Written by I recently posted a short comment on Google+ in relation to an article in the The Daily Mail online; an article about the release of Apple’s iPhone 4s in which a man had camped outside an Apple shop in Covent Garden for ten days in order to be the first in line. There were similar idiotic motions made by countless others across the globe presented in the article. I just want to break that down…
A phone is produced. A good smartphone, sure, but alas just a phone. It has some features that make for a good choice if one is in the market: buying their first phone in a while, or if one needs to buy a new phone for one reason or another. However, here we have a man who has essentially pretended to be homeless for almost two weeks not because he needed to, nor because it was some absurd condition of being able to purchase said phone; but because for some unbelievable reason he decided he had to be the first to buy it. I realise that with countless other sheeple, not queuing might mean that you wouldn’t manage to buy one on the day of release… but when it’s just a phone I fail to see what the problem is in waiting another two weeks.
I also wonder who it is in society that can afford a £500 consumerist gadget, and yet also afford to spend ten days sat on a pavement. Was this his vacation, in which case I’d argue a serious mental health problem? Or is he one of the countless unemployed on benefits who somehow still have large quantities of free cash to spend on needless nice-to-haves? Either way, I see a problem.
This man is undoubtedly an Apple ‘fanboi’, and the extent to which Apple ‘fandom’ exists is something I can literally not fathom – I am totally and utterly incapable of understanding it. The Onion, famed for piss-take satire, writes stories that have been becoming more and more realistic for a while now, and worryingly it’s the world that getting more ridiculous than The Onion less so. Indeed, following the death of Steve Jobs they hit the nail absolutely perfectly on the head.
What bugs me most about this delusional worship is something shared by many others’ posts that I’ve read: that Steve Jobs did not cure cancer, nor work to reduce poverty or deliver peace. He was an almost textbook-definition capitalist who manufactured need-less western middle-class gadgets that do very little in the support of humanity. To my knowledge, he himself was not a noted philanthropist, and neither is the company he ran (though that’s not to say neither were charitable). The products he manufactured, though shiny and clearly excellently marketed, were not innovative; and they were manufactured in Asia under immense pressure and with very little regard for human rights – all purely because Apple’s desire for wealth is apparently more important than such small matters as the string of worker suicides.
What gets me though more than all that greed, is that it’s based on the manufacture and sale of devices that people do not actually need! The man camping on the pavement no doubt already had an iPhone 4: his ‘need’ – and I mean need as in ‘need to eat’ – for the new model is literally non-existent. In the words of The Onion, these people “reportedly needs to get [their] fucking priorities straight”.
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