My beloved had all sorts of problems with her Nokia mobile phone, and so she went for the last model made by Apple. We played with it this morning, but neither of us could figure out how to set it up. Bewildered, we fooled around with a few features we could master. “Happy about it?” she asked at some point. I gave her a blank look. “Well,” she explained, “now you can get to the Internet whenever you wish.” I shrugged my shoulders. “I need a tablet computer of my own,” I mumbled, “and the one made by Apple seems to be the best one around.” She looked a bit disappointed. “The trouble is that it will take me quite a bit of time to figure it out,” I continued. We were on the same page again. “Even Apple is beyond us by now,” I shook my head. When it comes to electronic gadgets, both of us are troglodytes, indeed. Either companies such as Apple will redouble their efforts at making their products user friendly, or they will lose us as customers in a decade or so. Little by little, even troglodytes get ever longer in the tooth.

Addendum (September 23, 2025)

History is kind of repeating itself. My Nokia mobile phone knocked out a couple of days ago, and a friend took me to Pazin yesterday morning to buy a new one. This time around, though, I decided to go for the newest technology available. And I bought Apple iPhone 17. Once again, this is the last one made by this august company. Ever since, I have been fooling around with it. Judging by my prowess with such things, it will take me a few months to master the key bits, as well as a few years to master everything on offer, if I ever will. Model 17 is mindboggling, to say the least. Although it now allows me to browse the World Wide Web whenever I wish, it will take me quite some time to achieve such a lofty goal. Anyhow, I must return to the reason why my Nokia mobile phone knocked out in the first place. It was still in the best of shapes, but I failed to take it out of my pants before putting them into the washing machine a couple of days ago. To the best of my recollection, I checked its six pockets several times, but to no avail. When the washing machine went into the drying mode, I realized something was wrong. There was too much banging around, that is. The mobile phone kind of worked when I dried it, but its screen had no light any longer. I could barely read from it even under the sharpest of lights. As witnessed by my blunder, I am ever longer in the tooth for true. In about six months I will be eighty years old. Alas!