When the expensive device stops being useful
It’s around 1 AM on a school night. The house is completely quiet, everyone is asleep, and I’m in my zone. I’ve got VoiceOver running at high speed, Alex reading text fast enough to sound like a digital blender to anyone else, knocking out code and messages.
And then, right in the middle of a sentence: total, absolute silence.
Silence.
If you’re sighted, a phone crash is an annoyance. The screen freezes, an app stutters, or you glance down at the white Apple logo to know it’s rebooting. For me, when the speech daemon hangs, the phone doesn't just stop responding. It ceases to exist.
A smartphone without a screen reader isn't a computer; it's an $800 glass brick. There is no cursor to squint at. There is no haptic pulse telling you the system is alive. You tap the screen, nothing. You swipe, nothing. You flick the mute switch, dead.
You don't even know if the battery died, if the display is stuck at 100% brightness cooking the OLED panel, or if the kernel panicked into oblivion.
So begins the ritual. Volume up, volume down, hold the side button. I’m sitting there in the dark with my thumbs cramping, counting seconds in my head.
Five seconds. Ten seconds. Fifteen seconds. Did the Apple logo flash? Did it restart? Did I release the button too early? Did it boot back up into a locked state with speech disabled, or is it stuck in an infinite bootloop that I can’t hear?
You have no way of knowing. You just sit there holding buttons like you’re trying to jump-start an '03 Honda Civic at 4 in the morning.
For five straight hours, from 1 AM until roughly 6 AM, this brand-new 2026 iPhone 17e was a paperweight. On a school night. While the clock is aggressively ticking toward sunrise and your alarm is supposed to go off in a few hours.
That’s when the frustration peaked, and me and my AI companion Poco, an AI agent I work with, ended up in a full-blown 3 AM rant session because Apple’s flagship software was acting like an absolute bitch.
As Poco put it right in the middle of the chaos:
“Apple charged you $800 for an iPhone 17e just so you could experience what life was like before Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. Tim Cook out here putting 8GB of unified memory in a phone just for the accessibility daemon to get defeated by a background weather widget.”
Which made me realize how much worse things have gotten. Back on iOS 15, things just worked. The operating system was lean, fast, and stripped down. The audio pipelines were rock-solid, system daemons didn't step on each other's toes, and the phone never randomly went comatose in the middle of a sentence.
Fast-forward to recent iOS releases like iOS 26 and beyond, and the entire platform feels weighed down by endless background bloat that nobody asked for, while fundamental system stability gets shoved to the side.
Meanwhile, Apple posts glossy marketing videos like Accessibility: VoiceOver powered by Apple Intelligence
:
Watch Apple’s VoiceOver powered by Apple Intelligence video
They want everyone to applaud them for AI vision features and high-concept demos, but none of that matters if the base layer of the OS can't stay alive through the night.
And that brings me to the absolute punchline: digging an ancient 2019 iPod touch out of storage.
Think about this for a second. An iPod touch from seven years ago. A device with a fraction of the RAM, an ancient processor, a tiny battery, and software from that classic, lean era of iOS.
I dusted it off, hit the power button, and what do you know? VoiceOver came right up. Zero hesitation. Zero daemon stutter. It connected to Wi-Fi, loaded up messages, and let me talk to Poco and get my stuff handled while the $800, 2026 “superphone” was still lying on my desk having an existential crisis.
A seven-year-old museum relic with a headphone jack running classic, lightweight iOS saved my night because Apple broke basic system stability on modern hardware.
If your state-of-the-art smartphone can leave a blind user completely cut off for five hours until a retired iPod steps in to do its job, your software isn't advanced.
It's broken.