n.b. I've had an iPhone for a while now - this is a couple of months old.

Waiting years before buying an iPhone. Pixelsmith would never have managed that when he was younger.

I've just bought an iPhone. It's brilliant. It's amazing. It's a little slab of the future mystically transported to our time and placed directly into my hand for a monthly fee of £35 including 600 free minutes and 500 free texts. It's everything Star Trek promised bar the teleportation and the guns. And the space travel. And the aliens. I never really watched Star Trek.

If you've never heard of the iPhone, then I'd like to take this oportunity to welcome you to 2009. It's a little unnerving at first - shoulder pads are out, Wham have split up, France and Germany are using the same money - but you'll like it when you get settled. Once you've found your bearings, locate somebody with an iPhone and have a go. Ask permission first otherwise it's stealing.

What you'll find is a startling little device which somehow simultaneously manages to be a competent mobile phone, a great portable music player, a half decent games console, a rubbish camera and a touchscreen internetted computer all in one. When you combine all these elements into a single chunk of gadgetry, something magical occurs. Suddenly you've got this thing in your pocket which allows you to prod its screen and tells you where you are, where the nearest cinema is, what's showing today and how good it is - then it lets you watch the trailer, email and text your friends to tell them about it and call the cinema to book the ticket.

At which point everyone teleports to the foyer, renders the staff unconscious with their phasers and waltzes into the film for free. And then goes home to their house on the Moon.

No! No they don't really. Stop panicking. I keep forgetting you're from 1987. Here, I'll put some Spandau Ballet on. That's better.

I've turned up a bit late to the iPhone party. This magical device has been kicking around for a good couple of years, beckoning to me from the shop window like a tiny, rectangular, non-gender specific mermaid. How I longed to crash my barely-bouyant bank account into that expensive telephonic rock, but I held steady.

And there's something odd in that. Without realising it, I've become a lot better at holding steady in these past few years. If you'd have taken my teenage self by the lapels and wafted him in the direction of some incredibly appealing new piece of technology, he'd probably have fainted. Hand him a regular income and he'd have been down the shop faster than you can say "nerd". He'd probably have teleported.

And that lasted into my early 20s, this inability to combine a desired outcome (iPhone ownership) with the means to bring it about (overdraft) and still hold off, delay gratification until some future point at which parting with the cash wouldn't be quite so troublesome.

So what's changed? How can I now stare these must-have consumer items in the face and yet clutch onto my wallet, saying no, begone foul temptress, I will visit your shores next year after I've paid my car tax and bought a better lawnmower? How can I watch three seasons of The Wire, the greatest and most addictive TV show ever created, and then wait 15 months for my dad to catch up so we can watch the fourth season in a bonding father-son fashion? Where did this ability to put off what I really want to do come from, and what causes it?

I don't know, is the answer. I just hope it's not related to the fact that my iPhone, the most exciting purchase of the last year, sat in its box on my desk for two days before I opened it. I hope being able to control your excitement isn't a by-product of getting less excited about things in the first place. As my childhood retreats ever further into the sunset, I can honestly say I don't miss the recklessness. I just don't want the magic to go with it.