When your phone suddenly dies, but it doesn’t surprise you. That shouldn’t be the theme of gadgets, but unfortunately it is these days. Things keep getting worse and worse quality wise, or durability wise perhaps. People just seem to accept it. Me included, from time to time.

My phone suddenly stopped working last week. My nice, but budget friendly, Motorola G84 5G. I bought it new last year in March through Amazon. And now, 18 months later I shut off the screen. Picked it up 20 minutes later and it wouldn’t turn on. For a while I already suspected it to be on the verge of breaking, Bluetooth already didn’t work, for example. And the touch screen was inaccurate on the lower half. But I wrote that off as it being a budget phone and I certainly didn’t expect it to die on me like it did.

I never understood much of the Android market. Which SoC chip is good. MediaTek whatever. Snapdragon so-and-so, sigh… What brand is nice? None are particularly nice. So it’s been trial and error ever since I decided mid-range Android phones were good enough for me.

Samsung’s Android sucks so bad I’ll never buy anything Samsung again. Oppo’s Android is fine as far as I know, but Oppo only sells shitty phones here. Motorola’s Android is kinda nice, feels like stock, with a few apps and features tacked on. Pretty good. So my last few phones have been Motorolas.

But last week I was in a pinch and immediately needed a working phone. A quick search online and I instantly got lost in the sea of perfectly crappy phones. I visited a few stores that evening but got frustrated with not knowing which phone was any good beyond the ‘higher number is better’ logic. Plus, all phones available have enormous ridiculous camera mountains on the back. Run old android, or the newest, which is riddled with shitty features from Google. I know that much…

And so I ended up in the Apple store and bought an iPhone 16 Plus. Kinda the base model. They even had a black one. Oh lucky me.