A story of the iPhone amongst us
I mentioned a couple of days ago about why I got my 10 year old a SIM/Phone number. This cascaded into a discussion with the eight year old that 1) she already had a SIM in her phone I use for certain testing projects and it’s on airplane mode, 2) she didn’t need to take a phone to school, 3) no her 10 year old sister was not sitting playing games on her phone at school.
tl;dr story of Paul’s kids that nobody’s making you read.
My kids have my old devices, they’re primarily used to play Roblox and Skyping a few friends. Basically a game system where they can occasionally call and they’ve been fine with it until the oldest took hers to school to communicate with us in the event of a fourth freaking bomb/gun scare in a week. Yes, there were three.
The 8yo snuck hers to school yesterday. I shouldn’t say snuck because I occasionally let them have them in the car, but I’d said not to bring it and she did and then on the ride in she had it… eh, whatever, I knew she just wanted to show her classmates after school that she had an iPhone because nobody believed she’s had one since she was five and they’ve been asking me if she has one every third or forth pickup. Evidently this is Something Important(TM) – ok, whatever.
I picked her up and she had everything including phone and she looked at me and said “dad… do… do I have… do we have… are we Android people?”
I laughed because it sounded a little like a horrified accusation.
I asked her what she thought that meant and what her friends thought it meant. Turns out nobody at her age judged but they were astounded that she was in possession of something that was not an Apple iPhone. This was something most had only heard of as all their parents are iPhone weilders.
I actually doubt that’s the case, but in an 8-year-old’s world I think it is.
She’s been saying she had an iPhone for the past two years and was astounded that it wasn’t. Absolutely floored. She gathered this was a status symbol, but also admitted she didn’t know any other phones. She asked why we had called it an iPhone when it was actually a Samsung Galaxy Note 8 in a freaking awesome case.
I told her she was a little baby she couldn’t say Android, sounded like “annoyed,” and we had two iPads and an Amazon fire kids and whatever else I was either working on or reviewing. She could say iPad (as “ah paad”,) and she could say something resembling iPhone (“eye phoh”) so it became the iPhone. It was also significantly easier to say “get off the iPhone and eat” than look at the device and say something like “get off the Amazon Fire Kids tablet!” or “get off the Ipad” or “Get off the random Android tablet that appeared mysteriously”.
She’s been playing Roblox, Minecraft, and a couple of other little games for years now on the device. I have a bunch of devices about the house, mostly not Apple because, well, I like Android.
We had “the talk” about people like what people like and that there are substantively very little differences to the consumer these days. Just what you pay, and how it performs and that over a decade ago when I started writing about phones there was a very significant reason I went Android, but that at this point at her age it doesn’t matter because both play Roblox the exact same.
Eh, now she’s known as the Android kid… well, for a day… she didn’t even think of bringing it today because it’s pajama and stuffed animal day and that’s a lot more important than a hunk of tech she can’t even use at school.
Should be noted, while she had a phone in airplane mode, a qurter of her classmates of 8 year olds are packing devices. All think they’re iPhones. Not all are correct.
