I finally did the thing I've been putting off since roughly 2019: I opened the bottom drawer of the desk in the office and dumped it out on the floor to see what was actually in there. My wife has been asking about this drawer for at least two years. "It doesn't open all the way," she said, which is true, because it is packed with dead phones.
Here's the inventory, more or less in order of acquisition: a black iPhone 4 with a cracked screen protector that's somehow still stuck on there, a Nexus 4 that I bought used off Craigslist in 2013 for forty bucks, a Moto X that I genuinely loved and still kind of miss, two generations of iPhone SE, a OnePlus that I bought during a phase where I was convinced flagship pricing was a scam (it is, mostly, but that's a different post), and no fewer than eleven charging cables in three different connector formats. Micro-USB. The old wide Lightning. And a tangle of USB-C ones that I can't tell apart because apparently USB-C cables come in like six different power and data specs now and none of them are labeled.
None of these phones turn on anymore. I plugged in three of them just to check, out of some dumb hope, and nothing. Not even the little charging animation. They're just bricks now, paperweights with a camera bump.
So why do I still have them? I've thought about this more than the question deserves. Part of it is that trade-in programs always felt like a scam when the phone was actually worth something, and by the time I got around to trading it in, it was worth nothing, so why bother. Part of it is that these things have my photos on them, or I think they do, and even though everything's backed up three times over I have some irrational fear that the backup is wrong and the only real copy of a photo from a trip in 2014 is sitting on a phone with a dead battery in a drawer.
And part of it, honestly, is that I don't trust the recycling. I took a box of old electronics to a Best Buy dropoff once, years back, and stood there watching the guy just toss it in a bin behind the counter, no receipt, no serial number logged, nothing. Maybe that's fine! Maybe that's exactly how it's supposed to work and I'm being paranoid about a company harvesting rare earth metals from my old Nexus 4. But it didn't feel like recycling, it felt like throwing something away in a slightly more expensive building.
There's a specific kind of guilt that comes with a drawer like this, too, that I don't think gets talked about enough. Every one of these phones represents a version of myself that thought this particular purchase mattered. The OnePlus was supposed to be the smart, principled choice. The Moto X was going to be the underdog phone that proved you didn't need Apple or Samsung. None of that turned out to matter even a little, and now they're just weight in a drawer that doesn't close.
I ended up keeping four of them anyway. The iPhone 4 stays because it was my first smartphone and I'm sentimental about exactly one piece of consumer electronics in my life and that's apparently it. The Moto X stays because I keep telling myself I'll put a custom ROM on it as a weekend project, which I have been telling myself since roughly 2017. Everything else went into a shoebox destined for an actual e-waste facility, the kind that gives you a certificate, not a Best Buy bin.
The cables I sorted by connector type into a ziploc bag, which took about twenty minutes and made me irrationally happy in a way that probably says something about where my brain is at fifteen years into writing a blog nobody's paying me to write. If you'd told 2011 me that in fifteen years I'd still be manually sorting charging cables by connector standard, I don't think he'd have believed you'd still need to. He'd have assumed we'd figured out one cable by now. We have not figured out one cable.
Anyway. If your drawer looks like mine, I'm not going to tell you to go clean it out, because I put it off for seven years and the world kept turning. But there is something to be said for finally seeing the floor of a drawer again.