Silence is golden!

I do plan to buy a new desktop computer soon: the one I have is 7 years old, and it just got too slow. I am waiting for the free Windows 7 upgrade to come out. But when I do buy it, it’ll be on the expensive side based on what I want.

My laptop is newer – only a couple of years – but it isn’t my. It belongs to my employer, and they do tend to upgrade every two years or so. At least they did until the current crisis.

My cell is several years old, but I am happy with it. I can use it internationally, and this is enough. The only feature I want from my cell is that I can use it for the phone calls. I don’t really need it for anything else.

No plans about iphones. None of my friends has it – they aren’t much into gadgets either. Even if they had, I am not the envious type. Some people can afford more than others. For all I know the other person has an inheritance I don’t know about or is in debt. I have friends who are relatively rich, and I have friends that are relatively poor. The former can afford more than I do, the latter can afford less. Regardless, I can afford a new iphone, I just have no need or desire for one.

I don’t know, but for some reason I don’t particularly care about the gadgets. I do care about other stuff. I can spend $200 on a single visit to the Metropolitan opera (orchestra ticket+gas+tolls+parking). You save on one thing, you spend on another thing – as long as you can afford the total bill, you are fine.

I am actually glad people are buying. Think about Apple employees. If nobody had bought their stuff, how many more would lose their jobs?

“… buyer smashed his old iPhone with a hammer in celebration”
Now this is outrageous. I don’t like it when people deliberately destroy things that can still be used. Couldn’t they have given it to charity?

However, the fact of the matter is that I’ve been enjoying every feature that Sprint has to offer for $30/mo. for around 10 years now. Ask anyone and they’ve been paying 3 or 4 times as much as that each month. I was fortunate enough to cruise on the kindness of a Sprint customer support person.

Yes, I think that Sprint is wrong to raise my rate, but I’m paying what I should have been paying all along. And it’s still a huge discount compared to what people pay on other services.

Lastly, I had said that Sprint provided me with nothing more than they did previously. I’ve been a little wrong on that front… The phone has GPS (assisted by the network as well), and I found myself using it a couple times already. Earlier today while my wife has having foot surgery, I had a real web browser while I waited. I could do visit pages and do work that I couldn’t have before. There were no excuses about it rendering too slowly, waiting for javascript, etc.

It may be tough, but I think I can squeeze $25 worth of more productivity a month with it.

In all honesty, I have cut out everything else in my life that is of little use to me (like shopping), so having the new faster iPhone will increase my quality of life. But will having an extra 16 GB increase my quality of life that much? Questionable…

But my Virgin Mobile Pay-as-you-go phone cost me $20. I spend less than $20 a month for phone service. And as much as I want an iPhone, I don’t want the monthly bill.

The prepaid phone costs less for one year than most folks pay each month. I use the cell phone for my convience, not everyone else’s. Who has time to spend yapping or texting all day long?