the other thing not enough people are talking about is how even what should be genuinely new and exciting tech is instead shackled to some mandatory internet-of-shit account, which makes it nigh impossible to care about. you might say that it's just the techy crowd who care about that, but i'm pretty sure the consumer industry relies on us to try these products out and then enthuse about them to our friends and family, and personally i've been doing just the opposite.

Insightful. My excitement comes when I replace my $100 used iPhone with another $100 used iPhone every few years. Guess what: It's just as exciting, and the price stays pretty much the same over time, despite the improvements. Of course the best phone I had was a Nokia Windows phone about a dozen years ago. Zeiss optics. Now that is a phone that I miss. Has Apple improved the camera optics lately?