When it comes to purchasing pieces of technology, my philosophy is to choose the product that provides just enough capability. The laptop my parents bought for me in college was a netbook—I could have asked for something with a larger screen, or a more powerful processor, or a more generous hard disk, but I knew that school work rarely asked more of computers than basic word processing. When tablets became popular and the iPad mini came out, I still chose to get the Nexus 7, which was a lesser package in perhaps all aspects except two, where it mattered for me: price and display quality (should be of high resolution and color accuracy).
Yet when I was presented the opportunity to choose just about any phone I could have (as a gift), I swallowed all semblances of consumerist guilt and picked the glamorous iPhone. I rationalized it by thinking, hopefully objectively, that it truly was the best-in-class in the product attributes I cared about.
In particular, I was enchanted by the device’s camera module. Until I had the phone, I had stubbornly kept on using a sturdy six-year-old Sony digicam, and I did not mind that it was not ‘cool’, so long as I was able to take ‘proper’ photos. Little did I know that technology had advanced faster than I thought, and in six years’ time a tiny camera module in the corner of a slim, shiny block of a phone had already outclassed a dedicated device more than twice its size.
