A Comment on iPhone Hype

Somewhere in 2001 I first taped into the Apple rumor-mill. I was raised on PCs (from an ear­lier age than many actu­ally) as far back as that won­drous time when Lotus 1–2-3 and WordPerfect were con­sid­ered god­sends, and the most excit­ing gad­get we got was a 3 color band for our dot matrix printer, mak­ing sweet blue yel­low and red Print Shop fly­ers. There were macs at school, but I never really cared too much, until High School when I first messed around with Final Cut Pro. As a dili­gent geek, I sought out as much info as I could to make an edu­cated deci­sion about my first Apple pur­chase, an iMac G4.

Ever since, I’ve become a huge Apple fan­boy, with my ear close to the tracks. Those of you who know me know that my hero is Steve Jobs, and my favorite TV movie is Pirates of Silicon Valley. Now, lately, the inter­net (read the world) is abuzz with talk of Apple’s lat­est cre­ation, the iPhone. There is a lot of heated debate over it. And there is one very com­mon argu­ment that is really piss­ing me off that I’d like to share.

iPhone and Apple crit­ics wont shutup about the fact that Apple is just build­ing up a prod­uct that isn’t so rev­o­lu­tion­ary. They’ll say that you can’t shoot video with it, or no Flash, or touch screens have been around awhile, or any num­ber of things that the iPhone can’t do. Then, to the fan­boys like myself, they’ll say we’re just caught up in a mar­ket­ing scheme, that we’re brain­washed by the Jobs Machine, in fact that whole world has been brain­washed. Then it turns into an argu­ment of how there are bet­ter mp3 play­ers than iPods and Macs just have pretty cas­ings with crap inside, blah blah blah.

So here’s my answer to all of you, if you ever hap­pen upon my hum­ble blog: So what? Who cares that Apple has a die-hard fol­low­ing? We’re not brain­washed. They have great mar­ket­ing! We stand here on the eve of a rev­o­lu­tion, the release of the iPhone. Now, whether or not it is a rev­o­lu­tion­ary device is at the cen­ter of these debates, but no one real­izes that the device has noth­ing to do with this rev­o­lu­tion. Have you ever seen this hype over a gad­get? The answer is no. This is big­ger than Halo 2, big­ger than PS3, big­ger than, hmmm, Windows 98? The “dam­age” is done. The rev­o­lu­tion hap­pened. The iPhone is already a suc­cess because it made peo­ple so excited about a prod­uct that none has ever got­ten this jazzed about. The prece­dent is set, and now gad­get releases, we will see more and more, will be like movie releases. Hit ‘em hard and fast, then make a sequel!

Anyway. Tomorrow I’ll get in line with the rest of the nut­cases (read enlight­ened) and hand over my money to the revolution.

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Watching

ER

Third Season