Buying a new iPhone in China

There I was, finally in an Apple store upgrading my 4+ year old iPhone XR to a shiny new 15 Pro Max. Even though this was going to be considerably more than I’d ever spent on a phone, the in-store environment left a lot to be desired. There was some kind of iPhone tech demo going on in the centre of the store, with the presenter using a microphone and speaker setup that seemed to me to be unnecessarily loud. In addition to this, the relatively small number of people in the rest of the store were also creating a surprising amount of noise, thereby perhaps necessitating the use of the speaker for the tech demo and in turn requiring everyone else in the shop to raise their voices even more. This combination created a vibe similar to that of a Chinese railway station at rush hour, although with significantly fewer instant noodles in play, either way not so much what one might expect when buying a luxury product.

Then again, can the top iPhone even be considered a luxury product anymore, or is this just the new normal? Perhaps the in-store environment is deliberately kept below standard in order to normalise spending an enormous amount of money on an electronic gadget, to make the buying experience similar to buying a cheap steamed bun at the station before boarding a train.

I sat with my earplugs in, somewhat amazed by how loud the shop still was even with those in, and waited for my data to transfer from one phone to another. An older couple sat opposite me getting a 15 Pro Max each. Later on two older ladies sat next to me who were buying matching pink iPhone 15s. Maybe this is all not so unusual after all.

Either way my phone upgrade was long overdue. It had become deeply unreliable and regularly underperformed, negatively affecting how I was showing up. As Michael Jensen explains, when “dealing with an object that lacks integrity, … it creates those same characteristics in our lives”. Continuing to accept the increasingly negative effect my no longer fully functioning phone was having on my life was not an option.

I had decided not to upgrade to the iPhone 14 Pro Max when that was available as I very much liked the rumours about the new model getting a USB-C port and using the new 3nm chip. So I waited, and charged my phone 2-3 times a day, and carried around an external charger all summer while visiting Europe. My storage was completely full too, so I kept deleting apps until there were no more I could accept losing. I started going through my photos, deleting duplicates other unnecessary items. I started deleting chat histories on various social media apps regularly. Every time I did any of these it would free up a few gigabytes, just to be filled up again a short time later, resulting in warnings about more things needing to be deleted in order for the phone to function. In short, the thing desperately needed replacing.

When the long-awaited 15 arrived, the rumours about the port and the chip were confirmed to be true, but doubts immediately snuck into my mind amidst negative press related to possible overheating and data transfer issues. So I waited some more, as my mobile internet speed plummeted, my laptop started having more and more issues, and everything was starting to unravel.

Time then to bite the bullet, drop some cash, own the decision, start being able to rely on my phone functioning again and thereby immediately reducing my own “out-of-integrity behaviour”.

Time to focus on the positive, on new opportunities and possibilities, not on the negativity around keeping a device in use that is in desperate need of retirement.

A breath of fresh air.

Over the top? Perhaps, but also not really.