"If You Don't Have an Iphone"

"If you don't have an Iphone, well... you don't have an Iphone".

This is the latest tagline used recently by Apple to promote the Iphone. It's several brief 30-40 second television advertisements highlights the perceived unparalleled access and services that their wonderful product offers to modern society. No longer content with owning books and storing them on a bookcase; having a large and well organised physical music collection; enjoying a film on a screen that doesn't fit into your pants; or just simply having the nous to do something simple such as read a map or convert one currency with the other; the Iphone it appears is available to replace all this; and oh my god does it enjoy telling you about it.

Charlie Brooker has over the past several years aimed several 900 word rants on his Guardian column against Apple products and I'm not here to compete or to replicate what its seems only that man is capable of. I have my own grievances with Apple and the whole 'Smartphone' dependency that many of us now have or more likely being expected to have.


The Iphone, like all of it's 'Smartphone' competitors quite expectedly aims to highlight the never ending options and services that their products provides to the customer in order to boost their sales capacity for large sales and improve their public profile. Whilst some may advertise on the basis of an innovative new feature such as HTC; and others document their reliability and functionability such as Blackberry, the Iphone, like all Apple products simply needs to turn up and flex its muscles. They simply just swagger about the place and even if they products are given awlful reviews or embarassing technical hitches are discovered, it simply doesn't matter, they're just better. Being Apple must be like watching a successful sports team where despite how badly they perform and how much criticism they receive, they'll have the means, the power and the audacity to coast along infront of the rest of the opposition with a massive smug bastard grin on their faces.

Your life, it would appear is just incomplete without a Iphone. Your capacity to discover new books will be behind that of your peers. Just how is one to survive without access to more books than the fucking British Library there, then, in your hand is beyond me. When it comes to music, the Iphone's boast that it contains a music player within seems to me as a statement that they have reinvented the wheel. Ringtones and more so Walkman's and 20 odd years of portable music players must have just passed them by. It also has the audacity to tell you what music to listen to through its 'Genius' feature. So your own 'ear' for music is just no longer required. Don't bother reading any music review and discovering music on your own, Apple will tell you what to like. For many who listen to what they think they're supposed to anyway, I guess this won't produce a massive change (I.e. they'll listen to waves of shite).

I haven't got anything against any Iphone (or Smartphone) user; or even many of the products and services that these offer. However what bothers me the most is much of society's acceptance in using these new products. Just because you can now access more or less everything at your fingertips doesn't mean you have to. Don't watch a film on a screen the size of a postage stamp; read a 600 pg novel without turning a page; buy music you are being told to or pay for an app just because some other big dick in the office does. Do it if you want to. All I'm saying is other ways of doing things that a Smartphone can do haven't disappeared. Think about it; what did you do before....?