Ok, the whole iPhone hype really makes me sick. Seriously. This is perverse. So here we have people - the tragically hip - who pretend to be the coolest of the cool, the hipster dufuses of the current age. We've got style, we've got it easy (screw you silly Windows users), we got class and we're willing to pay $500 for something that you will get for free in a few months with your AT&T phone. Very cool indeed!

What's funny though is the lines. The hype, the craziness over a freaking tech gadget. Enough to get people to camp out and waste perfectly good time that could be spent doing something REALLY creative - like taking a walk in the park. Nah, you'd prefer to sit like a homeless person and make yourself a little hovel on the sidewalk. Nice. I especially like the picture to the right. Those 'hip' kids chowing down on McDonald's junk food are ultra cool! It really looks like 6th Street in San Francisco at 10pm (minus the $100 sleeping bags).

Flock we must

There are lines for the iPhone. There were lines for xBoxes and Wii's game consoles. There were NO lines for Vista and people got pissed off. Apparently lines have become a symbol of marketing success in this world. The more people flock like sheep the more successful the product. And the fanclub!

Maybe I'm anti-social or something (no wait - I AM), but would you go out of your way to sit in a line for hours or even overnight? What type of personality goes in for that? Last time I checked lines are BAD! I walk out of a grocery store if the line is longer than 3 people deep, but then I have a real aversion to crowds <s>. But if you're so fond of being outdoors and in line donate your net worth to your favorite charity and live it for real - nothing like a cold winter night and a line at the soup kitchen to tell you just how silly your idea of 'camping out' really is!

Wasted effort, wasted time - or just wasted!

Back to the iPhone. And oh do people get excited. They gush and gush about how awesome this phone is (even though they've used it for all but 2 minutes), or on the other end the critics will say how average it is and how you don't really need one. All this wasted energy about something that will be forgotten next year when the next tech gadget hits. Of course this happens almost daily as new things come out. There will be pre-release count down. Then there will be the imminent marketing rush, finally the unveiling and the release - and 3 days later the whole thing is forgotten. But think of the wasted resources - intellectual, material and monetary that goes into this sort of misguided market manipulation. And most of us buy into it or are at least curious. Unless you're completely tuned out of the system (and I come close, but apparently not close enough) you got inundated by iPhone trivia on Tv and radio (not me), in Web news (yup) and even through completely unrelated blog content (definitely). I mean you even have folks like Scott Hanselman gushing...

The new Sheepitalism

Ok, nothing new here right? This is after all the US of A the country of the consumer royal, the gadget über alles society. But seriously, why are so many of us so obsessed with our gadgets? We have cell phones, media players, game consoles, tv's that are 10 times more expensive than the CRTs we bought 5 years ago, we have stereos that sound shittier than those from 10 years ago while being 10x as complicated to make them do simple things etc. etc. Gadget this gadget that... it seems the more features the more complexity the more appeal the gadget. It's all backwards...

But my question really is - is all of this making your life better? Is it improving your quality of living? I really wonder. Life has changed a lot in the last 10 years. A lot. I'm 40 years old now and the last 10 years have seen more change than the 30 years that came before it combined. In the way we live, in the way we interact, in the way our society works. I know it's hard to remember even now but remember the world before Google and WikiPidia or as a software developer without MSDN and Web searching? It's hard to imagine now is it? How about without a cell phone (although I really sometimes wish we didn't have those fucking so that some idiot can be screaming into his phone - "You still there?" every two seconds).

So there are definitely improvements, but if you look at your quality of life is it really better because or in spite of the gadgetry? Cell phones are bringing connectivity to us anywhere and everywhere. That can be good and bad. Good because you can be in contact whenever necessary. But bad because you can in fact be gotten a hold of anywhere anytime. It takes all sorts of self-constrained to implement the 'Just say NO' policy on cell phones and 'turning off'. Always on, always connected always surrounded by the constant media buzzsaw... when's the last time you connected with - oh I don't know - yourself? Or nature? <s> And going on a long nature hike with your iPod blasting the latest MachineHead CD doesn't count!!!

So again - the question is, is it for the better or are too many of us just getting so fucking bored that we get excited and queue up (WILLINGLY mind you) in line to wait for the newest tech gadget and are willing to plunk down $500 because somebody in marketing said that you will love it? Ok, so this iPhone business is pretty much on the extreme end, but think about yourself for a minute - when's the last time you were foaming at the mouth for some toy that you really wanted and you were out by the mail box waiting for the UPS truck to show up already? Yeah it happens, probably to most of us.

Bääääääääh... to all of us... we are sheep, and we suck!