Perovskite and a new iPhone

Mineral Matters #613

“When life gives you lemons, make lemonade”.

This phrase is a proverbial expression that encourages optimism and a positive can-do attitude in the face of adversity or misfortune. The exact origin of the phrase is not definitively known, but it has been attributed to various sources over time.

One of the earliest reported uses of the phrase is from a 1915 obituary for an actor named Marshall Pinckney Wilder. The obituary described Wilder's optimistic attitude towards life, stating that he "took the lemons that fate handed him and started a lemonade stand". The phrase gained wider popularity through its use by various public figures, including Dale Carnegie in his 1948 book "How to Stop Worrying and Start Living". Carnegie used the phrase to illustrate the importance of maintaining a positive outlook and making the best of difficult situations.

Over time, the phrase has become a well-known idiom in English, often used to encourage resilience and adaptability in the face of challenges.

So why did I bring it up?

Well, my iPhone has been playing up for a while, with either the screen going blank, or just being totally unresponsive, at inopportune times, such as when trying to take a call. It is an iPhone 11 Pro Max, so a bit ancient in mobile phone terms these days!

I decided to bite the bullet and get a replacement. The current iPhone is the iPhone 16 and, as is often the case with Apple products, fairly expensive. I looked online and found a place that was still selling (new) iPhone 15s, and that would mean a “discount” of a few hundred dollars, and they were, according to their website, in stock.

So off I went. When I got there, I was a bit annoyed to find that they were not, in fact, in stock. So I enquired on the price differential between the 15 and the 16. For the first time ever (that I know of), Apple were offering a discount! Shock, horror!

So I ended up getting the iPhone 16 Pro for about $20 more than the advertised price for the 15 Pro.

Then the lemonade bit. I have a Struman Optics macro lens that screws onto a Struman phone case. But Apple change the dimensions of their phones each time they release a new one so the case wouldn’t fit (only by a millimetre or two). However, the iPhone 16 Pro has an in-built macro function. And it is quite good! Depth of field seems to be adequate. And the camera is stated to be 48 Megapixels. A bit of practice, and a better subject, and I think I could get some half-decent photos.

The cropped photo below is of a couple of perovskite crystals without matrix from Oka, Deux-Montagnes RCM, Laurentides, Québec, Canada. The smaller one is a cube measuring about 2.5mm, and the larger, an octahedral crystal, measures about 4.5mm.