Why I won’t be buying Apple’s new iPhone 14

Apple’s new iPhone 14 will be officially available in South Africa from Friday morning, and I will not be getting one, for a number of reasons.

I have been using Apple’s premium device since 2007, when the late Steve Jobs said: “Today we are reinventing the phone… and we are calling it iPhone.”

My first iPhone 

I was among two or three people in South Africa who had Apple’s first iPhone which was not available in this country, having got it from a cousin in the US who stood in the long winding queues to buy it.

Like everybody else, I was hooked. 

The iPhone was the most beautiful gadget I had ever seen. It used technology others could merely dream of, like the touch screen, and with some saying it was the beginning of the end of the Nokia era which commanded the cellphone market.

Apple soared to new heights after the launch of the new iPhone, and people were buying the gadget in droves, including myself.

Not excited by iPhone 14

I used to queue at the iStore from 4am to be the first for the new iPhone, even up until last year. 

But since the launch of the new iPhone 14 by Apple a few weeks ago, I have just not been excited by what I saw.

For me, it was just more of the same, with no innovation – and the price really burns a whole in your pocket.

There have been iterative improvements, but even over a couple of generations, it hasn’t added up to anything radical, especially in the non-Pro models.

iPhone 14 brings modest improvements that are appreciated but not game-changing, like nitty-gritty camera improvements, car-crash detection and the support for satellite-based emergency messaging. (Hopefully you’ll never be in a situation where you’ll need to use the latter two.)

Big iPhones 

I normally like my phones large – the bigger the screen, the better, so it’s the iPhone Pro Max for me, but this comes at a massive price. 

As I penned the article for The Citizen earlier this month on the pricing of the new iPhone 14 in South Africa, you may just have to sell a kidney to get one.

The new iPhone 14 Pro Max costs a whopping R28 399 with 128GB storage, compared to the R23 699 of the iPhone 13 Pro Max last year.

That’s a lot of money for a phone that really has not changed much, and if you a person who also likes your big phones with more memory, than the 1TB iPhone 14 Pro Max will set you back R41 499. 

Have you removed your kidney yet?

Little tweaks 

I feel the “little tweaks”, like the dynamic island that Apple have made does not justify the massive price tag.

Sure, sure, there are other minor upgrades, but is it still worth that amount of money?

With Dynamic Island, it will be able to show different alerts and notifications that pop up throughout the day. And, it will be able to expand to notify you about calls, charging, messages, and more.

The Music app morphs into the Dynamic Island bar, and even expands into controls in specific apps, like the Phone or Apple Maps app.

Is iPhone 14 worth it?

But is that worth 28k?

The iPhone itself physically maintains the same design and shape, and I feel Apple has not innovated enough to warrant forking out wads of cash. 

Especially when some other brands like Huawei, Samsung, Oppo and Honor among others have taken smartphones to a different level all together.

Like the sucker I am, I probably will get the new iPhone 14 at a much later stage, when the hype over nothing wears down and the dynamic island becomes a deserted island.

Foldable phones 

But, when companies like Huawei are innovating with foldable phones like the Mate XS 2, Samsung with the Galaxy Z Fold 4 and Z Flip 4 and Oppo with its Find N, you begin to realise that Apple has a lot of catching up to do.

But, when they do eventually unveil a foldable phone, which seems to be all the rage now, how much will it cost?

You will probably have to sell every organ in your whole body, only to leave you with nothing but your sense of humour. 

But trust me, you won’t be smiling when you see the price.