so I activated my iPhone yesterday
Feb. 25th, 2010 10:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jlhIn order to explain and justify my decision, I need to take you back in time a bit.
I've had really great experiences with Macs and really lousy experiences with PCs. And not because they're shiny! (I actually really hate it when people say that; it's condescending to people who just like Apple products.) I used a Mac Classic in college in the late 80s, and a series of Macs when I was first working in advertising. I didn't use a PC for work until 1999, and it was a pretty wretched seven years that taught me that PCs crash at least once every day, if not two or three times a day, and that if you call the IT people to fix them, they will come and be obnoxious to you and ask you what you did to break the computer when you didn't do anything other than try to write a powerpoint presentation.
When I got my first home computer in 2001 it was an ibook. On that Ibook I proceeded to burn my entire CD collection, about 19GB of music. In 2003 I got the 20GB iPod, mostly excited that I could bring all of my CDs around with me all the time. I know iTunes doesn't work for everyone, but I really like its interface, and now that I have 40GB of music (not a lot in this download era, but I've actually purchased at lease 30GB of that) I'm unwilling to restructure my entire music collection.
When that original iPod stopped syncing to my computer,ziggy1278 gave me his first-gen iPhone. And thank goodness that was how the iPod died, because I live in NYC, I'm always walking or on the subway, and I would die a thousand deaths if I didn't have my iPod. Half the reason my computer is the first thing I would save in my apartment other than my cat is that it has all my music on it. I listen to music all day long.
I was talking to a friend the other day about the iPhone. He thought I should get a cheap phone with an mp3 player, and when I pointed out that it wouldn't work with iTunes, he said, "iTunes sucks." And I got mad.
And I realized that for me, the iPhone is an iPod that has a phone in it. I would never get a different smartphone because I'd still need to have an iPod, because the mp3 player on the other smartphones pretty much sucks, and the entire point for me in getting a smartphone is to carry one device. If I have to have an iPod and a phone, I might as well just have a shitty free phone and an iPod Touch that can go online wherever there's wifi. I'm willing to grant that this is an entirely inappropriate way to approach the device but that's how I'd use it.
As forbetween_names excellent points about data coverage: It isn't a 3G phone to begin with, and I live in NYC, and only really travel to Boston and DC and sometimes LA where the coverage is relatively decent. I also go to the old homestead in Maine, but no one even gets a cell signal at that place because it's in the middle of the woods. So it's a good point, but more of a point for someone who isn't me. Having an iPod interface for the mp3 player is more important to me than the data coverage. Again, entirely inappropriate! But at least it wasn't because it's shiny.
Oh, and because it's not a 3G phone, or maybe because of the plan I already had with AT&T, the data plan is only $20/month. And I'm not under a contract because I had the phone, so if this doesn't work out I can go back to using it as an iPod touch and get some cheap ass phone. So it's a pretty low risk decision.
Somehow being tech-practical or tech-individual fifteen years ago was comfortable, but being so now feels seriously uncool, naive and subject to ridicule. I'm not sure if it's because I've aged into the dreaded and much hated by internet geeks middle-aged-mom demographic—which probably means I should just lump it and trade in the ibook for an ipad—or if it's that I know more people who are critical of how others use devices. Likely treating my iPhone as an iPod that has a phone in it, or caring about carrying one device, rather than appropriately thinking of it as a tiny computer in my pocket, is making all of you wince right now. But I really love music!
I've had really great experiences with Macs and really lousy experiences with PCs. And not because they're shiny! (I actually really hate it when people say that; it's condescending to people who just like Apple products.) I used a Mac Classic in college in the late 80s, and a series of Macs when I was first working in advertising. I didn't use a PC for work until 1999, and it was a pretty wretched seven years that taught me that PCs crash at least once every day, if not two or three times a day, and that if you call the IT people to fix them, they will come and be obnoxious to you and ask you what you did to break the computer when you didn't do anything other than try to write a powerpoint presentation.
When I got my first home computer in 2001 it was an ibook. On that Ibook I proceeded to burn my entire CD collection, about 19GB of music. In 2003 I got the 20GB iPod, mostly excited that I could bring all of my CDs around with me all the time. I know iTunes doesn't work for everyone, but I really like its interface, and now that I have 40GB of music (not a lot in this download era, but I've actually purchased at lease 30GB of that) I'm unwilling to restructure my entire music collection.
When that original iPod stopped syncing to my computer,
ziggy1278 gave me his first-gen iPhone. And thank goodness that was how the iPod died, because I live in NYC, I'm always walking or on the subway, and I would die a thousand deaths if I didn't have my iPod. Half the reason my computer is the first thing I would save in my apartment other than my cat is that it has all my music on it. I listen to music all day long.I was talking to a friend the other day about the iPhone. He thought I should get a cheap phone with an mp3 player, and when I pointed out that it wouldn't work with iTunes, he said, "iTunes sucks." And I got mad.
And I realized that for me, the iPhone is an iPod that has a phone in it. I would never get a different smartphone because I'd still need to have an iPod, because the mp3 player on the other smartphones pretty much sucks, and the entire point for me in getting a smartphone is to carry one device. If I have to have an iPod and a phone, I might as well just have a shitty free phone and an iPod Touch that can go online wherever there's wifi. I'm willing to grant that this is an entirely inappropriate way to approach the device but that's how I'd use it.
As for
between_names excellent points about data coverage: It isn't a 3G phone to begin with, and I live in NYC, and only really travel to Boston and DC and sometimes LA where the coverage is relatively decent. I also go to the old homestead in Maine, but no one even gets a cell signal at that place because it's in the middle of the woods. So it's a good point, but more of a point for someone who isn't me. Having an iPod interface for the mp3 player is more important to me than the data coverage. Again, entirely inappropriate! But at least it wasn't because it's shiny. Oh, and because it's not a 3G phone, or maybe because of the plan I already had with AT&T, the data plan is only $20/month. And I'm not under a contract because I had the phone, so if this doesn't work out I can go back to using it as an iPod touch and get some cheap ass phone. So it's a pretty low risk decision.
Somehow being tech-practical or tech-individual fifteen years ago was comfortable, but being so now feels seriously uncool, naive and subject to ridicule. I'm not sure if it's because I've aged into the dreaded and much hated by internet geeks middle-aged-mom demographic—which probably means I should just lump it and trade in the ibook for an ipad—or if it's that I know more people who are critical of how others use devices. Likely treating my iPhone as an iPod that has a phone in it, or caring about carrying one device, rather than appropriately thinking of it as a tiny computer in my pocket, is making all of you wince right now. But I really love music!
