So the iPhone 6 came out yesterday and I did not stand in a line for it, and I want to talk about why that felt weirder than I expected.
I've bought every iPhone since the 3G in a store, on launch day, in a line, at least once wearing a hoodie in July because I'm an idiot who doesn't check the weather. This year I just... ordered it online at midnight and went back to bed. My cousin texted me a photo from the line outside the Apple Store at the Galleria around 6am, maybe forty people deep already, and part of me felt this dumb pang of FOMO looking at it from my kitchen table with coffee. But mostly I felt fine. Mostly.
Here's the thing that's actually bugging me though, and it's not the line, it's the storage tiers. Apple killed the 32GB option this year. It's 16, 64, or 128 gigs now, no middle ground that makes sense. Sixteen gigs on a phone in 2014, when apps routinely run 100+ MB and you're shooting 1080p video by default, is basically a trap: you'll hit the wall in three months and spend the next two years deleting photos before every trip. But jumping to 64GB isn't a small step up, it's a hundred extra bucks over the base price. $199 to $299 on contract, $649 to $749 off contract. That's not "give people a reasonable middle option," that's "make the cheap one bad enough that people pay for the expensive one." I get why they did it. I still think it's a little cynical.
(Sidebar, completely unrelated: did anyone else notice Alibaba's IPO basically swallowed the entire tech news cycle this week? Priced at $68, opened around $92 on the NYSE Friday morning, same day as the iPhone launch, and for about six hours it felt like every single tech outlet had two headlines and nothing else. Jack Ma became one of the richest people in the world before lunch. Meanwhile Apple's biggest hardware launch of the year got shoved to the second story slot on some sites. Funny how that works.)
Anyway. Back to the phone I don't have yet. I went with 64GB gold, which — my wife made fun of me for the gold, said it looks like a phone a guy in Boca would own, and honestly she's not wrong, but the space gray one always looks like a smudged mirror within a week so I'm making peace with it. Delivery estimate says next Thursday. I'm mostly curious about the bigger screen honestly, not the fingerprint stuff or the NFC chip they're clearly setting up for some kind of payment thing down the road. I just want to read email without squinting, that's the whole ask.
The other thing nobody's really talking about yet is iOS 8 itself, which landed last Wednesday ahead of the phones. I put it on my 5s and the interactive notifications are genuinely great — replying to a text from the lock screen without unlocking is one of those small things that once you have it you can't believe you lived without. Widgets in the notification center are still half-baked though, most of the third party ones I tried just don't show up until you dig through a settings menu that's buried three taps deep. Feels like a 1.0 feature that got shipped a version early.
I don't really have a big unifying point here. It's launch weekend, the storage math annoys me, the gold phone was a mistake I've already accepted, and somewhere in midtown Manhattan there's a trading floor that just watched a Chinese e-commerce company do something no American tech company has ever done at that scale. Weird week. Good coffee this morning though, if that counts for anything.