Your Hot Cup of Rant

When the iPhone came out, everyone HAD to have one. Steve Jobs took time out from running his computer division into the ground to expound on why it was the Next Generation of phones, the sycophantic media fawned over it while poo-pooing it’s “minor” flaws, and of course, the public - always looking for the next materialistic gadget to take their minds off of how worthless their lives really are - waited in massive, twelve and eighteen hour queues just for the privilege of owning one of these gadgets at $500 (4GB) and $600 (8GB). After all, why not? It’s an iPod that makes phone calls! Why, we have to have that! But most importantly, it’s a STATUS SYMBOL! It will GET ME LAID!!!

Naturally, no one paid attention to the warnings. No one cared that in order to do just about anything with it you needed proprietary software like iTunes or Safari, possibly the world’s worst browser. No one seemed to notice that you can’t load ANY third party applications on the phone (sorry, all you Linux-on-iPod freaks), which caused the Safari lock. No one bothered to do the research into the fact that Apple’s hardware typically shits the bed in the first generation, and those kinks get worked out in later generations (see: iPod). And the whole “two year, exclusive contract with AT+T with no other choices” bit? Ignored. But they DID pay attention to Steve Jobs’s warning that there “weren’t enough” units to go around. Who cares if it could explode in your pocket in the worst case, or that Apple’s batteries tend to shrink in effectiveness as they get older? The iPhone might not be in! I have to get in line for it, or I won’t be cool! I WON’T GET LAID!!!

I can see their consternation; after all, if there’s anything a woman has ever wanted to fuck, it’s someone that stinks from waiting in a line outside for 18 hours coming up to her going “check out my gadgets!”

Of course, now that the euphoria has worn off, everyone’s starting to notice just what they paid for with that $600, or what is also known as most of my month’s rent. “What do you mean I can’t use this with Verizon?” “This thing’s really touchy!” “I can’t load my old SIM card?” And my personal favourite… “I can’t activate!”, which means your new gadget is nothing more than a $600 paperweight. It’s not like Apple cares, they already have made a profit of $335 - straight, since they control distribution and don’t have to charge wholesale prices to distributors - off of you idiots. I could spend three paragraphs going over everything that sucks about this product, but instead, I’ll let this site handle that

My job here is to send a collective bitchslap to American consumerism.

I find it amazing that in a country that features people digging in the dumpster and having to work two jobs just to get by, that so many people are so wilfully ignorant that they just throw their money away. I’m not talking about the super-rich here; I’m talking about people like you and me, people that simply don’t have $600 to blow. What causes this thought process? What makes a disposable gadget THIS important that people completely lose their minds and queue for almost a day, and in the case of devices like the PS3, even longer, to the point where they resort to VIOLENCE? And even worse, do these people realize how foolish they really look? Do they realize that this contributes to the rest of the world - a world that kills policemen over a children’s game played with nothing but a ball and a feet, don’t forget - viewing Americans as a group of fat, lazy, stupid mounds of protoplasm that lead meaningless lives, jumping from one mindless distraction to the next, caring of nothing but themselves and saying “fuck the world” because it’s inconvenient? Do they realize that the press intentionally propagates this hype and buzz to take us off of how badly we’re being fucked over by the people that are supposed to lead us? Even worse… do they even care? Do they give it even a moment’s thought?

Thankfully, the release of the iPhone went smoother than the release of the Playstation 3; everyone that’s wanted one has gotten one for the most part, there were no reported incidents of violence (to my knowledge), there’s no poachers making $10,000 off of this thing like they did on eBay with the PS3, and the threat of not enough iPhones turned out to be a bluff instead of an intentional hardware shortage like Sony put forth. But it still doesn’t make us look any less foolish that we put forth so much effort towards something that will be obsolete in a month, and won’t work properly much longer after that.

And the last time I checked, looking like a fool never helped anyone get laid.