iPhone 5

A collective *gasp* whooses through my two-person blogger audience.

"It cannot be," they exclaim. "The great Eric publicly speaking the name of a Apple product?! And not just any Apple product, but the messiah of Apple products!"

Yes, yes, it's true: I said it. Deal w/ it. It's not like I've anything good to say about the silly thing.

As many of you know, I'm not a fan of smart phones. I tenaciously hold onto my silly LG Alias 1, as I think it's the perfect combination of QWERTY keyboard and flip-phone. Its battery lasts for days. It does exactly what I need it to do - make calls and send texts. But even my own phone seems fancy to me. Just today, I told V that I wouldn't mind going back to my first true phone-love: Nokia's ever-famous bar phone. (Seriously, those things were the best phone ever. You could drop 'em, get 'em wet, chuck 'em. Didn't matter: they could survive anything). I loved that phone for no other reason than that its alarm would turn the phone on just to go off, which meant I could turn it off at night and still use it as an alarm.

But I'm not here to talk about my phones, past or present.

Several weeks ago, Apple's anxiously anticipated iPhone 5 hit the market. And the world exploded in a fervor of technical delight as thousands of people around the world got their hands on this new gadget. It does everything the old iPhone did, but looks better while doing it. (In all fairness, it probably does things better too. Faster. Less power consumption. Bigger screen. Etc.). News channels covered the product's release. All my co-workers wouldn't stop talking about it during our meetings and our lunch breaks. There was some kind of Mac "buzz" in the air.

Companies are even using iPhone SWAG as give-aways at job fairs to attract students! It's worth it to them to assume that a sizable chunk of the people they want will own iPhones! Seems like a big assumption to me...

That's what boggled my mind so much. To see people all around me so engrossed in this simple little technical doo-dad. The most cynical of my acquaintances went gaga over the thought of getting their iPhone 5 or hearing of someone else getting one. iPhone this. iPhone that. Apps. Data. Pictures. Social networks. Taxes. Cooking dinner. Changing the baby. Surgery. I was amazed at how easily a society could be sidetracked by this thing.

It frustrated me, but I couldn't explain why it bothered me so much. Maybe it was the materialism. How focused people became for something that really didn't matter. I seriously doubt anyone legitimately needed an iPhone 5. More than likely, they just wanted the next biggest, bestest thing to hit the market. It reminded me of something I once read on the internet of people's passion to buy Mac products.

Maybe it comes from my technical critique of the smart phone market. I was very critical of smart phone technology when it first came out. Mostly b/c I thought it wasn't ready for heavy commercial use. V's phone was a testament to that: the poor thing's hardware and software often fail to perform simple tasks like getting on the web. Now, my feelings haven't changed much. Yes, the technology's better. But the market for apps is kind'f what the market for cartridge video games or personal computers was like in the early 90's. Everybody had a way to make a computer. Some better than others. But the overall market was a mish mash of people trying too hard to establish a standard for computing machines.

But I digress...

People will get their new iPhones. They'll enjoy the luxuries it provides. But I doubt it'll really bring the satisfaction people think it will. No one will really register serious dissatisfaction w/ the product. I don't think people will actively dispose of their iPhone 5 for a similar smart phone - like I said, I admit the phone's a good piece of property to have. But when the next one comes out - b/c we all know there'll always be a "next" one - people will clamor and bustle about as anxiously as they did for the iPhone 5.

I guess it's just sad to see so large a group of people - our entire country - brought to such a silly social state.

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