Apple gave its big “here’s all the new iPhone stuff we’re releasing” announcement on September 10. Part of $DAYJOB is to watch those, and it had me thinking: what do I really do with my personal phone?
When I need a phone For Work Purposes, the iPhone stands out as the winner. A company can do literally anything to provision one of those highly-capable units and it will rise to the task every time. Fantastic performance, (usually) multi-day battery, and a plethora of accessories and compatible bits. If you hate tinkering, don’t want to think about it too hard, and need something that Just Works for almost any occasion, iPhone is the answer.
My $DAYJOB-provided phone works spectacularly well. It has full Mobile Device Management (MDM) installed on it, a VPN the office manages, and plenty of “you will use only [these] apps” in the management panel. It carries my digital keys for accessing the office, provides me ~60% of the access and capability that my laptop would, and ensures I’m always reachable during my on-call rotations. (Yes, I’m on-call for things. That part kinda sucks.)
This is good news! Having a company-managed and company-provided handset keeps me from doing “personal stuff” on my work phone and work stuff on my could-be-compromised-by-random-goons personal phone. I love this arrangement and request it of every company that wants to get ahold of me in an official way “off the clock.” When I look over at my personal phone, I start questioning whether I need the latest iPhone Pro model. There are almost zero days where I’m doing anything more strenuous than watching content (YouTube, Netflix, etc). Most of what I do is listen to music, navigate with mapping software, and… browse the internet. Oh! And use signal.
So… what then do I need a super-powerful phone in my personal life for? I don’t find myself carrying around a dock like with Samsung Dex. I have used a bluetooth keyboard and mouse with my phone for international travel, but if I’m traveling for work, that’s what the laptop is for. Typing on-phone while I’m flying somewhere is a limited luxury and it still requires an internet connection.
Let’s lay out the requirements then, and see what I really need out of a phone, rather than guessing:
I’ll organize the following lists in terms of frequency / importance for “normal” daily functioning.
Now that we have the list, let’s consider what the options are.
That… actually seems to handle the core services I absolutely need on my phone. I can use the mobile web browser to do stuff like my banking and credit card apps, access socials, etc.
The big question remains about maps. Maps are now also a mix of business directories and locations. I could try using OsmAnd for community maps, but the issue is that those are always behind. Google and Apple at least have monetary incentives to keep their mapping software updated and active.
I currently have ~800GB of combined/family data stored in iCloud. Looking at the rest of my data, I’ve got quite a bit of music downloaded, so I’ll have to see what that looks like.
…
About 14GB of downloaded music. That’s not terrible.
iCloud drive says I have ~5GB of “files”. Mail is around 200MB (and I already have that moved elsewhere). My personal photos are approximately 178GB… and Apple-Messages content is 26GB.
Looking finally at offline maps, I have about 3GB of the PNW saved, but that will absolutely vary when I need to travel to other locations.
This is starting to look… possible. Like, really possible.
It looks like I have three things that I really need to replace: Photos, Maps, and Music.
To research: