Saturday, July 07, 2007
I know I'm not alone in this, but I think the iphone is the coolest single electronic device to come down the pike in the last thirty years. What pisses me off is this; why the high cost for cool? Why can't cool be affordable? Of course this thought reminds me of that part in "Fight Club" where Brad Pitt is taking Ed Norton to task for allowing possessions to define him. Why do I think the iphone is so cool? Why do I want one so badly? Why? I could give you the geeky, techno answer; phone, video ipod, internet device, touch screen, etc... Perhaps it's the automatic status symbol, the fact that they are expensive and so unnecassary. I was talking to Peter the other day, and what he said is that he's been intentionally holding out on buying any ipod, because he thought eventually they would come out with a combo device. For him, if he's got to carry a cell phone, he might as well have an integrated ipod so that he's not adding a device to his already full pockets. The news that the baseline iphone costs $500, and then on top of his current AT&T service he'd have to pay $20/month just to use his iphone (that's $240/year or $480/2 year contract) bringing the total for an iphone over two years to almost $1,000. Then you factor in that Peter is really hard on cell phones, currently his outer display doesn't work, the camera takes pictures that look like they're underwater, and there is a fine layer of dust inside the main display. Anyways, my point is that if he's going to buy another cell phone it better be a little more hardy than the one he's already got, and perhaps the iphone isn't the way to go. So it's expensive, it's flimsy, it's a glaring example of materialsim, plus it's super lame. Maybe I don't want an iphone after all.
