A Digital Chronicle of the Post-2005 Generation: How I Was "Raised" by the Mobile Internet and Tried My Utmost to Break Free From It

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▍Preface

I am deeply fond of Ninajirachi's track iPod touch, partly because the very first electronic device I came into contact with in my life was an iPod touch. Back then, Apple's devices did not even have a Lightning port, and when I was still in kindergarten, I had no idea how to install apps, so I could only play the pre-downloaded Need for Speed from my dad over and over again. The lowest rank in Need for Speed was "Rookie", and it was from this game that I first figured out what the word "rookie" really meant. After its Home button was worn out from constant pressing, I still insisted on using it with the on-screen virtual Home key.

I was born in 2005, and for me, technology has played an indispensable role throughout my entire growth process. Since my dad subscribed to Computer News, I could take the issues after he finished reading them. From primary school to junior high school, I could recite the parameters of almost every consumer electronic product on the market in every period. However, I was not allowed to own any electronic device of my own back then.

After I started primary school, I went to the Children's Palace on weekends to take classical Chinese poetry and popular science English classes. Gradually, my dad thought it would be more convenient to contact and pick me up if I had a mobile phone, so he bought me a Nokia 106. It was a feature phone, and apart from making calls, I could only play the pre-installed Snake game over and over again.

It was not until the fourth or fifth grade of primary school that I finally got a hand-me-down Xiaomi 4, which to some extent became the enlightenment of my digital world. I spent endless time messing around with all kinds of random stuff on it, such as using BoardWalk to run the Java version of Minecraft on the phone. But the game could only run smoothly on the superflat world, and if I tried to enter the End dimension to take a look, the frame rate would drop to only four frames per second. When Pokemon Go was a huge hit at that time, I tried to play it on my phone. Though it ran successfully, I just could not get the mock location function to work no matter what I did. From an article in Computer News, I learned that the xash3D engine could run CS 1.6 on mobile phones. I also tried all kinds of ROOT master apps, but I never managed to get my phone rooted on my own in the end.

▍E-books

Kindle is the most important device for me.

Although I barely read books these days, and Kindle has even withdrawn from the Chinese market, which makes me feel full of sighs. When I was little, my dad worked at the court during winter and summer vacations. Since no one could take care of me, he left me in the court's library and picked me up to have lunch with him at noon. He knew I would be bored to death, so he gave me his Kindle and subscribed me to a Kindle Unlimited membership.

At that time, the logo on the back of the Kindle read "Kindle" instead of "Amazon".

The good part of Kindle Unlimited was that I could never finish all the novels by Keigo Higashino, while the bad part was that there were no Jin Yong's novels available. When I was in junior high school, I read all of Keigo Higashino's works, and my favorite series were the Galileo Galilei series and the Kaga Kyochiro series. I also read a lot of Zhihu Weekly issues, mainly because they were free. The early issues of Zhihu Weekly were surprisingly high-quality. I read the story of Julian Assange there, and also learned that some people in Silicon Valley were using Soylent as a meal replacement.

There were a lot of books stored on my Kindle, including Scientific Squirrel Club, Our Taiwan in Those Years, An Inch of Rivers and Mountains, An Inch of Blood, The Those Things in Ming Dynasty, and A World History for Office Workers. For me today, I may not be able to finish those juvenile bestsellers, but back then I was so absorbed in them that I could not stop at all.

Even for popular bestsellers, after finishing one, more or less it will leave a deep imprint in your mind. Yes, I want to say that it was Kindle that cultivated my reading habit, sowing the seed for me in a convenient, easily accessible way. After entering high school, I gradually expanded my reading scope from popular literature to more serious works, reading Roberto Bolaño and William Faulkner, but Kindle was exactly the starting point.

The electronic device that shocked me the most — no other device can compare — is Sony DPT-RP1. My dad spent thousands of yuan to import it from Japan as soon as it was released. This device still ranks first in elegance among all the electronic products I have ever seen. It has an all-black, paper-thin appearance, and the writing touch is just like using a pencil on real paper. The moment I unboxed it, I felt as if I was opening a product from an alien planet.

I brought this device to my English tutoring class. Everyone else wrote on paper, but I wrote on the e-paper, which attracted everyone's attention immediately. When the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in 2020, this device came in super handy. I did not need to print my homework at all, I could write directly on the DPT-RP1 and send the PDF file to my teacher directly, which made me feel extremely elegant.

After entering high school, at first there was only a dead area on the screen where I could not write, so I could only use it to read books. Later, the edge of the device started to crack, and I realized that "extremely thin" came with a price. After that, the touch screen stopped working completely, and it could only lie in the bottom drawer of my desk, becoming a souvenir of my teenage years.

▍Me and Apple

After being completely disappointed by Windows Mobile, my dad switched to Apple's ecosystem. Before I went to high school, every year on a certain day in September, when I got up for breakfast and found my dad propping up an iPad on the dining table watching the replay of last night's Apple launch event, I knew Apple had released new products again.

The gold color scheme of iPhone 6 was called "local tyrant gold" by many people. My dad bought an iPhone 6 Plus for my mom, and I still remember unboxing it with my mom. My dad bought a small-screen black iPhone 6, and to this day I still think the iPhone 6 has the most elegant appearance among all Apple phones. Later, although my dad gave me his old iPhone 6 as a hand-me-down, I did not want to use it at all. Apple devices cannot install APK files freely, and you have to mess around with all kinds of mobile assistant apps. As someone who has experienced the freedom of Android, I will never be satisfied with that.

I do not like Apple's closed ecosystem, but no one can deny that Apple's products are always at the cutting edge, they pay attention to details, with great texture and taste.

Although my dad started using Apple phones relatively late, my family had a 3rd-generation iPad very early, which was mainly used to watch American TV series. At that time, Sohu had a huge library of American TV shows, and I watched them with my dad, among which Prison Break left me the deepest impression. When I went to junior high school and took Xueersi Peiyou courses in Minhang, the courses had a dedicated iPad app, so I also needed to use the iPad for classes.

Besides the well-known Fruit Ninja, the games that impressed me the most on iPad also included Minecraft: Story Mode and Sanguosha Lie. The story-mode Sanguosha is even the best Sanguosha electronic game in my heart. Minecraft: Story Mode was completely out of print after its developer went bankrupt, while Sanguosha Lie was never launched on any platform other than iPad, and since it only supports 32-bit systems, it cannot run on today's iPad anymore.

In 2022, I had to take online classes at home. I heard that the new MacBook had switched to M-series chips, which made me quite curious. My dad thought MacBook could not run games anyway, so he bought one for me.

macOS still allows free software installation, so this is the only Apple device that I love so much that I cannot put it down. I soon found that the screen quality of Apple computers is incredibly great. During online classes, I kept the OBS virtual camera running all the time, and stayed in my room watching movies.

For some reason, Bilibili started to buy a large number of film copyrights at that time, and its home page recommended Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless to me. For the first time in my life, I saw a completely different type of work from the Hollywood movies I ordered on IPTV at home when I was little, during the two semesters from the second half of 11th grade to the first half of 12th grade when I stayed at home. I watched roughly a hundred arthouse films during the online class days, ranging from Godard to Bergman, from Fellini to Tarkovsky. The result was of course that I performed terribly in the spring college entrance examination.

▍Me and Microsoft

I am a loyal fan of the Surface series, which is mainly influenced by my dad. He was one of the last batch of users who stuck with Microsoft Lumia, and the first computer he bought for me when I was in junior high school was a Surface Book 2 (but without a discrete graphics card). After entering college, I chose Surface Laptop Studio as my laptop.

But I became more and more fed up with Windows, so I replaced its system with Linux. To be honest, leaving cost performance aside, the overall appearance of Microsoft devices is the most premium in the PC camp. The silver logo is extremely cool.

When Surface Duo was first released, it undoubtedly became my dream device. In my freshman year, I finally scraped together money from my living expenses and got a Surface Duo 2 at a price of more than 3000 yuan, fulfilling my high school dream.

In order to use it better, I even migrated my note-taking workflow to OneNote. Eventually I found OneNote is an underrated great software, but Surface Duo is definitely one of the most failed hardware products Microsoft has ever launched. The Surface Book series and Surface Laptop Studio at least allow me to ignore the keyboard when I watch dramas and movies — but Surface Duo has nothing left except its concept.

Microsoft tried to define Surface Duo as a productivity tool, but a mobile phone is never a productivity tool. In most cases, there is no need to use two screens at the same time, so this non-foldable dual-screen phone has to face that huge gap between the two screens, not to mention it is wide and thick, and the one-hand operation experience is terribly bad.

In the summer vacation between my freshman and sophomore year, I dropped this phone into the water when I went rafting in Anji with my friends, and it broke completely. Anyway, I still feel sad about the end of the Panos Panay era. I know that none of the products under his leadership can be called a success, but I just love the fanciness of those products themselves, the unique personality, the feeling that technology transcends the nature of being a tool.

▍Devices I use today

After entering college, I had some extra pocket money, so I could try all kinds of mobile phones. In addition to Surface Duo 2, I used a Sony Xperia Pro-I for a period of time. I thought it was a RX100 with a screen, but later found out that I barely took photos at all.

Later I tried to use Fairphone 5. I ran into some problems when unlocking the BL lock, so I sent an email to their customer service, and I did not receive the first template reply until 3 months later. I really did not know what to say about such a slow customer service. What was even more ridiculous was that somehow the NFC function of this phone broke down while I was using it. Interestingly, although the advantage of Fairphone lies in its repairability, the broken NFC only requires replacing a battery, but I was on an exchange program at UCB at that time, and I could not find any spare parts for Fairphone 5 in the United States at all.

My current mobile phone is a Minimal Phone. When I was on an exchange program at UC Berkeley in my junior year, it just started pre-sale and delivery, and coincidentally my Fairphone 5 broke down at that time. So the Minimal Phone immediately turned from a fun toy to my daily driver.

As an e-ink screen phone, the Minimal Phone is completely sufficient for daily use. Although I would never want to use it to browse any social media that requires constant swiping, it works perfectly for ordering food and getting takeaways via WeChat mini-programs, or replying to WeChat and QQ messages. It has NFC that supports Google Pay and Alipay Tap. It perfectly falls into the sweet spot where you can use it, but you will not take the initiative to use it for fun. On the subway, I will zone out, and when I eat, I can only focus on eating. I think that's actually pretty good. I never thought that I have been using this Minimal Phone in my hand for a whole year, and it completely cured my doomscrolling habit.

However, its camera is really, really bad — it is so bad that even scanning a QR code is difficult. If you are a little far away, you cannot complete the Enterprise WeChat check-in, and the lack of color display also brings some problems to facial recognition. So it is best to have a backup phone, for example, I have a rooted Xiaomi 9.

▍What should technology be like

Facing this widely spread post on Reddit that resonated with a lot of people, I did not know what to think. Because I can never imagine a timeline where technology stops developing at this point. I cannot imagine things that I have never experienced.

Born in 2005, I am a native of the mobile Internet. My entire adolescence is exactly the popularization history of mobile Internet in China. I witnessed my little aunt recommending WeChat to my mom, and then my mom bought a Xiaomi 2S as her first smartphone; I witnessed my relatives in the whole family starting to set up WeChat groups, playing red envelope grabbing and collecting five fu characters during Spring Festival; I witnessed my ill