Is That an Apple In Your Pocket, or Do You Have Tertiary Syphilis?

As we speak, Stench the Wino’s earning a buck an hour and four bottles of Thunderbird to hold a place in line for me at the Apple Store. I’m not buying an iPhone; I just figured: when’s the next time I’ll see that many Apple fanboys congregated in one place, ripe for the horrifying? So I won’t be relieving Stench from his duties when he gets to the front of the line. He has orders to relieve himself. Figuratively and literally.

The hype behind the iPhone is taking a toll on me. It’s not because of the phone itself; it’s the Goddamned Apple techno-snobs publicly gooping their pants over how ELEGANT the design is. “It’s a classy shade of bone white, and the user interface is so SIMPLE!” Which also describes my toilet, but you don’t see me skulking around outside the Home Depot trying to get my hands on a first-generation iDump.

I’ve written before about how enraged I get by the Apple zombies with their white earbuds and attention-stealing MacBook with the logo that looks like an elephantine testicle with a chunk surgically severed off (And considering the pocket-sized iPhone’s got a glass screen, I wonder if that’s a corporate logo or a prescient warning symbol).

And I know that I’m not the only person who feels that way, so why would I buy something that, whenever I take it out in public, will doom me to be seen as “That prick with an iPhone.” It doesn’t matter what you’re using it for: sending an email negotiating the release of hostages in Iraq? “Look at that prick with an iPhone.” Googling how to perform a tracheotomy to save a choking kitten? “Prick with a iPhone.” Calling in an order for a case of beer two minutes before the liquor stores close for a long weekend? “Lifesaving, heroic prick with an iPhone.”

And I’m not moved by the squealing zealots who can’t wait to get Wi-Fi access to YouTube videos. Look, I like online video as much as the next guy, but I think I can wait until I get home to watch grainy cell camera footage of high school kids lip-syncing to hip-hop songs I hate. Yeah, there are other kinds of online video I like, but I imagine it would be frowned upon if I watched them at Starbucks. I doubt the cops would be sympathetic to the argument that kids like movies about happy, satisfied horses.

Ultimately, I don’t understand the hype behind the iPhone. Yeah, it does some stuff that my cell phone doesn’t do, but who cares? Where the rubber hits the road, it does what my $100 cell phone does: rings at inopportune times and irritates the fuck out of me. And I simply can’t justify spending $600 up front and $100 a month for two years for Apple to irritate me.

Not when I know that the wholesale rate to irritate someone is a buck an hour and four bottles of Thunderbird.

[tags]iPhone, Apple, iPod, dark humor[/tags]