The Internets are abuzz with news of thousands of people camping out for new phones that have serious design flaws. This phenomenon is known as “I believe everything Geezer Mossberg says.”
The Internets version of swinger orgies is a relatively tame round of high fives as practiced by predominantly mainstream, Apple loving, geezer sites such as The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and closet-geezer Huffington Post. These sites are downright cider-ish in their love of Apple and the iPhone 4.
At some point they should be held responsible for creating demand for a product that has done nothing, and I mean nothing, to deserve the hype. Sure, iOS 4 is a step up from the previous version, whatever it was called in times of yore, but the new hardware hardly warrants a stampede to the stores.
You can take a perfectly decent iPhone 3GS and have the same lousy reception and dropped calls that you get from AT&T on an iPhone 4. No need to upgrade, and no need to sign up for another 2 years of said crappy reception.
This would normally make me a genius but in the land of the naked emperors, the man with a fig leaf is just salad.
I cannot say how disappointed I am by the lack of objectivity in the geezer press. It all boils down to this, me thinketh, geezers like Mossberg at the WSJ and Pogue at the New York Times need the page impressions. They anoint the iPhone 4 a winner but with little in terms of tangible proof or metrics because, after all, this is a new piece of hardware, and the glass cracks, and the case is a bit unfriendly to fingers, and no one can really test its app performance against a 3GS, but that doesn’t stop the damn Vuvuzela cry of, buy it now!
Apple ends up getting hyped to big sales, big sales become success, readers of geezer publications feel good about shelling out their disposal income for expensive electronic trinkets, and everyone pats themselves on the back. It is a self fulfilling prophecy.
At least with laptops and game systems, almost any other consumer product, you get realistic upgrade definitions. With Apple, like the company’s damn hardware upgrades on its computing products, the path upwards is littered with superficialities and hype.
Someone tell me why I should buy into an upgrade of a phone when there is no real measure of the return on my investment? You can’t tell me that my iPhone 4 experience is hundreds of dollars more valuable than my iPhone 3GS? And if you can then, damn well quantify it.
Damn geezers trying to look like hipsters. All HP has to do to compete is to sign up Sting for the launch party, and make sure Paul McCartney writes the lyrics for the jingle. Geezer heaven!
