John Zeitler

I started off this post with a rather poor attempt to review BT’s latest album, These Hopeful Machines, but as you can no doubt see, I’ve scrapped it. The reasons are many, but mostly they boil down to “I’m not a music reviewer, so anything I say is going to be hopelessly shallow and pedantic”, and “even if I was a music reviewer I literally cannot find the words to describe how this album makes me feel beyond ‘profoundly reflective’, but that’s mostly for personal reasons completely unrelated to the album itself”. I suppose the best I can do, really, is to say that it’s really good, and that anyone who likes electronic music is going to absolutely love it.

If that in fact turns out to be old news, then blame Amazon. I know I do.

Anyway. The word “hope” is a bit appropriate this week, as it turns out, as the Apple WWDC came on Monday and the big video game hoopla, E3, is next week. In both cases the internet has done what it does best: ruined the surprises. We knew about the iPhone 4 months ago, and “leaks” are coming faster and faster as the console “pre-conferences” come closer. I’ll cover these two events one at a time.

First, the iPhone. I found Penny Arcade’s assessment of the technical difficulties a bit… well, anticlimactic. I mean, come on. We all know what really happened. Grey Davis was accompanied on the altar by the employees responsible for the foulups, and together they were all sacrificed by The Jobs to The Beast That Has Naught But Two-Dollar Bills, He Who Thirsts For Quicksilver And The Blood of Interns, Great Bearded Geek With A Thousand-Dollar Computer, W’oz-Loggoth. For Gabe and Tycho to whitewash this just shows you how far lost they are in The Dark Faith of Cupertino. That said, the iPhone 4 was, literally, nothing surprising. I don’t mean that in light of the advances that were known based on the Gizmodo leak, and I don’t mean that it wasn’t technologically impressive. It was, in all respects, exactly what I was betting the 4.0 version of the iPhone would be when I signed on for the 3G two years ago.

See, the only people really getting bent out of shape are the fanbrats who are, either willfully or through sheer stupidity, failing to realize that the iPhone is not a computer and is not beholden to the same product lifecycles as one. It is a smartphone, and as such the decision to purchase or to skip it must be made from that paradigm. Phones are updated on an almost weekly basis. I’ve lost track of how many “phone X running Android-/Palm-flavored OS version Y is now available on carrier Z” posts I’ve seen in the last year. Hell, I couldn’t tell you how many I’ve seen this week. The point being that it doesn’t matter which phone you buy, or which platform you commit to. You need only blink before something “better” comes along. If you’re going into the iPhone, or an Android handset thinking that you’ll be hip and completely up-to-date, think again. Also please hit yourself on the head with a hammer, repeatedly, until the stupid leaks out of your ears. It’ll be a gray color, you’ll know it when you see it.

I can’t speak for everyone, and I certainly can’t speak for someone who’s taking this opportunity to jump from iPhone to an Android set. Who I can speak for is myself, and I’m going by the same rules I’ve had for cell phones since the very beginning– altering them, in point of fact. I started with a fairly basic clamshell phone back in early 2004, and limited myself to one upgrade per year until I made the jump to the iPhone two years ago. I did so knowing that I could not keep up that pace, and that it was entirely likely that I would not need to– remember, the first-gen iPhones shared in a lot of the features that the 3G version did back in ’08. It was not an altogether wild leap to assume that it would be merely one year between each version of the phone, and it turned out that I was right. The 4.0 handset has features that I want, and makes upgrading an attractive option– and since I was planning to do so anyway, there’s no problem. (If the 4.0 had, in fact, not been announced this year– I would have waited until the end of summer– I’d have gone to the 3GS for the extra storage space anyway.)

As for people dealing with the advertising and marketing campaign surrounding, well, all of Apple’s products, I refer you to the dissertation available on this weblog dated the twenty-eighth of February, Anno Domini Twenty-Ten, and shall leave it at that.

This ran a bit longer than I expected, and got a little ranty and preachy near the end. I’ll skip the E3 discussion until tomorrow, but I have a lot to say about that, too.