Marianne Schultz

Well, not really. I’m not a very good poet.

Yesterday, AT&T revealed that it will be eliminating one of its text messaging plans, taking away the $10-for-1,000 messages plan as an option for new customers (existing customers, including me, will be grandfathered into this plan). This leaves AT&T’s unlimited text messaging plan priced at $20 per month (or $30 for family plans) as the only option available to new customers starting August 21.

Even though this won’t have any immediate financial impact on me, this change chaps my hide for a few reasons.

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I tweeted about my surprise seeing a woman at Starbucks rocking a first-generation iPhone earlier today since I realized I hadn’t seen anyone using one in a long time. Fellow MacRumors member Longofest replied that it was a good, solid design and I agreed, thinking of the spare first-gen iPhone that spends most of its time on my desk as an understudy for my iPhone 4 should anything catastrophic happen. Because I know in my heart of hearts that I couldn’t make do with just any phone, even temporarily, if I lost my iPhone 4.

That aside, I started thinking more about why I missed that first-gen iPhone so much. And I realized that it’s partially because technology seems to be moving so fast now that we never have the time to really appreciate a product before it’s replaced by a new model. Think about it – how many new cell phones, GPS devices, tablets and computers are released every year? Manufacturers want us to buy those new models and try to entice us with snazzy marketing conveying that the latest model is *the* one to have.

I won’t bore you with the details again but I was so very excited to get the first iPhone on that warm Friday evening in June 2007. I coddled that shiny new iPhone, installing a screen protector right away and trying out case after case after case to protect it.

The first iPhone was a perfectly good smartphone that handled email, web browsing, media playback and more with aplomb. It was sturdy and sleek, even by today’s standards for the most part. A little more than a year later, I convinced myself I needed the iPhone 3G because it was faster and had GPS. Less than a year after that, I convinced myself I needed the iPhone 3GS because it had an auto-focusing camera. And last summer I convinced myself I needed the iPhone 4 because it was faster yet, had an even better camera and the most beautiful display to date in an iPhone.

And I’ll probably go through this mental justification exercise again in September or October or whenever the iPhone 5 is coming out even though I love my iPhone 4 and it can already do more than what I need. Why? Partly because my day job is all about Apple and its products. And also because I’m not clearly strong enough to resist the “new is better” mindset that seems to pervade western society.

Where does it stop? Well, it could stop anywhere I want it to, of course. I could exercise some (well, an extraordinary amount, really) self-restraint and not get the iPhone 5. I could simply continue to enjoy the marvelously capable device that is the iPhone 4. But I do wish it had a bigger screen. And since my iPhone is my primary camera these days, an 8-megapixel sensor would be nice too.

Oh, hell.