My Beef With the iPhone
By Thomas Gallant
I have a problem with the iPhone, namely that I don’t have one. Two years ago I made the jump over to a Mac computer, a move facilitated by iTunes invading my PC and making me familiar with the glossiness of the Mac interface as well as the Leopard OS finally being one that required minimal behavioral changes for a Windows XP user to learn. It has been a great experience, and I haven’t looked back. I now have a Macbook Pro, an iMac, an iPod Touch, and iPod Shuffle an Airport Express with AirTunes and a shitload of white cables.
I’m totally chugging Apple Kool-Aid, I admit it. I get geeked out by the set up of being able to stand in my yard and from my iPod Touch control the iTunes library on my iMac and have it pipe the sound to my outdoor speakers via the stereo across the house that has the Airport Express hooked up to it. It’s wireless, convenient, seamless, and of course expensive.
So all this cool stuff and no iPhone. I can think of only one reason why I don’t have one, can you guess what it is? That’s right, I’m a Verizon customer. I can also only think of one decent reason why I’m still a Verizon customer: it fucking works. Their customer service sucks, the people at the stores lie to you about technology, they overprice every accessory they sell and they have all sorts of unattractive proprietary software. However, I’ve driven across this great land a few times and been across the pond once or twice and my phone works everywhere. It’s incredibly frustrating how accessible I am sometimes.
So why don’t I just switch to AT&T? All of those other people seem to be able to survive with their service, right? Well, to be honest, I believe the hype. I see the commercials with the maps, I see AT&T using Luke Wilson to try and convince me that “coverage” and “3G coverage” are the same thing by flinging postcards all over the place. It’s not working. I’m also locked in to a contract and really like it when my Blackberry gives me that hourglass icon telling me I have to wait for something.
The AT&T/Apple relationship pisses me off, quite frankly. Would I buy a Ferrari if I could only fill it up at Sinclair gas stations? Well, yes, because I’d still have a Ferrari and that would be awesome and in that scenario I’d have enough money to put a Sinclair station in adjacent to my mansion. But back to reality, isn’t it the same thing? Why would you want the best of anything if you couldn’t use it to its full potential? I believe the same thing will happen in a different capacity if and when the iPhone comes to Verizon. Every two or three weeks it seems there is a new rumor that it’s coming to Verizon sometime about 6 months away. All teases released by Verizon to keep people from jumping to AT&T and locking in to a 2 year contract. Lots of people are wishing Verizon had an iPhone, but will it be allowed to be all it can be? Or will Verizon cripple it by turning off the GPS or making you use their App Store instead of Apple’s? Apple probably won’t allow this type of behavior that Verizon has displayed in the past, making it all the more unlikely that it will ever happen.
Droid, you say? Get the Google phone? I was cool with all things Google until they released Buzz. Oops. Sorry guys, you fucked up. I still love Gmail and your search results really are better, but c’mon, did you need to do Buzz?
In the words of George Carlin “I have no ending for this, so I take a small bow.”
