I have had a horrible realisation. I don’t need a new iPhone. But it’s worse than that. I don’t need a new phone of any sort. If I was rocking a Samsung, or Pixel or any smart phone released in the last four or five years, as long as I could replace the battery … I wouldn’t need to upgrade.

This is an awful, shameful thing to know about yourself, but I had been creeping up on awareness for a while now.

The eye-watering price tag for the latest fondle slabs from the blessed fruit company did surely hurry me along to revelation, but it was an instance of calculated generosity that pushed me over.

I replaced the battery on my old iPhone 6S Plus a week ago. With nearly 750 charging cycles on the clock it was, as the iMinion from the Genius Bar told me, “about to be consumed”. They sounded both horrified and impressed by that. Apparently not many batteries survive in the wild long enough to be “consumed”.

Mine had been gradually losing its grip on the world and it wasn’t unusual to run that bad boy down to a near zero charge by mid-morning. But the iPhone maker is running a discounted battery replacement program for older models until the end of the year and 39 bucks got me a new one full of fresh apple juice.