iDon't Care

Last week, a whole bunches of people from work went out during lunch and bought iPhones. The old ones with not very much memory that are on clearance for something like $299. [Correction - I have learned that the vast majority of them bought the $399 8GB models, not the clearance ones. Suckers.] Now, as far as I can tell, there is basically no use for an iPhone other than to make phone calls or browse the web really, really slowly using EDGE. Now, a few of the people at work seem to think there is something very cool about having an iPhone, and they are constantly trying to get you to ooo and ahhh about their lemming-like purchase. I assume this is because once they got it home, they realized, "Hey, I just paid $299, plus I signed up for a $60/mo cell contract that I am locked into for 2 years, and I can't even use an MP3 as a ringtone! I must either be the coolest dude out there, or just a big dumb fuck."

And they (wrongly) assume the former.

So anyways, I was chatting with The Hamburgler, and somehow he started waving around his iPhone as he always does now in a desperate attempt for validation. He was telling me all the great things you could do with it which included, "MoodyT got this great light-saber sound effect program, so as you wave it around, it makes light saber sounds," "You can watch entire movies on it," and "You can watch YouTube videos on it!"

I said, "See, but I don't actually care about any of those things."

"But they're so cool!"

"But I don't care. None of those things are something I want to do on my cellphone for $300 and and extra $30/mo. It'd be more useful to me if it were a flask."

Then, of course, I got riffing on that.

"It could have a little straw that popped up and it could ring at you whenever it was time for a little nip. You could enter your height and weight, and it could estimate how much you needed and dispense just the right amount. You could build in a breathalyzer so it could track your BAC and refine its metering to match your personal physiology. It could use the GPS location to look up the local driving laws of wherever you are on its precious wireless web, and it could let you know if you were OK to drive or not. It could ask you if you wanted to drive, and adjust your target BAC based on that. Or you could enter in a BAC target, and it could dose you perfectly to get you there quickly and keep you right there.

"Yeah. The iFlask. Now that'd be something interesting."

Or, I guess, you could download an application that used the internal accelerometer to make light-saber sounds.