So today's the day. iPhone 5s and 5c officially went on sale, and I walked past the line outside the Apple Store this morning on my way to get coffee, probably sixty, seventy people camped on the sidewalk at 9am, some of them clearly there since before dawn, huddled in hoodies with that specific look of people who have made peace with being uncomfortable for a t-shirt and a bragging right. A guy near the front was livetweeting his own wait, which felt very on-brand for 2013.
I didn't get in line. I want to talk about why, because it's not the reason I expected to have.
It's not the money, though $199 for the 5s (on contract, 16GB, and don't get me started on the fact that Apple still treats 16GB as a reasonable base storage tier in a world where iOS 7 alone eats a couple gigs) or $99 for the 5c isn't nothing. It's Touch ID. The fingerprint sensor built into the new home button is the headline feature this time around, more than the gold color option everyone's already sold out of, more than the faster A7 chip. And I keep going back and forth on it and landing in the same place: I don't want my fingerprint living inside a phone I'm going to lose in a cab eventually.
Apple says the print data gets encrypted and stored in something they're calling the Secure Enclave, walled off from the rest of the system, never uploaded anywhere. Fine. I believe that's the design intent. But a fingerprint isn't a password, you can't reset it if something goes wrong down the line, and "trust us, it's sandboxed" is exactly the kind of sentence that ages badly. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe in a year this is just how everyone unlocks their phone and I'll feel silly. I've been wrong about tech predictions before (I said nobody needed a tablet in 2010, so, you know, grain of salt). But right now, on day one, my gut says wait.
The other thing nagging at me is smaller and dumber: I updated my old phone to iOS 7 on Wednesday when it dropped, and I still haven't fully made peace with how it looks. The whole thing got flattened, no more skeuomorphic leather stitching, no more fake green felt in Game Center, just thin Helvetica Neue everywhere and these translucent panels that slide and blur. I get why they did it. The old look was starting to feel dated next to what Android and Windows Phone had been doing. But some of the app icons look like they were designed by committee at 2am, and the parallax effect where the wallpaper shifts under your icons when you tilt the phone genuinely made me a little queasy the first time I noticed it happening. I'm not the only one, there's a whole thread of people online comparing notes on iOS 7 motion sickness like it's a group medical condition. You can turn the parallax off in Accessibility settings, for what it's worth, buried under "Reduce Motion," which I only found because I went looking after feeling weird for twenty minutes straight.
Meanwhile my brother has been completely useless to me all week because Grand Theft Auto V came out last Tuesday and he has apparently not left his apartment except to buy groceries. Says it's the best-looking open world he's played, says the game made something like a billion dollars in three days, which if true is a genuinely absurd number for anything, let alone a video game. I haven't played it. Not really my genre. But I like that it's out there proving people will still pay full price and then some for a single-player experience when everyone keeps insisting gaming is all moving to free-to-play mobile stuff.
Anyway. No new phone for me today. I'll probably cave in six months once the initial bugs get shaken out and Touch ID either proves itself or gets quietly walked back in a future update. That's usually how it goes with me and new Apple hardware, skip the line, join later, act like it was the plan all along.