Size — Blog — Healy Chen

I'm here. I'm back

After six years of using the standard sized iPhone, it’s really nice to be back to the one with the bigger screen. Not since my iPhone XS Max got unceremoniously taken away by the Feds for reasons totally not of my fault (no sarcasm) have I bought the larger iPhone. This iPhone 16 Pro Max I got last Friday, sitting at a 6.9 inch (nice) diagonal screen, is just about the biggest I would want a smartphone to be. Anything more and it’s a tablet.

The increased screen real estate is instantly better for typing. I’m noticeably making fewer typos tapping away on the larger keyboard. Another plus is reading books on the Kindle app: more space for text, less page flipping. The experience is so good that I can forgo using the iPad for reading. Content from the web and Youtube fills up the larger canvas beautifully. Why did I go so long in between giant iPhones? Oh right, I didn’t want to pay the $100 price premium. Hashtag broke boy.

Obviously, the iPhone 16 Pro Max is not as pocket-able as the non-Max version. Even as a manly man with manly pockets in his never-skinny manly jeans, the Max iPhone is cumbersome to carry. Before doing any motion that involves bending over or squatting down - like tying my shoes - I must take the phone out. Otherwise I risk it slipping out of the pocket, damaging that pristine titanium frame. The best way to carry the iPhone 16 Pro Max is in the hand, but don’t do that on public transportation, because some thug will for sure snatch it out of your hand and exit swiftly at the stop.

Another con with the Max iPhone is the difficultly of one-handed operation. I have to perform this juggle with the phone in order to position my fingers to reach the stuff at the top half of the display. Apple has a solution for this since the iPhone 6, but for some reason I prefer to do the finger juggle than the simple swiping shortcut.

Smartphones with giant screens: I like it a lot. It’s good to be back using one.

It's too damn big

It’s pretty obvious that cars are getting bigger and bigger. What has not gotten larger in commensurate are the width of roads, and the size of home garages. The former is easy enough to fix: just tear up the current lane markings, and replace with ones wider apart. Obviously, certain streets are going to be impossible to do. For those situations, I think you simply have to ban cars of a certain size. Much like how some residential neighborhoods prohibit 18-wheeler trucks from entering.

Parking lots are similar to roads. The lot at my workplace have already gone through a widening of the berths. Previously, it had gotten so bad that you cannot open your own driver door if the car to your immediate left did not park exactly in the middle of two lines. You know who’s got the best parking lot? IKEA. The berths there are so wide - to accommodate furniture loading - that even the largest of SUVs has no issues fitting in comfortably.

Logic would say that if cars continues to get bigger, it’s only a matter of time before the parking structure at work will need to have its lines repainted again.

Cars becoming too wide to fit home garages is a far more difficult fix. Some of the older homes I see in San Francisco, ones built way back in the previous century, have garage openings that appears incapable of allowing a modern SUV to pass through. No wonder people would rather park on the street and use their garage space as storage! Widening a garage aperture is going to cost many thousands of dollars, and applying for a few permits. As we know, permits in San Francisco are super easy to get, so long as you know who to bribe.

One of the items to check off when buying a house should absolutely be: can your car fit in the garage with room to spare? Or maybe this is only a San Francisco problem. Everything is bigger in Texas, am I right?