If you need an antidote to the hype over Apple's new iPhone, Sam Graham-Felsen provides just the thing at Good. He used to be an iPhone fanatic, but no more, and he swears he's not going back. But this isn't an Android-is-better screed. His phone of a choice is now a "boring little Nokia," and it's pretty much just a phone. Graham-Felsen explains that he worked on President Obama's digital team in Chicago in 2007 and became one of those people who couldn't go two minutes without checking his smartphone for something, anything.
His epiphany came after he read Thoreau's Walden, which, of course, he had downloaded on his iPhone. "I was almost embarrassed by the degree to which Walden felt directed toward me," he writes. "And when I came across his famous verdict—'Men have become tools of their tools'—I felt like an enormous tool." He traded down, with few regrets. "It feels a little like getting a new contact lens prescription: Things that were blurred together feel sharper and more distinctly colored. And of course, I’m no longer engaged in half-conversations with the people in front of me and half-conversations with the Internet." Full column here. (More Apple stories.)
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