Silver Apples of the moon

I don’t believe I’ve outed myself on this site as a total Apple-head, one of those fearsome Kool-aid drinkers you hear about, but I am.  OK, I let the cup pass me by when it comes to the iTunes Music Store and those supremely obnoxious Justin Long TV ads, but otherwise I'm all about the little white fruit logo.  

The first time I used a computer 20 years back it was a Mac, and the interface immediately made perfect sense to me.  A few months later I went to work in a PC-based office, which in 1988 meant DOS, and I hated the character-driven interface from Moment One.  Why, I wondered, would anyone subject themselves to this torture when they could be using a GUI instead?  (Not that I knew then it was called a GUI, but never mind.)  I’ve been one of The Cult from then on.

Given that, you’d think I’d be camping out in front of the Barton Creek Mall store waiting for my new iPhone tonight.  Well… no.  I don’t want any part of it.  In fact, I’m just a little bit nervous about what’s going to happen over the next few weeks once the iPhone becomes available.  I think there’s too much expectation, and chances are the product isn’t going to live up to it, and we’re going to hear a lot of forecasting (again) about how this is a big mis-step on Apple’s part and it’s probably going to kill the company and blah blah blah.  Which would be bullshit, but that doesn’t mean I want to hear it nonetheless.

Problem is, the consumer public with its microdot-size attention span sees the possibility for something new that’s as exciting and devotion-worthy as the iPod, and that’s what it wants.  Wants badly.  We love the iPod, love it to death, love it so much that we want something that’s going to replace it because we also love to believe that our lives can be changed (meaning improved) by a single piece of hardware.  But that’s not going to happen here, or certainly not immediately.  It seems already forgotten that the iPod, ubiquitous though it is now, didn’t really take off for at least two years after its release.  It took that long to get enough of the bugs out that it was mass-appealable.  (Those pastel Mini colors quite possibly made the difference.)  Don’t let all those pretty commercials fool you – the iPhone isn’t as ready for prime time as everyone wants it to be.  It can't be, simply by weight of expectation.  ("The Jesus phone"?)

If I do get one it won’t be for a long while.  It's not so much that I'm broke, or happy with my current wireless provider (though I am, both); it's that I’m pretty low-tech in these matters.  I've only been using a cell phone at all for 3 years and was absurdly happy a year ago just to get one with a color screen.  While it’s my only phone since I ditched the land-line, I don’t talk much on it because I’m essentially not a yakker.  It’s got no camera, no games, no dipshit personalized ringtones, and so far I don’t care to learn to text.  Web-surfing?  Fuhgeddabouddit.  I got a nice, dependable old laptop for mobility.  

It’s an iBook, of course.