moved. Okay battery life.
If I retired the 3DS today, it would have cost me $0.08 a day. A steal in any economy.
Leave a comment