IThe Cruelty of Newest New Versions

Susan G Holland
The Story Hall
Published in
3 min readAug 27, 2024

Improvement is what they advertise.
What they really are doing is COMPETING for profit.

https://share.icloud.com/photos/02cp-gfGoxXoH_3hY1-BeWHDg

© SGH draft July 9–2024

TOO MANY CHOICES. <check link

So Many Choices! The whole history of apple phones!

It’s worth reading the “overchoice” study in the link above.

REMEMBER when you met your first infant? Maybe it was a baby brother or sister, or maybe it was your first child. A little baby comes hungry into a world of choices. What is vital is food.

You know what happens when a tiny newborn is hungry. You are driven to solve that need by the urgent screaming of hunger coming from that little mouth!

From the get-go, humans are born into a world of choices. Helpfully, the newborn is kept from looking at all those choices at once. Mostly it wants to eat with its eyes closed; then blessed sleep. And then there is all that crying again and food is not all the baby needs. It needs new panties!

From the newborn, let’s speed forward eighty-some years to the grandparent whose eyes are a little blurry and who can’t hear well.
Now this grandparent has had a busy and complex life. The accomplishments and solutions of life are demanding and are truly without end!

Say you are a grandma like me…and you use hearing aids and multiple spectacles, and a cane, and above all, you use kind others to lead you over the choices you must make every day.

You have choices. Myriad choices! Vast multiples of choices.And one choice is what you decide to use to communicate!

THE choice these days ? >>>>>”you HAVE to choose a cell phone! It’s how we ALL talk to each other these days. “

Even old people have to use a cell phone. Even if they are deaf, dumb, or blind! Even if they are suffering from early Dementia! Alzheimers!

When does a person no longer need a cell phone? When they are dead.

What kind of cell phone do they need? The one “everyone” uses this year.

How fast can a granny learn to use this year’s cell phone? ? ummmmmm?

I understand that the number of people over 70 will be a HUGE percent of our population next year.

How, I ask you, will these people use cell phones if the manufacturers keep adding tricky options and new formats and updated style if it changes in front of their eyes?

Attention, Cell Phone Makers:

Make one that is simple and will stay the same for a long time.
It does not need to be cool. Never mind the color. Just make the font size large and the microphone clear. Make the words easy to read, and do not change the colors or the font just for fun. Seniors need consistency.

You would sell a lot of cell phones to a lot of people if you could make them like that. If they could spend this year learning how to use them and then keep using them the same way next year. And the next year.

Keep the buttons in the same place, for heaven’s sake! Do not change the qwerty buttons. Keep the punctuation simple and easy to find. Let them always be there. You could call your new format Same Old. Old people wouldn’t mind if it’s not chic. We just want to write a note to our kids, or place a call to our doctor. We would like our mail to be in the same place each day.

Thank you.

Your public will thank you , and you will sell a lot of these things. We old folks die All The Time. Other ones get to be old All The Time.

©SGHolland 2022

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Susan G Holland
The Story Hall

Student of life; curious always. Tyler School of Fine Art, and a couple of years’ worth of computer coding and design, plus 87 years of discovery. Now in WA