Why I still get excited about new hardware

Next month Apple will be coming out with new phones. I'm looking forward to it.

It's easy to be cynical these days about tiny upgrades, corporate entities sucking us dry for everything we're worth, planned obsolescence, and products that are merely incremental improvements over previous year models.

That's all partially or technically true.

But I'm still excited, and bear with me.

As a child I loved to tinker with hardware of any type. At one point I was gifted a digital Bible. It was about the size of a walkman tape recorder, and had a tiny screen that could only show a few lines at a time. There were also buttons for navigating through chapters and pages. It was a weird contraption, and not particularly useful. But I could search for words, and I could fiddle with the affordances and see things shift and change on my screen.

So too with a Casio watch I was gifted as a teenager. It had a tiny section for notes, a calculator, alarms, stopwatches, and more. Writing out notes on a watch, with only a few buttons on the side for typing out the alphabet—well it's not for the faint of heart. But I had something special. Words, captured and editable, on my wrist at all times. Even though the amount of space available was minuscule, the opportunities were endless. I could save passwords, notes, capture reminders.

Then came the Palm Pilot. Again, an old piece of hardware I was gifted. It was bad. Real bad. And I loved it. I could use the stylus to capture thoughts by hand, and its archaic letter recognition could convert that into type. I could save notes, capture ideas, and use a precursor to a digital computer as a way of being a second brain for my ever forgetful mind.

Of course it had the unfortunate issue of losing all data when the battery drained—an all too often occurrence. I tried to fight against it, baby the charger, watch the battery percent. But a device that forgets everything, well it's not a very useful second brain. Still I loved the idea of it.

All these things have a single point in common. They were pocketable. I could offset my physical world with something digital, carry it around. I was trying my best to be the inspector gadget of the late 90s and early 20s.

I was late to the iPhone party, joining with an iPhone 4s. But I did have an iPod Touch starting in 2010. And since then, I've enjoyed the possibility of using that small device to offset and capture things in the world that matter to me.

True, there's the infinity wells, the endless scrolling, the trap of social media—it's all there, in a device that offers all the possibilities of the world, both good and bad. But beyond that is an endlessly useful thing to have.

And then there's the cameras.

I've heard it said that the device shouldn't make the photographer. And that's true. There are many great artists who could use a Polaroid to capture ideas, based on understandings of lighting, perspective, thirds, and a million other things I don't get—and they'd capture photos that would be many times better than my own. But they're not mine. And the way I like to take pictures is to learn the art of photography while geeking out on the hardware and software capabilities.

A better lens, better light capture, faster shutter speed, all these things get me excited to take more photos, to see bits of the world and save them, and learn the principles of great photography.

I don't need the better iPhone every year to do that, but time and again I see a spike in photo capture for several months after the acquisition of a new model. I play with the latest settings, try to hold the essence of the subjects I see in the real world and capture a similitude of them for later—all that is fun.

That brings me to September. If the rumors are true we'll be getting an iPhone 18 Pro with an amazing camera. And we'll also be getting a foldable iPhone. It will not have the new amazing camera though, a limitation of the how thin it will be. And that's an interesting choice I'm thinking though. On the one hand the foldable holds the potential for something I've been thinking about for a while—an iPhone that doubles as an iPad mini. If (and I haven't heard a single rumor about this so I can't imagine it's happening) the new device supports an Apple Pencil—well I'd be sold in an instant.

I'm excited about the new hardware rumors, and plan to get an iPhone of some sort this year. The only thing I'm not sure of is whether I care about an amazing new image capture device, or whether the new form factor opens up possibilities I haven't been able to explore so far.

Yes, these are simple reason to be excited about buying something new, but I enjoy the possibilities just the same, and will be watching the event to see what new device I'll be carrying in my pocket.