For the last several months, I’ve been hearing more about the iPhone on NPR while driving to work than I really cared to.
The phenomenon is a fascinatingly, achingly-perfect example of our consumer culture. All of the reporting I heard on NPR was about the wonderous technology and gotta-get-it, gotta-get-it, gotta-get-it.
Or sometimes about people who feel they’ve gotta-get-it, gotta-get-it, gotta-get-it.
People standing in line; people paying people to stand in line. Lines, everywhere — if reports are to be believed. People waiting to buy; people waiting to try: to the former, “Do you have nothing better to do with your money?” and to the latter, “Do you have nothing better to do with your time?”
I really just don’t get it. It’s a phone that plays music, and accomplishes it without a keypad. Nothing revolutionary. Nothing that turns our conception of the universe on its head. Bohr, Plank, and Einstein would have all been impressed, I’m sure.
Perhaps I’m just one of those “old fashioned” types that thinks a phone that is just a phone is sufficient. My phone is two years old, and if I don’t have to get a new one to renew my contract, I probably won’t, because I just don’t care. It rings; I talk — end of story.
If I want to listen to music, I’ll use my iPod…
Here, here! (Or hear, hear) Let’s get some perspective people. Those people who queued and bought a phone acted as if their lives dependent on it and the world would end if they didn’t get this phone. Uuuuh…it’s a phone…get over it.
I think it’s “Hear hear.” And perhaps their lives, in some way, did depend on this — which is a terribly depressing thought…
I suppose that some folks lives are so mundane that any distraction like this comes as a welcome relief to the boredom they endure. It looks “slick” the way it operates but…still is a phone! Now an improvement to me would be a phone that didn’t “drop out” during a conversation – or maybe would say, “Hang on a moment I’m about to go into a ‘dip’ and might lose you.”