Phase Four - Complacence
It happens to the best of us. We sometimes take our loved ones for granted. We don’t remember the thrill of exploring the new relationship, and start to get annoyed when we’re forcibly reminded that those days are over. We see others walking around arm in arm with their new love and you think to ourselves “enjoy it while it lasts” or “I bet you just play games on that thing, don’t you, chump?” Soon, it seems like everyone has an iPhone. The 12 year old brothers across the aisle from you on the plane - why the hell do they need an iPhone? Your entire crew gets them and you just know they’re gonna be borrowing your charger. Yes, I’ve got my charger with me. Jesus…
You’ve since moved away from actually programming the thing, since object oriented programming is one giant blob of convoluted shit for a 30 year old bass player with a kid to try and pick up in his spare time. Besides, web development really seems like more bang for the buck. Might not pay as well, but this whole iPhone gold rush is pretty much over anyway. You read all the tech blogs by this point - you’ve turned your manager onto NetNewsWire before abandoning it yourself to try Google Reader but you’ll ditch that soon, too - so you know how annoying it would be to try and get your app through the Apple process were you even capable of coding such a thing. You don’t even check out the App Store that much anymore, since there’s nothing but a bunch of stupid games over there anyway.
Phase Five - Resentment
This began in earnest for me about three weeks ago. In fairness, it’s not completely the fault of the iPhone. A good bit of the aggravation is due to AT&T’s service. It’s just not that good. It was really good (or so I thought) when I first got the thing, but I swear since however many millions of people have bought iPhones the network has gotten noticeably slower and spottier. There was a voicemail outage this past weekend that affected nearly everyone on the network whether they knew it or not. I was in St Cloud MN last night with “full bars” and 3G service, but couldn’t get a page to load all night.
This is pretty inexcusable to me. AT&T’s one and only job - for which they are well paid - is to deliver the services that they promise. At Rothbury and Wakarusa the service was unusable and the 10,000 or so iPhoners that were at Rothbury (not an exaggeration, they were the only phone I saw all weekend, at least half the phones there it seemed) were reduced to communicating via text. Whaa, whaa you might say, and ordinarily I might agree with you, but you know what Verizon did at both of those festivals? They brought in a mobile antenna to provide service to the festival site for their customers. Does AT&T even have such a truck? Could they be bothered to bring it to the festival site in the middle of nowhere where 10,000 of their customers were going to be savaging their shitty network all weekend? Apparently, no, on both counts. Inexcusable. (The upside is that someone had the good sense to put together a Rothbury App which worked great for me all weekend. The schedule was imbedded so I wasn’t reliant on the no-cell coverage and I always knew what band I was watching at the time. Very cool.)
The other thing that I’ve noticed in the last weeks is that the new OS 3.0 is a good bit slower than the previous version. Boot up time and app launch time, both slower. This is ostensibly because there are new features loaded into the new OS, but many of those features aren’t even available to 3G and OG iPhoners. So all we get is copy and paste and a dog of a phone. I’ll be getting the new one, whatever version it is whenever I get it, but in the meantime I’m left avariciously playing with Stacy’s new 3GS.
In closing
The iPhone is awesome, but if you don’t have one - wait. It will most likely be coming to Verizon sometime in the next year. I will be jumping ship when it does. My advice for the meantime - get an iPod touch and stick with your cell phone that works. There will be a new phase for me after the resolution of this current dark period while AT&T gets their act together (I hope), or it goes over to Verizon, but in the meantime it’s#attfail for me.