Tobold's Blog
Thursday, May 06, 2021
 
Worthless

Yesterday my new iPhone 12 Pro Max arrived. Setting it up by transferring the data from my old iPhone 7 Plus was very simple, mostly automated by bringing the 2 phones in contact, and scanning the image on one of them with the other. I then moved my SIM card to the new phone, and everything is working fine. I had already bought an original Apple Magsafe charger, and a third-party stand for it, so I know have a very nice magnetic stand and charger on my desk to keep the phone when I am at home. So only one problem remained: What should I do with the old iPhone?

After a bit of research, I found that Apple is actually offering trade-ins: Send them your old phone for store credits. Obviously I didn't want to trade in for a new phone, but maybe for an AirTag or other accessory? So I found out my old iPhone's IMEI (it's engraved on the SIM tray in very, very, very small letters) and entered it into the Apple Trade In website. In answered all the questions about the state the phone is in, which is very good, the thing doesn't have a scratch on it. And Apple told me what my old iPhone 7 Plus in perfect condition is worth: Absolutely nothing! They offered to recycle it for free if I would send it in.

The only positive thing about this is that gives me a good argument to justify having bought a new phone. :) But in reality I don't agree that a 5 year old iPhone in good condition is already completely worthless. So I looked around for alternatives and found Swappie.com. They evaluated the residual value of my old phone at €135, which is actually a bit more than I would have thought. So agreed to sell them my phone, which works by them sending you a label for a delivery service company to come and get the parcel from your home and sending it to them. They then check if the phone is as described and transfer the money onto your account. I'll see if that works. But hey, it can only be better than Apple's offer!

Comments:
The iPhone 12 Pro Max costs like... A lot. I am pewrfectly aware that you're fine with spending that money because you can affor id (which makes sense) but... What does it make worth that amount money, for you? Maybe the camera? Do you take a lot of pictures? Shooting 4K videos maybe?

I really don't get how such an expensive phone makes any sense, frankly.
 
I don’t think with Apple it is necessarily about the phone itself. It is more about buying yourself into the Apple ecosystem, where things tend to work very well together. Besides the phone, I have an iPod and the Apple TV. I just bought the first AirTag as well. And the consumer experience is markedly different and much smoother than with the Android phones and tablets I had in the past.
 
Coincidentally my wife just got a new Iphone 12 yesterday. It has one rather unfortunate omission. They dispensed with the fingerprint sensor entirely so you are supposed to always use face id for unlocking your phone. In theory that is great but it doesn't work so well during a pandemic when everyone wears masks. Apple pay is nightmare when you have to type you password in every time. Apple released a patch which claimed to fix the issue but as far as I can tell it only works if you have an apple watch as well! Pretty embarrassing imho.
 
The ecosystem makes sense, but not with a $1100 price tag, in my opinion. Android may not be as fancy as Apple (it's not) but I've got multiple Android-powered devices at home and I've yet to find any issue. 3 tablets, 3 smartphones, 2 Chromecast, 2 smart-TV's, 1 Chromebook. Everything works perfectly fine. I can easily manage my kids' accounts for school and/or fun purposes, switch accounts, etc. And the most important thing, at least for me: my device is mine and I can really customize it to a very deep level. Something that Apple doesn't want, at all: their products are their, you aren't even allowed to repair a phone where/how you want.
 
Yeah, facial recognition while wearing a mask isn't working great.

Recently in went into a bank, and I put my mask on as I entered. It struck me that if I had done that two years ago, I would probably have been arrested. Now I'd get into trouble if I entered a bank *without* wearing a mask. :)
 
I recently bought new android phones for my wife and myself. The pair of them came in at under $500, and they are far more capable than we need. Whenever they are finally obsolete, I will get new phones that probably make our current ones look like rocks with "FONE" crudely painted on them, and I can almost guarantee I won't be spending more that $500 for that pair of phones.

The only reason we upgraded from our previous phones, that were given to us for free when we signed up for phone planes, is that our old ones were starting to have trouble playing Pokemon Go at max settings . . .


 
Personally I dislike Apple, considering them to be even worse than Microsoft when it comes to a "closed box" approach. I used to have an iPad (long dead) and I replaced it with a cheap Samsung tablet. Is it as good? No, but for my use I can't really tell the difference, it's significantly cheaper and I can just connect it to anything with an USB cable and transfer files from/to it, even from linux (which is the OS on all my computers). With the iPad when I wanted to transfer photos on it the only way was Dropbox, and videos was VNC server mode.
I always joke that "you can do anything on MacOS/iOs, as long as it's what apple wants you to do" :)
 
> I always joke that "you can do anything on
> MacOS/iOs, as long as it's what apple
> wants you to do"


Not to mention the repair costs. The iPhone 12 Pro Max glass replacement costs $329. I'm all for being part of an ecosystem but this is just insane.
 
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