The kids these days with the iPhones! I tells ya!

Every time the Macalope tries to get out of the business of jousting at silly pundits, he gets pulled back in.

The horny one was determined to ignore Tom Kaneshige’s InfoWorld piece entitled “A new etiquette for the iPhone generation”. Really he was. He ignored it when he saw it in InfoWorld’s daily email blast. He ignored it again when he saw it has been reposted by InfoWorld’s sister publication, Macworld.

But then someone emailed it to him and instinct took over.

Stupid antelope genes.

Armin Henreich’s infamous “I Am Rich” iPhone application—a $1,000 ruby-red screen saver—was pulled from Apple App Store shelves months ago, but its message still resonates loudly.

Really? With who? Other than jackass tech journalists.

Now the iPhone, the tech symbol of the “in” crowd, is on the verge of crossing the line into AIG-like excess and arrogance.

Hey, everyone! We’re getting a bailout and a taxpayer-funded trip to a spa! Whoo-hoo!

“I’m not sure, under the current economic conditions, that it’s a great statement to make,” says Rob Enderle, principal analyst of the Enderle Group. “You may not want to flash it.”

Are you suggesting, Tom, that we take advice on what kind of personal statement to make from this man?

Or really any kind of advice?

C’mon, Tom. Not every iPhone user can suddenly take up golf. For starters, there aren’t enough tee times.

Maybe you’re new around here so the Macalope will just let you know that quoting Enderle in a piece about Apple is tantamount to scrawling on the top of said piece “I AM SO PHONING THIS IN” next to your byline in crayon.

From “my apps are cooler than your apps” contests…

The Macalope must have missed this contest. Anyone know what he’s talking about here?

…to “sent from my iPhone” e-mail footers…

Yeah, it’s a good thing no other smart phones have those!

cough – Blackberry – cough

…people love showing off their iPhones.

Yeah, what is up with that?! My god, people! Get a phone you’re embarrassed of! Tuck it away in the closet! Bury it in a mason jar under your porch!

NEVER SPEAK OF IT AGAIN.

Traditional cell phones and iPods already audibly isolated people in their own little worlds, and iPhone’s visual carnival pushes that isolation further.

Wait, wait, wait. Which is it, Tom? Are we loud-mouthed show-offs who insist on pushing our gaudy iPhones on everyone we meet on the street, or are we quiet introverts, leading lonely, isolated lives, shunning all human contact for the warm glow of technology? It can’t be both, dude.

The visual nature of the iPhone can be a big distraction. Will consumers, walking around with their heads down as they play a game or look at a map on the iPhone’s mini-screen, collide with each other like pinballs?

Will these iPhone-using kids wander onto our lawns and summarily decline to get off of them?

Last month, a train engineer in Los Angeles was allegedly text messaging on his cell phone moments before he crashed into a freight train, killing 25 people, including himself.

That settles it! From now on, only the Amish will drive our nation’s trains!

Wait…

Look, this kind of trite, bullshitty article gets trotted out every so often by lazy-assed writers (or, in fairness to Kaneshige, writers with lazy-assed editors) who dourly want to warn us of the perils of the printing press cotton gin horseless carriage phonograph television

Oh, fuck it, you get the point.

Just stop it.

12 thoughts on “The kids these days with the iPhones! I tells ya!”

  1. I think a very interesting question (one that goes unanswered by the Macworld editorial staff) is why can’t Macworld exercise some editorial control over articles like this. It is pretty obvious that the Macworld staff isn’t going to agree with the content and it is obvious to pretty much everyone that the article is dumb to a embarrassing degree yet Macworld is apparently obligated to run them anyway. And apparently they can’t talk about why either. The whole thing is pretty odd.

    You would think that any article containing an Enderle quote would be summarily rejected. And I really do believe that if the Macworld editorial staff had the ability to reject these articles, they would.

  2. I have to admit that I saw Enderle in there and just closed the tab. He shows up and you just know the article is a waste of time…

  3. That article makes McCain’s wandering around the town hall debate look like a purposeful stride. Is he talking about app store censorship? iPhone braggarts? Every other idiot with a cellphone? It didn’t even turn out to be an iPhone piece! Even a piece that quotes Enderle can be focused with an obvious thesis with supporting facts instead of a collection of red herrings that disguise the central concept that presumably spawned the story. Why bother shooting down a story that leave users dizzy and confused?

  4. Exactly.

    I’m pretty sure that the “Sent using” tagline was first pioneered by RIM with the Blackberry as a way of positioning it as THE mobile e-mail device (which in its day, it pretty was the only game in town).

    Of course, then the carriers get involved, and you end up with taglines like, “Sent Using my Blackberry device on the ROGERS Wireless Network” …. Of course, I can’t imagine who would actually want to *advertise* being a *Rogers* customer (although I’m sure some silly pundit could make a case that people want to show off by demonstrating how much they can afford to be ripped off). In reality, however, I think most users quickly edit that one to change it or take it out entirely.

    ….and that’s rather the point. The tagline is just a default signature block which you can edit to whatever you like. In reality, most professional people I know leave in this sort of tagline or some variation of it just to reiterate that the message is being sent from a mobile device and manage expectations (ie, “Don’t expect a twelve-paragraph response and please forgive the occasional typo.”)

  5. > Every time the Macalope tries to get out of the business of jousting at silly pundits, he gets pulled back in.

    It’s an addiction, and the only way to deal with an addiction is to give in to it completely.

    Right…?

  6. James Bailey:

    Just to clear things up, every article that appears on Macworld.com is chosen for publication by an editor at Macworld. Nothing posts automatically, and nobody at IDG orders us to post things from sister publications.

    Your suggestion that “the Macworld staff isn’t going to agree with the content” is, in my mind, irrelevant — if someone has an interesting perspective it need not pass some sort of ideological test. We often post opinions we disagree with because they’re interesting. Sometimes we post things specifically because we disagree with them, because we think readers will find them interesting. It’s not our job to be some sort of Pravda that only published articles that make our readers feel happy and reinforces their own world-views — our our own.

    However, your point about the article being “dumb to a embarrassing degree” is a lot more relevant. I imagine that the editor who published this piece possibly didn’t read it as carefully as they should have. We may need to exert more effort on carefully reading pieces from sister publications, because they may not meet our editorial standards even though they’ve passed through the hands of one of our editorial colleagues at IDG.

    But once again, I must reinforce that we are not obligated to run any IDG content we don’t want to. And I’m not quite sure where you got the idea that we “can’t talk about why either” — there’s no gagging order in place, and that’s a pretty wild and paranoid claim. Neither of those assumptions are accurate. I’m not quite sure why you assumed they were, and stated those things as fact when they’re simply not.

  7. “Will these iPhone-using kids wander onto our lawns and summarily decline to get off of them?”

    That is a line worthy of H. L. Mencken.

    -jcr

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