The Iphone 3GS is perfect
It can do no wrong apparently
By Nick Farrell
Monday, 22 June 2009, 12:36
THE RELEASE of the Iphone 3GS has sparked a wave of sycophantic wibble on the world wide web lately.
Reading the material over the weekend techie reporters seemed to have packed their common sense off to a holiday somewhere hot while the rest of their personality writes the most banal lunacy about how wonderful the Iphone 3GS is.
When the new version came out, reviews were actually somewhat muted. Most of the press was concentrated on the fact that the old phone was going to be discounted so that it was as cheap as chips. The new phone spec was a bit better but not really worth the price difference.
But once it was released and fanbois started writing about how wonderful it was, it seems that the tech journalists have had a change of heart.
As SFGate hack Mark Morford points out, people have suddenly stopped moaning about the fact that the phone lacks a microSD card reader, enterprise capabilities, support for multiple codecs, background processing and a real time GPS, and that it's slow syncing and has pathetic video upload, a pants camera and a silly single-core processor.
Instead stories about the Iphone 3GS "being perfect" have started to become currency.
Morford quoted the following from a TechCrunch forum: "This gorgeous little slice of heaven, no bigger than a half deck of cards and prettier than a sleeping cherub in a box of clouds, meets every possible need I have, and many I didn't even know existed. I simply cannot think of a single thing I need it to do that it does not already do with perfect grace and joy. Wow."
Lets be clear about this. No product however good it is has ever been perfect. The fact that people can say such nonsense is part of the reason I think that the Apple media control machine is worse than any atrocity that Microsoft or Intel ever dreamed up.
The Apple dream is one where 'perfection' is defined for you. You buy a slice of that perfection every time you buy a product. It will be perfect until the upgrade comes out and you will have to keep buying or you will not be perfect.
This bizarre relationship only exists with Apple and its fans. Microsoft users expect the Vole's products to go wrong, it is like a running joke. Linux is based on the idea that if something goes wrong the user might be able to fix it.
But there is a loop in the "perfect Apple" thinking. It goes like this: 10 Print "Apple = Perfect" 20 If Apple <> "perfect" then Print "Apple = Better Than Microsoft" 30 If Apple <> "better than Microsoft" go to 10.
What's scary is the power of Apple's reality distortion field to turn (almost) the entire media to promoting its dream factory.
