I’ve had this question posed to me a number of times before.
My answer to that is usually “I refuse to succumb”.
Not that I think it’s really cool of me to deliberately not get an iPhone.
(I’m perfectly happy with my Nokia whatever-it-is model.)
Not that I think the iPhone is a bad product either.
In fact, I would agree that it is one of the more amazing inventions of our time.
And hey, I’m a very satisfied iMac and iPod user, so I have absolutely no doubt that the iPhone is equally wonderful as well.
It’s just that I don’t wish to hop on the whole oh-look-I’ve-got-an-iPhone bandwagon….and it has nothing to do with me thinking I’m being perceived as “cool” or “rebel” or anything.
The iPhone, or what I would sometimes like to call the “wow-this-gives-me-the-perfect-excuse-not-to-have-to-engage-in-any-social-behaviour device”, is just too good for its own good, if you get what I’m saying.
It’s loaded with games and apps that could probably keep you busy on your own for 24 hours a day if you so wished.
And it gives people the perfect excuse to be occupied with something, rather than attempt to perhaps pause to take in the beauty of the things around us, or even to attempt to engage in social interaction with humans, such as say…I dunno, talking?
Call me old school, but I just find it a tad disturbing when I see 3 youngsters seated together at a coffee joint for half an hour, but all 3 of them are staring down at their own iPhones and playing their iPhone games the whole time.
(If one of them had my Nokia phone he’d be bored stiff within five minutes.)
Makes you wonder what people in the pre-90′s era did in public to pass time before the invention of cell phones.
I guess what we’ve achieved in terms of technology we’ve had to compromise in terms of the quality of human interaction.
Hey, the kids could well be playing games with each other.
I’m thinking the same too.
Oh yah, I never thought of that possibility.
But the idea of getting together is to do stuff that you cannot do when not in person, no?
I fully agree. That was the point I was trying to bring out.
Agree that iPhone is one of the most intuitive phones one can get. Even 1-year-olds can do “the slide”.
1 reason not to get the iPhone too is that once you get it, you would kind of “have to” keep getting iPhones down the road. Difficult to switch.