My car is now fully sorted at over 80k. It's finally living up to the promise of Acura -- steady, strong, reliable. Of course as a 2014 car from a model run that started in 2009, it is also hopelessly outdated. The nav and audio are looking decrepit, connecting my phone is an adventure is pointlessness. I fail to understand why your auto infotainment has to be stuck at the point you bought it. Why cannot this get upgraded like virtually all other electronics? Still, I'd like to get 2 or 3 more years of no car payments out of it.
My new phone (Moto G6) is hanging in there. It is roughly on par with my old phone functionally, though a bit faster and with what seems like nearly double the battery life. Android remains a usability dumpster fire, and until now I have successfully fought off Apple, but...
There is only one thing that would make me buy an Apple device and that is if the price was Free. Well, as a 25th anniversary gift from work, I received an Apple iPad. I am treating it as an experiment. The best outcome is that it replaces my laptop during travel. The worst is that it replaces my ancient Samsung tab which can barely play solitaire without lagging and whos primary use is as an alarm clock and kindle reader. More to come.
I have not cut the cord with cable and I am suspicious of how much it actually would save me. I suspect not much. If I switched to internet service only, the first thing Charter would do is jack up the price of it. Then, let's say there were 5 pay services I wanted to subscribe to at $10-12/month, I would probably not be saving all that much money. Does 5 seem like a lot? Remember virtually every broadcast and cable network is building their own service with a plan to no longer licence stuff to Netflix or Amazon. That's gonna get worse, too. I do wish Charter would come out with something to replace that god awful, 1980s-era cable box. I gotta figure everything it does could fit on a chip now. Of course, at the rate they're losing customers, they have bigger problems. No idea how all this is going to fall out.
In truth, virtually all my tech is need of upgrade. My laptop is multiple years old; the touchpad is balky and the power cord is flaky. My DSLR, a Canon EOS, is hanging in there, but honestly it has never taken the same quality photos as my old Nikon; probably due to a poorer, lens, yes, but I understand Fuji is doing some amazing stuff with their latest line of mirrorless cameras and lenses. Even my beautiful Panasonic 65" plasma -- last of the plasmas -- is long in the tooth and aching to be replaced by an 85" smart 4k OLED. Maybe a wholesale tech-life upgrade is in order. Not this year, though. I can only afford to piss away one small fortune at a time.
