My thoughts on the iPhone

…are not important.

I’m giddy over how clo­sely this matches the mythi­cal device of my ima­gi­na­tion, and disap­poin­ted it will require Cingular.

But why should you care?

The net is awash with blo­via­ting and armchair pun­ditry around Apple’s latest announ­ce­ment. Much more atten­tion than the iPod recei­ved, but the dis­cus­sion is fami­liar. Every­body seems to be strongly con­vin­ced either it is inno­va­tive and des­ti­ned to domi­nate the industry, or it’s a disap­point­ment and doo­med to lan­guish in obs­cu­rity, fin­ding suc­cess only among “those crazy Mac fanatics.”

Cer­tainly hype and inno­va­tion both tend to pola­rize. But why does ever­yone feel the need to author para­graph after para­graph of rants, breath­less admi­ra­tion, and argu­men­ta­tive name-​​calling? Do they think their blog post (or com­ment) is going to influence Apple’s sales figu­res? The com­pany is healthy and the mar­ket they’re ente­ring is huge, so no one should be fea­ring for their invest­ments (finan­cially or cul­tu­rally) either way.

If only every pro­duct gar­ne­red such unso­li­ci­ted and char­ged open feed­back, Blog­Mo­ni­tor would be ove­rrun with raw data. I’m not sure it’d be nearly as infor­ma­tive as more nor­mal chat­ter levels.