So I gave up today. Officially. I have been trying to buy a Nexus 4 since the second week of November and I am done refreshing the Google Play Store like it's a Ticketmaster queue for a band I don't even like that much.
Quick recap for anyone who hasn't been following my sad little saga: Google put out the Nexus 4 back in mid-November, made by LG, unlocked, no contract, $299 for the 8GB and $349 for the 16GB. Those prices are genuinely great for what the phone is — quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro, 4.7 inch screen, stock Android 4.2. On paper it's one of the best deals in phones this year, maybe the best. In practice it might as well not exist, because you cannot buy the thing.
Every restock I've caught (and I've caught maybe four of them now) the phone is gone in under ten minutes. Sometimes less. I had it in my cart on a Tuesday afternoon a couple weeks back, got all the way to the payment page, and by the time I clicked through the 16GB had vanished and it kicked me back to a "currently unavailable" listing. That's not a supply chain hiccup, that's a company completely misjudging demand, or maybe not misjudging it and just deciding scarcity is a marketing strategy. I genuinely can't tell which and at this point I don't think it matters to me anymore.
I bring this up not to whine (okay, a little to whine) but because it says something about where phone buying is right now that I find kind of funny. We spent years with carriers subsidizing everything and locking you into two-year contracts, and the one time a company puts out a genuinely unlocked, reasonably priced phone, nobody can actually get one. My friend Priya has been trying just as long and switched to just setting a calendar reminder for restock rumors, which honestly is more organized than anything I've done.
A word on why I even wanted one
I'm still on an original Galaxy Nexus and it's fine, it does the job, but the battery life has gotten noticeably worse over the last few months (as these things do) and I wanted something closer to stock Android without paying Verizon or AT&T another two years of my life. The Nexus 4 lacking LTE is the one real ding against it and I don't even care that much — I'm on wifi for most of my day anyway, my commute is twenty minutes on a train with terrible signal regardless.
Anyway. I've decided to just wait until January and see if the restocks calm down, or if I get impatient I'll look at the Nexus 7 as a consolation and keep nursing the Galaxy Nexus along a bit longer. Not exactly the tech-blogger dream of always having the newest thing, but that's honestly fine.
Separately: I saw somewhere that Microsoft's Surface Pro pricing finally leaked out properly a couple weeks back, $899 for the 64GB and $999 for 128GB, launching sometime in January. I have mixed feelings about that price. It's a full Windows machine with a pen, sure, but that's iPad-plus-keyboard-cover money for something that still needs a kickstand on a table to be usable. I'm curious about it, not sold on it. Ask me again in January when actual reviews exist instead of spec sheets.
One more small thing before I close the laptop for the night: I noticed a bunch of "the world is totally going to end on the 21st" posts making the rounds again this week, tied to that whole Mayan calendar thing. I'm not going to spend any words debunking it because smarter people than me already have, repeatedly, but it is a little funny that we're ten days out from a date that's mostly famous now for being an internet joke rather than anything anyone actually believes. My uncle texted me asking if he should be worried. I told him to worry about his phone plan instead.
That's it for tonight. Cold here, coffee's gone cold too, and I still haven't given up entirely on that Nexus 4 no matter what I said in paragraph one.