After five years, I was still happy with my phone, even though its battery had started the inevitable process of slowing to a stop. But Donald Trump’s tariff nonsense pushed me to make a decision: buy a new phone or fix the old one now, before the prices go up. The answer was clearer than ever – I replaced the battery.

I have an iPhone 12 Mini, a size Apple no longer makes. It’s small and light, which is what I want from a phone. When it came out, our reviewer found that the battery died on him every evening. I use my phone less than most, and so this was not actually a problem for me – until this year. My battery had degraded by 80 percent, which meant that my phone did actually run out of battery at the end of the day unless I switched on “low power mode” early.

Apple has designed its iPhones to be disposable, largely because Jony Ive is an asshole obsessed with “sleekness,” a concept I do not find impressive. Its phones’ actual functions haven’t kept up with the constant churn of iPhone models. For a while now, each major iPhone review has had the theme of “a set of very nice but ultimately minor changes” from the previous model. The changes haven’t been to the phone part of …

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