Life After iPhone On The Weekend

This is the third post¹ in what I guess I can now call a series.

My weekends are largely spent playing with my kids and going to various locations with our family. Occasionally a dinner out. Maybe some errands or tasks around the house. The only reason I would really need my phone on the weekend is to take pictures. There are many times before this experiment where I’ve left the house with just my Apple Watch so I wasn’t expecting too many issues.

Things That Happened

• As much as I try, if my iPhone is nearby I will grab it out of habit to respond to a message, read some news, or kill an idle moment… I would have to move my iPhone to somewhere inconvenient to get over this;
• I recently changed the mesh network in our house and the new hardware’s app is iPhone-only. I have been regularly monitoring which devices are connected to which Wi-Fi repeater and have just been using my iPhone for this. I do not anticipate checking this regularly after the first couple of days;
• I was trying to plan a visit with a friend for the upcoming week and was exchanging a few lengthy messages with him throughout the day. I ended up grabbing my phone to type out messages to him - I could have used my iPad for this but the phone was nearby;
• We went to the zoo and there was no way I wasn’t going to take photos. I could have taken my camera with me but it is much larger, much more inconvenient, and not so much better at taking pictures that it I feel it is necessary. I brought the phone with me and used the phone for CarPlay on our drive and for taking photos but otherwise it stayed in my pocket;

I suspected photography would be the most noteworthy shortcoming of this experiment and that has been the case in several situations - whether it was actually bringing my iPhone explicitly to take photos or being without it when I wanted to take a photo of something. The performance on the last few iPhone has been so good that the only real reason I have been upgrading has been for the camera. I have an Olympus micro four-thirds camera that does take very nice photos but for the most part, the iPhone X photos are fantastic. I still do use my camera but well over 75% of all of my photos over the last two or three years have been taken with my iPhone.

I am going to go keep going with this for the next week or so and see what else comes up before I try to really conclude on anything. Going Apple Watch-only at this point doesn’t seem possible. Aside from the fact that you need the iPhone to setup the Apple Watch, a secondary device seems like a requirement but that really shouldn’t be a surprise. If anything is surprising so far, it’s that I’m confident I could make the LTE Apple Watch + LTE iPad setup work.

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