I finally succumbed.
For two absurdly simple reasons.
On iPhone XR[1] launch day, at 10 am, there were very few people in the Apple store[2] I visited.
"I've been here for two hours," a salesman told me. "And I haven't spoken to a single customer until now."
He thought there'd be long lines.
"We had four people out there at 8 this morning," he admitted.
The second thing that sent me over the XR edge was that, on launch day, this store had every single color at every single GB level.
Also: Apple's iPhone XR: The Reasonable choice[3]
I could actually look at the phones, see if they matched my eyes and shorts, and take one away with me. How often does that ever happen on launch day?
Naturally, I chose the black XR. Those blues and yellows were little loud for first thing in the morning.
I didn't bother practicing with it in the store. I'd already chatted about it with an Apple store employee on a previous visit[4].
So now I picked it up once, turned it around to see both sides and decided that this would be the time I'd part ways with my special cracked-screen iPhone 6, may it rest in peace in a drawer.
What, then, does it feel like to have Apple's latest phone after several years of slumming it?
You May Need To Buy New Shorts.
For the first few days, I kept getting out of the car and, shortly afterward, not finding my XR in my pocket.
It didn't look that much bigger when I compared it to the