My year of tech upgrades

Actually, this blog could just as easily be called “My month of tech upgrades,” since I bought all this stuff between mid-November and mid-December. However, “year” seems more appropriate since all but one of the devices I’m replacing has seen at least eight years of service.

There are essentially two major reasons why I decided to buy all this stuff now.

The first reason is one that I already created a forum topic about: after Trump’s election win, it struck me that if he does impose anything like the tariffs he’s promised, things are about to get much more expensive generally, and probably consumer electronic devices in particular, since these days electronic devices source their parts from all over the place. That being the case, if there was ever a time to do some upgrades, now was probably it, before the theoretical tariff-geddon happens.

The second reason is that I simply have more money now than I’ve ever had at any other point in my life. Without going into overly tedious biographical detail, my chosen profession is academia, which is not exactly known for being a high-paying profession, and I spent much of the last decade being a graduate student wage slave who was on government health insurance and, at one point, food stamps. My financial nadir came in early February 2021, when I had just paid the continuous registration fee for my grad school and was still waiting on a reimbursement for a new work computer; at that point I had a grand total of $102.17 to my name. Now? I have graduated, both literally and figuratively, to an entirely decent wage, especially after I got promoted late last year and got a 37% pay bump. So for the first time I have money in the bank to burn, and really, a lot of these devices were overdue for replacement. I am generally in the school of using tech until it breaks, but I decided that now was the time.

So, let’s get to it. I’ve replaced five devices: my phone, my TV, my PC, and two monitors. In each case, I’ll list the old and new device, how many years of service the old device saw, and how much the new device cost me. Then I’ll provide some narrative about my experiences with both.

Phone

Old device: iPhone SE (1^st-gen)
Old device years of service: 8 years
New device: iPhone 13 Mini
New device cost: $443 (refurbished)

I am pretty much of a luddite when it comes to phones. The iPhone SE was my first smartphone, bought for me by my brother and mother as a gift in 2016. I had used a flip phone before then. After getting it, I had to admit that I liked being able to text more easily and access my email through my phone, but other than that and an occasional game while waiting in a doctor’s office or something, I just don’t use my phone much, especially since I now work from home and rarely travel. In fact, last year I actually replaced the protective case on the old SE phone rather than buy a new phone, since after seven years the case had begun to fall apart.

In looking to replace my phone, a primary concern of mine was size. All of the most recent phones are ridiculously gigantic. That being the case, I decided to go with the last model of iPhone that still fit comfortably in my hand and pocket: the iPhone 13 Mini. Since these things aren’t being manufactured anymore, I had to go the refurb route. I opted to go with a refurb rated “excellent” on Amazon.

Unfortunately, this didn’t work out the way I’d hoped. After I’d received and set up the phone, I realized that there was something very wrong with it: the screen was horribly screwed up. It looked fine, but the touch sensitivity was completely borked. It seemed especially bad toward the bottom of the screen; e.g., I’d try to hit the spacebar while texting and it often wouldn’t register the first four or five times. Grrr. I looked into the cost of a screen replacement, and Apple quoted me $400... more than I had paid for the phone itself. So I ended up returning it and springing for a “Renewed Premium” IPhone 13 Mini, also from Amazon... which was roughly $100 more than the “excellent” condition one I’d bought, but after getting one bad phone, I didn’t want to gamble on another.

I will note that I had a bit of a nightmare while waiting for the replacement phone to arrive. I tried to transfer my data back to my SE (I had already wiped it) so I could send the bad phone back faster. After hours of screwing around with it, I discovered that this was actually impossible, since the SE could not be updated past iOS 15, while the new phone was on iOS 18, and it simply wouldn’t allow me to transfer anything back to an older iOS version. $#^%ing Apple!

Thankfully, the new phone arrived and worked fine. It even had a battery health of 99%, whereas the bad phone had only had 80%. I got the bad phone refunded, and so it ultimately all worked out.

The new phone functions pretty much like the old one, but with a few notable differences. First, it is 5G capable while the old phone was only 4G... this did seem to recently lead to people being unable to hear me clearly during actual calls, possibly because 4G networks are busy being replaced? Second, it uses Face ID rather than Touch ID. This took some getting used to, but for the most part it does seem to be a superior option; the only drawback is that the phone usually can’t recognize my face when I’m in bed in a dark room. The new phone also has slightly more screen real estate. But that’s about it. Ultimately an iPhone is an iPhone, they’re all about the same so far as I can tell, at least for the limited way in which I use it.

TV

Old device: 37” Vizio E371VL
Old device years of service: 13 years
New device: 55” Samsung S90D
New device cost: $1,300

In 2011, I moved from one grad school across the country to another grad school. At that point I was actually still using an old-style projection TV, believe it or not. I left that one with my roommates. When I arrived at my new home, I went into a Best Buy (or was it Sam's Club?) and got the first 1080p TV of a reasonable size that I saw, no research involved. It was a 37-inch Vizio, and I remember that it had a picture of Hannah Storm on the front.

To the great credit of the old Vizio, I used it pretty hard for 13 straight years and never had any major problems with it. The only truly annoying thing about it was that it only had two HDMI ports; even just one more would have been a big help given all the devices I was plugging into it. But other than that, I can’t really complain. It was a trooper, and for all I know it could have lasted another decade. It’s now sitting in a corner of my bedroom; I’ll probably hold onto it as a backup just in case.

Frankly, in some ways I appreciate that the 2011 Vizio was a “dumb TV” that had no computer in it, no internet connection, and no bloatware apps; it did nothing but display what was plugged into it. I liked the simplicity of that. I’m not sure how much we actually gain from all the software loaded onto modern TVs. But I suppose that’s a longer conversation.

Anyway, when I went looking for a replacement TV, I basically knew nothing at all. I didn’t even know which brands were considered good these days (turns out the answer is apparently LG, Sony, and Samsung). I had to educate myself on all sorts of things, including the difference between an OLED and QD-OLED, all that jazz. I had never researched any of this stuff about TVs ever.

After about a day of research and reading up on the benefits and drawbacks of all the new gee-whiz XYZ technologies, I ended up settling on the Samsung S90D, since it was roundly recommended as the best gaming TV out there by multiple websites (including a truly absurd response time). The odd thing about this particular model is that you get different panels depending on which size you get. The 42”, 48”, and 83” come with WOLED panels, while the 55”, 65”, and 77” come with QLED panels. My understanding was that if you were going to buy a Samsung, you wanted the QLED panels, since they hang their hats on QLED these days, so I opted for a 55”, even though that’s actually a little bigger than is ideal for the room it’s in.

And for the most part, I’m quite happy with my purchase. I suspect almost any modern 4K TV would have looked loads better than my 2011 Vizio, but this thing really does look pretty spectacular. My brother checked it out shortly after I got it, and remarked that he thought it looked better than any of his TVs, and he’d replaced one just a year or two ago.

There are two points of this TV that particularly amuse me.

The first is that it is absurdly thin, even though, since it is a QD-OLED, it is technically speaking backlit. That’s because the quantum dots are not themselves luminescent; all they do is change colors, but still need a light behind them to display. So I’ve now got this TV that is literally no more than 3 millimeters wide and it’s friggin' backlit. Yeah, OK. To me, this is high comedy. Perhaps I am too easily amused.

The second is that the TV’s remote has a solar panel on the back of it. That’s right, you can turn your remote upside down and leave it by a window and the battery will recharge by itself. This seems particularly unnecessary since it can also be charged via a USB-C cable. It seems designed solely for Samsung to be able to brag on the box that they are being environmentally conscious. Which, uhh, OK, sure?

I also have to say that most of the supposed drawbacks to QD-OLED TVs don’t really seem to apply to this TV. For instance, since it is technically backlit rather than each pixel being individually controlled, QD-OLED TVs are supposed to have inferior viewing angles and blooming/halo effect versus standard OLEDs. But the viewing angle is absurdly good (not that I really need it, to be honest), and if there’s any blooming, I don’t notice it.

The only problem I’ve encountered with this TV is that it reset my picture settings several times in the middle of gameplay. The sudden change was very obvious since I discovered soon after getting it that the extra brightness offered by QD-OLEDs was completely unnecessary for me, since I usually play in a fairly dark room. And so when the TV’s brightness suddenly changed from “0/50” to “50/50,” it felt like the TV was making its best attempt to sear my eyes out of my skull. However, after a firmware update, that problem seems to have gone away. Otherwise, no complaints.

PC

Old device: Late 2020 custom PC from iBuyPower; GTX 1080, Ryzen 5 3600, 1TB SSD, 6TB HDD
Old device years of service: 4 years
New device: Late 2024 custom PC from iBuyPower; RTX 4090, Ryzen 7 9800X3D, 4TB SSD, 2^nd 8TB SSD
New device cost: $5,800

I have never before had a top-of-the-line gaming PC, and had until this point stuck to consoles for flagship AAA titles. In 2013, I’d bought my first tower PC in a long time—a pre-built one from Best Buy, on short notice, after my laptop's screen suddenly failed—after buying three consecutive laptops for ease of transport during college. I replaced the toothless graphics card on that computer with a GTX 750 Ti, which was a nice mid-range card at the time, but not top-of-the-line. I replaced that machine after 7 years, only because after a certain point Windows updates began completely breaking my internet connection (I never figured out exactly why). For that machine, I ordered a custom one from iBuyPower in late 2020 with the cheapest graphics card they offered, then replaced the card with my brother's old GTX 1080, which he was kind enough to give to me... still a pretty decent graphics card even though it was five years old at that point.

This time, I decided to just go top-of-the-line everything, which included an RTX 4090 and the newly released Ryzen 7 9800X3D (only a month old at that point). The other especially expensive aspect of my new machine was lots of fast storage; I got a 4TB SSD as my primary C drive, plus a second 8TB SSD for media.

I had two scares with this machine.

The first was that the day after I’d gotten it and woken it up from sleep, I got a BSOD after about two minutes with the error message: “Driver power state failure.” That apparently happened because some portion of the machine had not woken up from sleep like it should have. I updated the BIOS for my motherboard, updated the driver for my Wi-Fi (apparently this was the most likely culprit), and then disabled the Wi-Fi completely, because I really don’t need it since I have an ethernet cable anyway. After that, no more BSODs.

The second was that a friend noticed that my fans were not working properly. They had come with software that was, of course, supposed to read the machine’s temperature so they could ramp up appropriately when it was under heavy load. However, the software was not actually reading the machine’s temperature at all; it kept thinking it was at 0 degrees C. After much fiddling, I ended up simply re-installing the fan software, and that magically fixed everything. Go figure.

With this machine, I went from Windows 10 to Windows 11. After a day or two of using it, I posed this question to my tech-savvy family and friends: “Is there anything that’s actually better about Windows 11 versus Windows 10?” Their answer: nope! Honestly, as an OS, this thing seems strictly worse. I have two particular complaints.

The first is that the new volume control sucks. It’s bundled together with the battery icon and network status, and it takes more clicks to get to the settings you want. I tried enabling the classic volume control, but that seemed buggy, and in any case just provided a second volume control icon in the system tray rather than replacing the new one, so after a few days I ditched it and resigned myself to the new inferior volume control.

The second is that folder thumbnails in Windows 11 are terrible. In Windows 10, you could set a folder thumbnail that would scale to both the horizonal and vertical pixels and looked fine. In Windows 11, the thumbnail is not only always scaled only to the horizontal pixels (meaning portrait-size pictures are massively cut off), but the folder icon cuts off the bottom half regardless. I found a solution to the second problem, but for the horizonal scaling there simply is no fix right now that I’ve discovered.

Aside from those two Windows 11-specific problems, I can’t complain about the performance. My new RTX 4090 and Ryzen 7 9800X3D handle any game on the highest settings without a sweat. Admittedly, this new machine is complete overkill considering I’ve opted to stick with a pair of 1080p monitors. However, it won’t go completely to waste, since I also bought a 15-foot HDMI cable so that I can plug the new PC into my new gee-whiz 55” 4K TV. The plan is to buy Monster Hunter Wilds on Steam in late February and do just that. How many other games I will bother playing on the new 4K TV with my PC, I’m not sure. I guess we’ll see. But I also bought the 4090 in anticipation of migrating it to any new PCs I buy, until it simply stops working. Hence I’m OK with the fact that it's currently serious overkill for 1080p gaming.

Primary PC monitor

Old device: 21.5” Samsung 22C300
Old device years of service: 11 years
New device: 23.8” ViewSonic XG2431
New device cost: $250

I had bought my old primary monitor at the same time I bought my 2013 pre-built Asus PC from Best Buy. Though I bought it in 2013, it was manufactured in 2011. It certainly wasn’t anything fancy, but it got the job done, I guess. Only 60hz refresh rate.

Like the TV, in searching for a new PC monitor, this was another instance of me knowing literally nothing about what makes a good one. The one thing I decided beforehand was that I would stick with a 1080p monitor, since higher resolution would natively make icons and text smaller than I liked for little real benefit (unless I got a really giant monitor, which... no thanks). This time, since rtings.com had seemed a good resource for researching the TV, I simply looked at their article on “The 4 Best 1080p Monitors – Fall 2024,” and got the one listed under “Best Budget 1080p Monitor”... because I simply didn’t feel that I needed a super high-end one. That ended up being the 23.8” ViewSonic XG2431.

It's funny, even though the new PC had cost me massively more money than the new monitor, it feels like the monitor made almost as much of a real-world difference. I had been using that cheap 60hz Samsung for 11 years, and the move to 240hz was... really something. Such smooth motion compared to what I was used to. I also realized that my old monitor had been hilariously miscalibrated, color-wise; it had waaayy too much blue. Further, whenever I had tried to play modern PC games on my old monitor, I'd always experienced terrible screen tearing if I didn't turn on vsync; with the new monitor, that was no longer a problem.

Overall, I simply don’t have any complaints. This seems like a pretty great monitor, though again, as with the TV, I think most new monitors would have looked good compared to my cheap old one.

Secondary PC monitor

Old device: 22” Samsung 2443BWX
Old device years of service: 16(3) years
New device: 23.8” AOC 24G15N
New device cost: $110

I should first say that for most of my life I’d subsisted on a single monitor, and didn’t really see the need for a second. Then my brother offered me a second monitor that he wasn’t using, I believe in 2021. It was a 16:10 (1920x1200) Samsung manufactured in 2008. Regardless, it wasn’t long after adding that second monitor that it was obvious to me that I’d never go back to a single monitor setup. I use it both for productivity tasks of having a spreadsheet or other document open for work, and for watching something on a second screen while I game or work. I used it for about three years, though my brother had bought it new, so overall it was used for about a decade and a half.

I had considered only replacing my primary monitor, but after the ViewSonic had proved so much better than my old Samsung, I decided to go ahead and replace my secondary monitor as well. I figured I didn’t need another $250 monitor, and instead opted for the rtings.com “Best Cheap 1080p Monitor,” which was the 23.8” AOC 24G15N.

This was the one I would come to regret.

The first thing I noticed upon setting it up was that the stand sucked ass. Besides not allowing for height adjustment (only forward or backward tilt), the stand was narrow and wobbly. Even normal mouse movement would sometimes set this monitor to wobbling like Jello.

The other major problem I noticed was that it had truly terrible “ghosting.” Apparently this is a thing with VA monitors, as compared to my new primary monitor, which is IPS (I knew nothing about these different standards). Even fairly slow movement with my mouse cursor turns it (the cursor) bright green. And likewise, motion tests with things like the Blur Busters UFO motion test revealed it be a green-tinted, blurry mess where motion was concerned.

Beyond that, it shouldn’t be a surprise that no amount of calibration could get the colors of this monitor to be anything that remotely matched my new primary monitor. I suspect it’s a fundamental difference in panel types that’s mainly to blame, but probably any two monitors are going to look a little different. When I calibrated it for high-saturation color, it would then look completely different for B+W images, and vice-versa. My brother remarked that having differences in monitor color calibration was the very definition of a first-world problem, which, fair, but it still bothered the crap out of me.

I gave it a week to see if I’d get used to it, but in the end, I decided that the shortcomings of my new secondary monitor simply bothered me too much, so I sprung for a second ViewSonic, same model (I ordered it shortly before I began writing this blog; it should arrive this weekend). At least this way I’ll know that the two monitors should end up looking exactly the same, which will soothe my semi-OCD about colors matching. And I’m also just well-off enough now that I can write this off as a $110 learning experience. No more VA monitors for me. Not sure what I’ll do with this AOC monitor; I’ll probably try to gift it to any family member who might want it, otherwise I suspect it will simply gather dust.

Concluding thoughts

Overall, I spent a little over $8,000 on my new electronic devices within a period of only a month. For anyone who’s not genuinely wealthy, that’s a lot of money. However, I do plan for all of these new devices to be with me for a long time. Unless one of them fails well before it’s expected to, I shouldn’t have to replace anything before the Trump administration ends, and ultimately that was the goal.

Hopefully you’ve enjoyed reading my experiences of buying new tech for the first time in a long time. Feel free to tell me about your own experiences with buying new devices; now that I’ve just finished buying all this new stuff, I’m genuinely interested!