Cutting Through the Tech Hype - My Journey Away from Unnecessary Purchases

2026-02-09T11:20:20.000Z

Simplifying life without spending more

Over the last couple of years really I’ve been reflecting on whether certain purchases - largely tech purchases and ones that are promoted online - are all that necessary. I’ve been trying to trim the fat in my own life and cut down on unnecessary costs.

I see a lot of promotion of these things online and many of them sound good, because they take up this anti-big tech narrative: “don’t want to be tracked by Big Internet, get a VPN”, “want to avoid renting your music all the time? Get an iPod” or “want to break a phone addiction nursed by Big Tech? Buy a dumbphone”. So a lot of the intention is at least admirable, though I could not recommend these as prudent purchases.

iPods

First of all, I totally see the value in having a separate portable music device. I think with the death of the iPod we did lose a fair bit in our music listening experiences. Of course, there’s the whole move away from owning music to renting it, but we also began to have to balance battery life for listening to music with critical actions like messaging, navigation and payment. Not only battery life, but storage space too. As apps take up more and more space every year, a lot of us have moved to streaming music over mobile data, rather than having all the music we rent downloaded to our devices. This however uses up data for those not on unlimited data plans.

I do like seeing this sort of offline music experience being talked about more and more online. My concern though is that this often leads to a fetishisation of iPods in particular. The prices of iPods on the second-hand market have risen quite considerably in recent years. Certain models are highlighted as ones to avoid, such as certain Nanos (apparently because they often succumb to battery deformations) and attention is then focused on the iPod Classic. The pool of available devices shrinks further and the price increases under demand. The base price is already high, before one adds in the cost of modifications to the batteries, storage and from adding new technology like Bluetooth to it.

It might be worth questioning whether iPods are truly practical in today's age? Click wheels do have a charming retro feel, but they were introduced to provide navigation in a time before the advent of the touchscreens of the mid to late 2000s. I struggle to believe that a click wheel is more intuitive than a touch screen. On the connectivity front, if you don't mod your iPod to include Bluetooth, you're going to need to plug it into a computer whenever you want to add any music to it.

I have been loving having a separate device for music that I can throw into another pocket. I just would question why this needs to be an iPod. How many of us have at least one previous phone someone in our home? Is it gathering dust in a drawer? Why not repurpose it as a music-focused device?

Smartphones don't have to be able to run every single app. We can remove features from them in the same way that companies can impart controls onto their fleets of devices. For instance, have you ever been to a museum and discovered that the handset you can get for an audio tour is often just an iPhone in a big plastic brick that's been restricted to run one or two apps for the tour? We can all do this with our own devices, using free software intended for businesses, but which can just as easily be used by individuals. These are Mobile Device Management tools and they exist for and are often produced by all major device manufacturers. Apple's, for instance, is called Apple Configurator.

What these tools can enable, and for free, is the transformation of an old smartphone we may well already have into a dedicated music listening device, one which has a modern touchscreen, a good-sized battery, as well as native Bluetooth, Wifi and AirDrop support. The only app capable of being run on the device can be set as a music streaming service's app or an offline music player. All other device functionality can be disabled.

Dumbphones

I think it's a very similar situation with so-called dumbphones. As niche devices, they are often anything but cheap. Sure they might be cheaper than the new base model iPhone. but in terms of capability per unit of currency, the iPhone will wipe the floor with them. You can pare an iPhone right back, really choosing the features and types of apps you can use on it. With most dumbphones, their capabilities are opinionated and fixed; they can't be upgraded. Given their very small market share, there's also no guarantee that the manufacturer will be around in a few years time, should you require any support with the device.

If you're looking at getting a dumbphone, might I suggest turning your current phone into one by, as with the discussion of iPods, setting it up as a ‘dumbphone’ using MDM? You should be able to save yourself a lot of money.

Apps and services that charge a subscription when you don't really need them to

Let’s imagine a scenario. I am looking for an app where I can store my recipes. Each record or recipe will need to list the ingredients, the method and any other notes, maybe a photo or two and a couple of tags. I find one app with a nice design that does all of these things. It asks me to make an account so that I can securely store my recipes. "Fair enough", I think, "I don't want them to be lost!" It tells me that to store more than 10 recipes, I'll need to subscribe to the paid plan. Well that’s a bit annoying, but it would be nice if I referred to my recipes more, as I might cook more and become a better cook, so maybe this is a worthwhile subscription? Maybe the act of paying will incentivise me to cook more? Also isn’t everything a subscription now anyway?

Oh, but hang on. I've just found a second recipe manager app that does all of the things I need it to and it's a single one-off purchase. Is this feasible? It's not asking me to make an account, but instead is syncing my recipes using my iCloud storage. That's interesting...I already have that and know it's secure.

Ok so which should I choose? Can I just get the one-time payment app? Well, I would say yes. I think we have to think about what we are paying for. I'm seeking to pay a developer for an app that does a fairly fixed amount of things, including listing my recipes, being able to search using tags or keywords and then presenting the recipes to me, before taking me through each of their steps. The second app does all of these things at present and the developer has decided to charge £5 for perpetual use of this app in this form. They let the user bring their own storage through iCloud for example. The developer may have to squash a few bugs from time to time. Sometimes these are caused by their own oversights and good developers are happy to fix these to rectify matters. Sometimes a new OS update requires developers to enact a few changes, but these don’t come around all that often. The developer(s) may have to occasionally put in a bit of work to keep the app running well, but this is not a constant endeavour. They have already delivered all the features most of us really want in a recipe app. They aren’t storing anything on their end, so bar their Apple Developer membership at $99/year, their day-to-day running costs are near zero. The hard part of their work is done. If it’s a well-made app, they should be able to move onto another project, while a steady stream of purchases of the original app continue to come through, driven by good word-of-mouth online. At $5 an app, they may well only need 20 purchases a year to not lose money from their Developer account dues.

Now, of course, sometimes we do want to store data in some sort of account, accessed through an app. This costs the company in server costs and the like. We obviously need banking data to be stored on our bank’s server, so it’s understandable that they charge us for this, in the ways that banks generally charge us. That wasn't maybe the best example... Photo storage! I want my photos to be backed up securely to my Apple account, so I’m perfectly happy paying monthly to have this happen. A better example?

What about something like Goodreads? Using it is free. Again, let’s reflect on why that is. Amazon is letting us use the platform for free, in exchange for contributing information on books to their database, as well as parting with lots of data that they can parcel up and sell to publishers, interested in exactly how and what people are reading. If we’re happy handing over this sort of data, we get a pretty good deal in return. I think it would be the same for things like The StoryGraph, Trakt.tv, Last.fm etc.

Therefore sometimes a ‘free’ app is kind of worth it. Sometimes too we need to pay subscriptions, to access libraries of content, backup our own content to external servers
There are however multitudes of popular apps out there that absolutely do not warrant charging a monthly subscription, yet they currently do. I really put this down to simple greed or, if I'm being kinder, because the app has let itself become larger than it needs to be and now there’s a team of developers, designers and marketers that all require salaries.

My advice is to always try and think of the economics and technology behind an app, when assessing whether all one needs is an offline one-time-payment app.

VPNs

I know I’m not alone in subscribing to YouTube channels which routinely feature ads for VPNs. I'm certainly not going to name any names and I will add that I still follow their output, but even these creators cannot convince me to pay for a VPN. Do we really need to use them in this day and age?

To preface this, I will say that I’m certainly not an IT expert. However, I’m also not a company selling VPNs. If one searches online for 'do I need a VPN?' or 'benefits of VPN', really the only results returned will be from VPN company sites or articles sponsored by a VPN company. There really does seem to be a dearth of independent information about VPNs out there.

My own understanding is that in the days when HTTP was widespread, nefarious folk snooping on a public WiFi network could absolutely see all the data moving back and forth to your device. The thing is that nowadays basically every website and app already uses ‘military grade’ encryption via HTTPS by default. Banking apps for instance go further and apparently utilise TLS for greater security. Snoopers can, if they infiltrate the network, see that you’re on YouTube.com, but they cannot see what video you are watching, nor inspect any data as it moves back and forth.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit advocating for digital privacy, wrote in 2020 that ‘HTTPS protects the content of your communications, but not the metadata’. They concluded by saying ‘There are plenty of things in life to worry about. You can cross “public Wi-Fi” off your list’. To be sure, they mean one can cross off ‘using public WiFi WITHOUT using a VPN’ from our list of things to worry about. If the content of my emails, texts, or photos is already encrypted, I personally don't care who knows that my device just sent requests to messages.apple.com.

The other benefit of VPNs often cited online is that you can watch content from a provider back home, while you're abroad or that you can watch the American version of Netflix, for example. I have tried this before, but streaming services have got really good at detecting when you are using a VPN and blocking access if you are.

I do think then, for most of us, VPNs are redundant and a recurring cost we can go without. Let's try and not let the fear-mongering get to us. Public WiFi is safer than is often made out online.

Physical app blocking tags

These are products that are becoming more and more popular online in the digital minimalism/digital detox discussion. Often, because they are marketed quite aggressively, they seem to be acting as the hook into this discussion for many people who are hitherto unfamiliar with it. This is at least judging by people online announcing their initial intentions to cut down on their phone use by expressing an interest in buying these products.

We should take the time to consider just how these products work. At the core of it, they are simply NFC tags in branded plastic wrapping. They make use of the Screen Time API Apple released to developers a few years ago. None of them have developed any secret sauce and each is as effective as the other, by which I mean all share the same loopholes.

I did however recently learn of another option called Foqos, developed by Ali Waseem. While it doesn't do anything markedly different from the subscription-based options - as, again, the API only allows for so much - it is free (with optional tips for the developer). Unlike the paid options though, it can be used with regular NFC tags or QR codes. I happened to buy some NFC tags last year at 25 pence per tag. Compare that to the £50+ Brick, Bloom, Unbloq, Blokd etc and one starts to realise just how inflated these prices are. Furthermore, Bricks and the like need the app to keep operating for them to not become £50 plastic toy credit cards (I’m not actually convinced that this doesn’t violate Apple’s App Store policies). One cannot repurpose them as regular NFC tags, should these companies fold or withdraw their apps from the App Store. If Foqos ever ceased operating, your NFC tags can be repurposed. If you don’t end up liking or benefitting from this style of app blocking, you’ve lost no money with Foqos. Compare that to Bloom for instance, where, if you’re still within your 30 days, you’ll have to spend money shipping them back to the USA.

A bit of a rambly post, but this is a theme I increasingly feel quite strongly about. It seems to me that many of the 'anti-big tech' products might really just consitute another form of consumption.