By Jack Edwards
If you’re looking for a cell phone with all the convenience of carrying a boat anchor in your pocket, I recommend the iPhone 6 plus. Let me recount my cellular journey from the practical to the preposterous.
It was 2007. Phones were getting small, really small. In fact, they were getting so tiny that people with normal sized hands were having difficulty using them. People were hiring chipmunks to dial their phones for them. It was in this era of unobtrusively small phones that Apple first released the iPhone. It was much bigger than the others. Huge in fact. It stuck out like an aircraft carrier tied up at the local marina. “It’s about the size of a candy bar,” we kept hearing people say like a mantra. This sounded reasonable. We liked candy bars. Of course, few of us carried candy bars around in our pockets, but we still liked them. And sadly, we were all too comfortable with them. Sooooo, okay. We’ll end our quest for convenience and start carrying Hersey’s sized phones around.
Thus began the slow creep. We were lobsters in the pot. The water was slowly warming around us. The iPhone 4 was not much bigger. The iPhone 5 bigger still, but not by much. It was, after all, an iPhone 5. The sleekest, coolest phone on the planet. Then came the 6. Hello! The 6 was really stepping out there. The iPhone 6 was noticeably larger than the 5. Sure it was thinner, but this was one large phone. And larger still was The Behemoth – the iPhone 6 plus. I actually laughed out loud when I first saw it.
There is absolutely no excuse for anyone to buy an iPhone 6 plus. None. So I am naturally embarrassed to confess that I bought one. It’s an electronic monstrosity. The technological “Tall man” of the circus freak show. Sticking an iPhone 6 plus into your pocket is like pulling a Hummer in a compact parking space. It cannot be done with any semblance of grace or dignity.
I know a sign of maturity is the ability to step up and take responsibility for one’s actions. Not to shift the blame. So, imagine the guilt I feel blaming others. First is someone I’ll refer to as “Tim” because his name is Tim. Tim showed me his iPhone 6 plus and declared that it was the best thing since the invention of sliced bread. Then there was “Katy.” Katy is like the Mikey kid from that old Life cereal commercial that didn’t like anything. But guess what? Yeah, she was waving her new iPhone 6 plus around like she’d discovered the Sacred Chalice. The salesman at the store didn’t do me any favors either. He told me I could bring it back if I didn’t like it. He failed to mention this would involve a “restocking fee” equivalent to the gross national product of Uruguay.
The end result is that I am now walking around talking into phone roughly the size of a sheet of plywood.
True story: I was using my phone the other day, holding it in one hand, as one might do with, say, a portable cellular phone. And I when I reached across the screen to tap an app in the upper left corner of the screen, I thought I pulled a muscle in my thumb. I’m serious. I actually thought my effort to make that stretch might necessitate physical therapy.
My parting advice is that if you too decide to throw sanity into the abyss and buy an iPhone 6 plus, when the salesperson asks you if you want to purchase “AppleCare,” ask him if it includes medical.