Portfolio and Blog of Dan Mowchan

iPhone 4. A passing glance at the new Apple devices webpage reveals a barrage of one-liners directed at the potential buyer. “The most vibrant, highest-resolution phone screen ever.” “No other phone makes staying in touch this much fun.” “The biggest thing to happen to iPhone since iPhone.” For the buyers who aren’t the most technically advanced (heck, that’s sorta one of their niche markets, isn’t it?), these marketing claims could spell tragedy.

True to yearly Apple tradition, the launch of their newest smartphone was plagued with another flavor of disappointment for many. Even while they know that because of the huge following of the iPhone, there will be a monumental amount of sales, they never seem to produce enough units for launch. I may be stepping beyond my knowledge here and this is pure speculation, so correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like the perfect way for Apple to create a huge amount of last-minute frenzy hype for their new product launch. They create a demand. People need the glorified phone. They are willing to wait in line for hours and days to be the first person with the latest offering from Cupertino.

It’s sort of sickening that people are like this. However, I realize that I myself am like this as well. I am tied into the Apple ecosystem so tightly that it is a scary thought to leave it. I bought the Macbook Pro; I still love it. Got the iPod, switched to iTunes; still love the iPod. Finally leapt to iPhone and now after almost two years on the device part of me is dying to get my hands on version 4. I can stay comfortably within all of the services I already use. It ties in with my Mac and I don’t have to migrate my tediously organized music collection to a new music manager. Everything is going to work as expected and I know I’m going to enjoy the jump from iPhone 2G to iPhone 4. The other part of me is trying to be adventurous. Buy an Android phone and get on a safer carrier.

The option to switch to Android was always sort of farfetched to me. I never took it seriously until just recently when reading some comments on a popular tech blog. My eyes were opened. After all the years salivating over the newest iterations of iOS and the iPhone itself, I always ignored the utility that is lost with the design choices made by the notorious Jonathan Ive. The newest complaint against the latest iPhone is how easy the glass is to break. I have dismissed this until today. After some thinking, I’ve come to the conclusion that it doesn’t make any sense for the backside of a phone to be made out of glass. Apple found it so necessary to tout the strength of the glass, they put it on the back of the phone. They were so egotistical about their new mystical “comparable in strength to sapphire crystal” glass that they had to make their phone twice as likely to shatter in one way or another.

I knew that I was ignoring these things, but I brushed them off thinking to myself “just don’t drop your phone.” While this may be true, everyone makes mistakes. The new even thinner iPhone might slip right out of your hand. Oh wait, buy a case, right? Maybe the incredibly expensive to manufacture cellphone that you are marketing as having the strongest glass on the planet should actually be built to last. As much as a lot of us love our Apple products, there comes a point when you realize that everything Apple does gets sugarcoated. If Microsoft tried to pull a lot of the same choices Apple does, they would be attacked ruthlessly. They’ve gotten lazy and the last thing I want to see is the trend being carried over to the Macintosh.

Quit trying to be so over the top pretty, Apple.