Apple- why I won't bite!

Apple - why I won't bite

 

 

Mrs Resourceful is an outdoor kind of lady. She can name plants. Her favourite novelist is Jack Bivouac (favourite novel: Off the Road). She enjoys the kind of walks where you have to stop and bang your shoes against stiles to get the mud off. It was on one of these walks that I had my one fleeting experience of owning an Apple iPhone.

We found it in some forest or other, just lying there, an Apple in the woods. In order to find the owner, I had to pretend for about half an hour that it was my phone. Hundreds of phone calls, some wildlife photography and a little internet browsing later, we arranged a meeting with the owner, who met us by a church I'd sent his wife photographs of. I think I also sent her a Wikipedia entry and a map. The owner showed up almost sobbing with gratitude. His child was in the back of the car, also sobbing with joy. The owner gave us a bottle of wine.

I could see why he was happy to have the iPhone back - my phone doesn't even have a camera.
Imagine! A phone without a camera!

Here's the thing, though: all this happened a while ago. That guy's phone is now old news. It's nowhere near as flashy as the new iPhone, which has greatly increased capabilities and a toaster.
Imagine! A phone without a toaster!

Radio 4 recently had a feature about how Apple is set to become the biggest corporation on the planet, and things that big exert a lot of gravitational pull. And yes, I would love, say, an iMac. But even though I consider their products veritable style icons, I can't get into Apple.

My problem is this: I don't want to buy a style icon only to find that it is superseded a few months later. A few years ago I came close to buying an iMac, back in the days when I considered buying expensive things. But by the time I'd sold a kidney to fund the purchase (not mine, thankfully), there'd been a press release about a newer version, which was thinner and had some sort of black trimming. Imagine if I'd bought the old one!
Imagine! A computer without black trimming!

Style icons shouldn't evolve too quickly. Sinclair brought out some variations on the ZX Spectrum, but everyone knows what the real thing looked like; there was only one definitive model. But Apple try to keep us perpetually frothing at the chops over their next release, and I don't want to do all that frothing, thanks. Until they slow down, I'll stick with a cheap laptop that works, and view the Apple parade from afar.

Interestingly, I managed to convince an owner of the old iPhone last weekend that my phone is the new iPhone. My phone is actually a Doro Easyphone, which I got, truth be told, as a joke. It has big buttons, a deafening ring tone, an emergency button on the back that you can press if you fall down and break your hip. No internet, no camera, no toaster. But my interlocutor clearly believed me. I had to explain to the iPhone owner that I was kidding. In retrospect, I should have sold it to her.
You see, if the cool companies change their flagship products every other week, nobody knows if your piece of crap is, or isn't, the latest incarnation of something ultra desirable.

You could have some fun with that.

Mr Resourceful