Professional Critic Digs Deeper

This morning while watching the news and drinking coffee before leaving for work, I learned that just two months after going on sale, Apple is dramatically lowering the price of its iPhone from $600 to $400. The segment featured several interviews of early adopters, all displaying various degrees of irritation and betrayal. As I watched the story unfold, along with the accompanying footage of the hundreds of people literally camping outside Apple stores to buy the phone this summer, I paused for a moment and felt ... nothing.

I'm not entirely lacking in empathy or sensitivity as a general rule, but even as I dug deeper, still nothing. Spending $600 on a phone because it's new and cool (and make no mistake, I do think it's cool), but that can be destroyed with just one drop into the toilet, slip down a sewer drain, or encounter with a car, is sort of crazy to begin with. It's a telephone that was relentlessly advertised to you, appealing to your need to be cutting edge and cool to your friends. And you went for it. A phone, not leukemia drugs that promised to save your life but killed you instead. And if you were spending $600 on a phone instead of buying leukemia drugs, you're far beyond the kind of help Apple can offer.

In an open letter to iPhone owners Steve Jobs not unreasonably says:

... being in technology for 30+ years I can attest to the fact that the technology road is bumpy. There is always change and improvement, and there is always someone who bought a product before a particular cutoff date and misses the new price or the new operating system or the new whatever. This is life in the technology lane. If you always wait for the next price cut or to buy the new improved model, you'll never buy any technology product because there is always something better and less expensive on the horizon ...

Check out this blog for more iPhone whinging and whining. It's entertaining for about five minutes.

In totally unrelated news, Madeline L'Engle, author of A Wrinkle in Time died today. I really can't deal with science fiction, but I am to understand that she was actually a great writer.