I miss having a functional smartphone with me.

You may recall that I have GrapheneOS installed on my Google Pixel 6. The phone is stripped from anything Google besides the App Store (many of the apps I need are not available in other places) and the Camera (the camera that comes with GrapheneOS is basic at best). My smartphone hasn’t felt that “smart” for months.

My work iPhone seems magical, especially now. It scans my notebook pages to PDFs in one tap. It measures distances with the camera. It can take photos and edit them and post them to the blog and add descriptive text in one go. It has a functioning map that shows me the locations of nearby coffee shops, the hours they are open, and how to get there. It knows the weather and warns me when it’s going to rain. It even fits in my pants pocket.

I keep wrestling with my privacy shtick daily. Why am I doing this? What am I gaining out of it? How is it good for me? I’m not sure I know anymore. Yes, Apple has my data, and Google, and Amazon, and 20 other places. So what. As long as I don’t trust them to keep my data and I have my own backups… so what. Meanwhile, I have a blog with my thoughts, a YouTube channel with my face, and I’m considering a podcast with my voice.

The more I think about it, the more I wonder how long I can keep up with this.