I’ve been living happily in an electronics shitworld long enough that I’ve begun evangelizing for it. My last television, a Hisense pulled from the storeroom of a North Carolina Walmart by an employee who didn’t know it was there, is a simple and vibrant LED TV with bad sound. My stereo is built around an Insignia receiver (Best Buy house label) that powers speakers from a company called Micca ($55.60, 347 customer reviews, 4.7 stars) and it sounds… pretty good! My router is made by TP-LINK ($18.99, 575 customer reviews, 4.3 stars), and keeps me online about as reliably as my Netgear did. I bought my mother a neat little Baytek Bluetooth speaker for $26.99 (54 customer reviews, 4.6 stars), which she loves, even if its programmed voice draws out the “ess” in “Connected SuccESSSfully” in a way that suggests a strictly mechanical familiarity with English. I impulse-buy off-brand earbuds with mixed results and derive great satisfaction from discovering good ones. I bought a used Macbook for work but use a $280 Chromebook whenever possible. It is my aspirational shit-top, and I consider this situation a failure. Mainstream laptops are far enough along in the commoditization process that, for the purposes of browsing and emailing and chatting and dealing with photos — a near-totality of my computer usage — almost anything available will do. The top-selling laptop on Amazon is a $250 Asus that runs Windows 8. It would suit my needs nicely. We’ll see what happens when the Mac dies.

Off-brand electronics are, like their branded counterparts, interesting for a limited amount of time: The highest-end branded version of a product offers a chance to taste the luxurious future of technology; the shitworld version lets you preview a more practical future — the future most of the global electronics-buying public will actually enjoy. Take the Jambox, a small and dazzlingly expensive prism of speakers and battery and wireless radios that plays music from nearly any phone at a respectable volume; it was a sensation for a few years after its introduction in 2010. By 2013, off-brand speakers were making major inroads online, allowing shoppers like me to feel like we were somehow gaming the system (this requires, of course, a narrow and convenient definition of “the system”). The year after, Amazon, America’s primary portal to consumer electronics shitworld (and recently one of its proud citizens), had released its own version of the Jambox concept under the pointedly dull name “AmazonBasics Portable Bluetooth Speaker” (731 customer reviews, 4.4 stars). Soon, basic picnic-ready wireless speakers may become an undistinguished, disposable part of many consumers’ lifestyles, like USB sticks or batteries — a point at which branded versions are a minority sustained only by those consumers looking for Bluetooth speakers that signify luxury, style, or taste. Off-brand electronics are alluring only when they feel like deals — that is, only as long as there are more popular branded alternatives which they can imply are overpriced. They’re interesting, in other words, for as long as they make the buyer feel smart.

One of the lesser-appreciated joys of online shopping is that, in the process of streamlining and compressing the expressions of capitalism we call “retail,” it gives us a god’s eye view of market patterns. In one search on Amazon or Newegg you can see a category’s past, present, and near future: high-margin luxury options on one side, low-margin or out-of-date good-enough options from unlikely or unknown brands on the other. Then, in the big mushy middle, brands fighting over a diminishing opportunity. This is faintly empowering. To watch the compressed cycles of modern consumer electronics pass through your viewfinder gives a calming order to an industry that depends on the perception that it is perpetually exceptional. This perspective also helps to enforce realism about your relationship with consumer electronics. Whether you choose the luxury option, the commodity option, or something in between, you are buying future garbage.

It feels a little too early for the shitphone. My other off-brand electronics are easier to conceive of as LEGO-kit assemblies of parts. If my off-brand TV has a confusing menu system or a slow remote it’s not a huge deal, because most of my TV watching is passive. Its job is to show me a picture, and it does. But a smartphone’s job is to connect me to hundreds of people and dozens of internet services. A smartphone is extremely expensive, extremely small, and extremely complex, not just as a machine but as an interactive object. It must receive commands as ably as it provides information. Our relationship must sustain hundreds of expectant touches a day, and it must not be miserable.

The arrival of acceptable shitphones would represent the final commoditization of an entire era of consumer electronics, after the laptops and flip-phones but before the wearables and the implants and the [REDACTED] and the [RETURN TO YOUR CONSUMPTION SECTOR, THANK YOU, THIS IS YOUR LAST WARNING].

Shitphone arrived on time, delivered to the doorstep of our temporary rental home so quietly that the dog didn’t notice. It just appeared: a final invisible link in a labor chain stretching back to BLU Products, in an anonymous rectangular structure in an industrial suburb of Miami, and from there back to a factory in a Special Economic Zone in China. On the side of the box, a sort of manifest: 1 handset, 1 battery, 1 charger, etc. On the back of the box, the basics:

Aside from a few mysterious markings (a seal from Anatel, for example, which is Brazil’s version of the FCC) the packaging is serviceable and even helpful, more like nutritional information than advertising. Neatly packed around the thick, light, shiny phone were headphones, a case, and a screen protector. I installed my SIM and slotted in an $8 SD card. I activated the phone and installed my apps. The screen was fine, the software was Android (4.2.2, aka “Jelly Bean”: not new but not abandoned). The camera took pictures, the internet connected. It was mostly charged, and so we began.

The first day with shitphone was one long sigh of relief. Everything worked, or at least seemed to work. There was no app I needed that I couldn’t download. I chatted on GroupMe and checked Instagram and took pictures and texted and made some calls. I went for a run and listened to music that streamed from the internet. I dictated directions to Google Maps and it got me where I was supposed to go. Typing was a little slow, and Gmail would pause for moments, but as a proof of concept shitphone was performing better than expected. For a tenth of the price of the iPhone I had begun to resent I was getting nearly all of the functionality. At the end of the day — an active one — I had some charge left. Nice, nice, nice. I set my alarm, and the next morning it woke me up.

Homogeneity is what you should expect from shitphones, because it’s what you get. Buy a BLU or an Unnecto or a Posh Mobile or a Prestigio or a Yezz or an InFocus or an iRulu and you can expect similar boxes of parts, sorted by price point. The guts will likely be low-to-mid-range hardware from MediaTek, which is mostly invisible in the U.S. market but is the second largest supplier of mobile phone systems-on-chip in the world. This means the phones will share not just specifications but quirky features: even some of the cheapest phones let you use two SIM cards, for example, and many of them have an FM radio. The shells, which must fit around MediaTek’s core technology, stick to a few basic styles: For the bigger phones, seamless rectangles of a particular thickness; for the small ones, round-back thick-bezel handsets that evoke the iPhone 3G. For cheaper phones, you’ll get Android 4.2x. For a few more dollars, Android 4.4x. As is the case with major brands, shitphones with the latest version of Android, 5.0, are just becoming available.

Premium branded phones are the culmination of decades of research in wireless technology, computing, materials, and design. Shitphones are the culmination of decades of research in wireless technology, computing, materials, and design — minus a year or two. Shitphones are generally not actually shitty. They are, if you isolate them from the distorting effect of highly competitive preference-driven smartphone retail and marketing, the absence of which helps keep them so cheap, marvels of engineering and execution, assembled with precision and care and able to accomplish tasks that a half-dozen years ago would have been inconceivable for a portable device. iPhones are really just shitphones from the future.

This is what commoditization feels like: genuine novelty rapidly reduced to thankless anonymity. The iPhone and its high-end competitors benefited for years as the most visible and functional instance of a profoundly and globally novel new product. To be one of pioneering brands at the beginning of a new technological era — to sell someone his first magical hand device — is to apply a temporary multiplier to everything from brand recognition to loyalty to profit. But their brands, now, are just temporary protective spells cast against the inevitable. As we approach the 10-year anniversary of the release of the iPhone, the category it blew up is starting to feel familiar. By now, an American who purchased a smartphone on contract in 2009 has not just bought but discarded at least three devices, and as smartphones mature, that is the reality of their use: to improve is to disappear just a little more. Aren’t we all just emailing and Instagramming and Facebooking and Snapchatting and WhatsApping and Angry-Birdsing anyway?