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.