This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera cellphone (which I bought in 2004).
This blog is one of the transitions for the new year. I've started it This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera cellphone (which I bought in 2004).
This blog is one This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004
…this weekend, that is. It's going on sale tomorrow at six PM. Steve Jobs is one of my top hi-tech heroes, so I hope he doesn't take it personally. That doesn't mean that I won't ever buy one. In fact, I'm fairly certain that I will buy an iPhone within the next few years, barring some unexpected disaster, Hey, I wrote about it when it was first announced. But right now, I'm telling Apple, "Thanks, but no thanks."
My core reason for not buying one now is that I don't need another computer immediately, and I still maintain that the iPhone is a computer being marketed as a cellphone. I already have all of the functionality of an iPhone on a MacBook, an iPod nano, and a Sony-Ericsson w600i cameraphone. At least I think I do. Having never laid hands on a functioning iPhone, I it's conceivasble that it could do things that my three gizmos don't. Of course, the iPhone integrates many of the capabilities of the three gizmos and has the trademark Apple minimalist esthetics and out-of-the-box functionality. Gizmo-wise, I'm still learning that I can do things with my Sony-Ericsson that I didn't know I could do when I bought it a year and a half ago.
Why else am I not buying an iPhone? For one thing, I'm not only an ornery cuss, I'm a cheap ornery cuss. Five hundred bucks plus an obscene amount of tax is a lot of money, and that leads me to the fact is that the iPhone, like the iPod before it, will be improved, upgraded, tweaked, debugged, and eventually I will be able to buy an even better iPhone (I'm guessing with double or triple the memory of the present iPhone) for the same 500 bucks plus probably even more tax. Oh, yeah, and I realize that I probably couldn't even get my hands on an iPhone if I wanted to this weekend because they'll be all sold out and I'd end up having to wait for it to be delivered, maybe weeks or even months from now. Hey, I don't camp out in front of stores, but even if I did, it's already too late.
Finally, there's one more thing about which I'm reasonably certain. When I finally do buy an iPhone, I'm going to turn it on, carry it around, make calls on it, send and receive emails, surf the internet, maybe watch YouTube, and I'll be saying to myself, "Damn, this is cool. How could I ever have lived without it? I should have bought one in June, 2007, when it first came out."
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