Op-Ed: IPhone users are insufferable geeks

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In terms of significant cultural landmarks, the iPhone has drawn more devotion than “Seinfeld,” the 2004 Red Sox and tribal tattoos combined. The only recent trend that has held the attention of screaming preteens for as long has been “Twilight,” and they were all using iPhones to tweet about it. Steve Jobs and company have stirred up a religious fervor the likes of which haven’t been known since, well, the publication of the Bible. The techno-worship has got to stop.

For one, the iPhone’s appeal seems to be predicated on the fact that it’s so exclusive its owner should be showered in praise and admiration every time he or she whips it out. This may have been true when it was first released two years ago and there were still waiting lists to get one, but now everyone has one. So many people have them now that AT&T has been struggling to keep up with the resultant surge in bandwidth demand. Service has sometimes been close to unusable in densely populated areas.

And all of this Web traffic for what? Checking Facebook 15 or 20 more times a day? Don’t get me wrong; I’m not trying to sound like an old man overprotective of his lawn, but do we need to be so plugged in all the time? It seems self-evident that it would be better to actually spend time with someone, even for just a few minutes, than text them all day. This is simply the nature of evolving social customs, but no matter what you conclude, it’s hard to deny that the iPhone encourages constant use. I can hardly go three minutes without at least checking my e-mail, which the phone actually does for me, but I have to check manually “just in case.”

Apple likes to flaunt that the iPhone has several orders of magnitude more applications than competing smart phones, but that just means much more rubbish. For every genuinely useful app — and it’s exceedingly difficult to find a good example — there are thirty or so flaunting “bikini babes” or volunteering all your personal information so you can tend a small virtual garden. Finding useful apps requires sifting through a lot of trash on the App Store or using an outside Web site to find them for you. It’s a design flaw when you can’t use Apple’s downloading tool to find applications to download.

There is no legal alternative distribution method for applications, so developers are beholden to overbearing restrictions on what they may or may not do. The only way to circumvent Apple’s control — “jail-breaking” — is technically difficult, violates Apple and AT&T’s terms of service and has been known to turn the coolest phone ever into a useless brick. Apple’s intention is clearly to restrict the activities of both its users and developers.

Some of these problems are clearly not specific to the iPhone but to smart phones generally. All of them encourage persistent, all-day usage. All of them breed a sense of pretentiousness in their users, to some degree. But in terms of applications — Apple’s supposed advantage — competitors win the day. The Palm Pre supports Web-based third-party applications, and Adobe is actively developing Flash for Palm use, something the iPhone is often criticized for lacking. The signal-to-noise ratio in BlackBerry applications is seemingly much higher than the iPhone, and Motorola’s Droid and other Android-based phones are well positioned to challenge Apple’s market dominance.

In the end, what separates iPhone users from others is a pervasive sense of smug superiority. When someone has an iPhone, you will know it; they will ask you if you’d like to see their phone’s newest trick, latest app or simply bask in its splendor. What is forgotten is the iPhone is just the bastard child of a cell phone and laptop, and it doesn’t necessarily excel at either role. The next time you encounter an insufferable iPhone user, remind them they could have spent just as much money on an inexpensive cell phone and just about any netbook and doubled their versatility. Mention Linux for bonus points and watch their smiles fade into thinly-veiled contempt.

Andrew Catalina is a gigantic hypocrite for owning an iPhone.

• Student wins iPhone from UMaine.txt (December 13, 2007)
• Boot camp for film geeks (September 25, 2008)
• University, not users, knows best when it comes to tobacco (April 7, 2008)
• Vintage Corner: Obsessions are often ‘Gone with the Wind’ (December 3, 2009)
• ‘Your balls are showing’ (September 18, 2003)

This entry was posted on Monday, November 16th, 2009, 1:04 am. You can follow any responses to this article through the RSS feed.