Apple releases new (die)Phone 7

New smartphones continue to roll out but the devices fail to progress.

Michelle Brignoli/The Skyline View

New smartphones continue to roll out but the devices fail to progress.

Oh good. There’s a new iPhone.

The right thing—the sane thing—would to be maniacally stoked. So stoked that I would head-butt a nun if she got between me and my sweet, sweet iPhone, so help me, I’ll do it.

I’m sure it does a bunch of stuff. I should research it. It’s probably got a ton of new, really fancy features that make all prior iPhones obsolete. Those were merely I-Phonies. This seventh phone, surely it is the iPhone of the gods.

Yeah, no. I know nothing about it, but I already know that it’s not. It’s a phone, it calls people. It will be irrelevant, as will iPhones eight through-twenty. The iPhone is like a snake molting; sure, it’s shiny and new looking, but it’s the same snake. If you still manage to get bitten, then you’re bit. Go sweetly into endless night, dear vole.

I should stop and point out that I’m probably the worst person to opine about the iPhone. I have a fifteen dollar track phone. It works. Where I start getting irked is in the hype surrounding the iPhone, and how people seem to go so crazy about getting new ones.

I’m struggling to understand the delineation between progress and consumerism. You can’t fight progress, that would make you look crazy. You’d be some jerk wrapped in a space blanket, screaming at traffic.

From this standpoint, the iPhone is a perfect scam. Nothing ages like technology—just do a comparison of CGI from the 1980’s to the mid 90’s to now. The changes are so sharp that its laughable, but people were actually stoked for the Claymation in Clash of the Titans.

The iPhone, however, is technological crack. It’s a brand new thing that’s guaranteed to go out of style. People go kookalooka for these things. It’s a phone, it’s for calling people.

I was cut by the knife edge of progress once, when I was six.

It was the Super Nintendo/N 64 transition. I went to the video rental store (a real thing that used to exist), and I noticed that there were fewer and fewer Super Nintendo games available. They had been replaced by N64 games. You have to get the new thing, says the store guy. Otherwise, you can’t play. By the time I’ve saved/begged enough for an N64, it’s outdated, replaced by some stupid purple cube thing.

Even as a kid, I knew this was screwy. I liked the old thing. I wasn’t opposed to new stuff, but did new technology necessitate a complete phasing out of the preceding machinery?

Look: There used to be giant cell phones that were attached to the dashboard. People were stoked, said you had to have it.

Then there were pagers, then sliding phones, then flip phones, and now this. It calls people, and gives you something to do on the bus, other than looking at the world around you. If that’s worth paying almost a thousand dollars, then I wholeheartedly recommend the iPhone 7. It will probably do all of those things. Go stand in line, right now.