Two Purchases, One Wife, and Absolutely No Good Judgment on My Part
I wanted a DJI Action 4 for Manali. My wife wanted me to use my phone. One of us is going to win this and I'm quietly checking store timings.
June 1st. Manali. Mountains, cold air, winding roads, and me standing there with absolutely nothing to capture it on except my iPhone that already has a cracked corner protector I’ve been ignoring since February.
This is unacceptable. This is, in fact, a crisis.
So naturally, I did what any reasonable person does when faced with a crisis: I opened Amazon at 11pm and found the DJI Osmo Action 4 Standard Combo sitting there at ₹24,990 — down from ₹44,990 — looking me dead in the eye like it had been waiting for me specifically. 4K footage. Incredible stabilisation. Waterproof. Magnetic quick-release mount. Practically made for mountain roads and waterfalls and all the things I’m about to see in exactly seven days.
I showed it to my wife.
She looked at the screen. She looked at me. She looked at the screen again.
“No.”
Just that. One word. The full stop at the end of my dreams.
I tried the rational approach. “But it’s already 44% off—”
“No.”
I tried the emotional angle. “Think of the memories we could capture—”
“Use your phone.”
I tried the investment framing. “This is essentially infrastructure—”
She had already left the room.
So here’s where I am now. Manali is six days away. The DJI is still in my cart, I check on it the way you check on a friend who’s going through something hard. Just to make sure it’s okay. Still ₹24,990. Still perfect.
And I’m seriously considering the oldest move in the married-person playbook: the Quiet Solo Trip to the Electronics Shop. You know the one. Where you go “out for a bit” and come back with a bag that gets placed directly in the wardrobe before any questions can be asked.
Will she notice? Almost certainly. It has two screens, front and back. I’m going to point it at everything in Manali. There will be footage. There will be evidence.
But here’s my working theory: mountains are forgiving, sunsets are beautiful, and if I come back with good enough videos — maybe, just maybe — she’ll see the DJI and think fine, it was worth it.
That’s the plan. A thin plan. A plan with visible cracks. But it’s the plan I have.
(Hi. If you’re reading this, I love you. The camera was on sale. Please notice the mountains.)
Meanwhile, My Apple Watch Is Also Having a Quarter-Life Crisis
Separately, and I don’t want to alarm anyone — my Apple Watch Series 7 has quietly aged out of usefulness.
Battery capacity: ~80%. Which sounds fine until you remember that 80% of a battery that was already struggling to last a full day is now a watch that needs charging before dinner. I’ve started treating it like a hospital patient — checking on it constantly, giving it top-ups throughout the day, quietly hoping for the best.
Apple will replace the battery for somewhere around ₹7,500–10,000. Which is the sensible, economical choice. I know this.
But then I made the mistake of looking up the Apple Watch SE 3. ₹33,900. And Apple does trade-ins.
So the math in my head currently looks like this:
Battery replacement: ~₹8,500 SE3 price: ₹33,900 Trade-in value of Series 7: something Net upgrade cost: probably ₹15,000–18,000 for a brand new watch instead of patching an old one
Is the SE 3 better than a battery-replaced Series 7? Marginally. Is that margin worth ₹15,000? Probably not. Will I spend the next two weeks convincing myself it is? Absolutely.
The cruel part is I can’t even pitch this to my wife right now. I’ve already used up my “reasonable tech purchase” quota for the month on a camera that’s technically still in my cart and not yet physically in my possession.
One gadget negotiation at a time.