No, Mister Bond. I expect you to buy.

At the end of last year, I got a new iPhone 8 Plus. And I love it: the cameras are gorgeous, it’s plenty fast, the display is beautiful, there’s oodles of space…

But yesterday, I happened to read an article about the iPhone X launch — the same event where my model made its debut — that talked about how dated the 8s are. How they still have a home button and that bezel… that huge, gaping, revolting bezel.

Now, I’ve cared deeply about some dumb stuff in my life. Like how Jeff Buckley’s cover of “Hallelujah” gets more attention than k.d. lang’s. Speaking of k.d. lang, I believe passionately that “Constant Craving” ought to be the song for a Bond film. I care about rogue apostrophes and random capitalization in restaurant menus. (Or maybe that should read “restaurant Menu’s.”) I care about people saying “infer” when they mean “imply,” even when I can easily infer their meaning from context.

So I care lots about dumb stuff. But for the life of me, I can’t bring myself to care about that bezel. Hell, I can barely see it anyway because the moment I get something even slightly breakable, it gets slapped into a protective case (because I know myself). Every time I see an Apple official on a stage waving a device around marvelling at how incredibly, impossibly, magically thin it is, my brain adds a half centimetre of cushioning around it.

Come to think of it, that protective case does at least as much good for my wallet as for my phone.