I'm in college and have one of those iFriends, every one knows these people, these are the friends that can't each lunch with you without commenting at least twice about how much vista apparently sucks or how they just downloaded the lasted hip app for $9.99. These are the people that always refer to their laptop as not a laptop, but a Mac. Its not a phone, its an I - Phone. Its not their speaker system, its their BOSE. And they'll pick you up in their BMW, not their car. Basically they'll buy into any marketing campaign, branding, you name it they got all the brand name rip-offs. Bose, Apple, Northface, <insert $100 designer jeans worth $10>. They're the guy, while every one is typing away in English 101 on their PCs that just work, hes struggling with his $3400 mac because its not compatible with some network application.
So it was no surprise to me that he had lots to say when I dropped my old AT&T crapberry for a Droid Incredible on Verizon a couple months ago. Hes said the iPhone 4 is coming out soon blah blah Android is really buggy blah blah people will look at me blah blah the interface sucks. The thing is though like most things that iFriends say, it just doesn't equate to anything tangible. Sure the menus aren't as slick and it doesn't sync with iTunes, but now I can get rid of iTunes (i had itouch), now I have multitasking which is real useful, flash, backgrounds, better camera, and I switched to Verizon so I get 3G coverage across campus where AT&T sucked balls.
But I decided to let him test drive my Incredible as everyone else we know who has android phones have the crappy old ones. Of course he had lots to say about how bad it was. He even commented that how he thought the multitasking was really taxing it. But the weirdest thing was that I couldn't get it back out of his hands, and when I looked at him, I noticed something real strange. A single bead of tear slowly formed in the corner of his right eye and streamed down his check. As he looked up at me for a moment we shared an intimate moment and I looked deep into his eyes and beneath all that iTouting, all that "I'm a Mac" personification, there was a real human being. Trapped in a prison constructed by the very company he is subliminally forced to praise by all that penetrating Apple marketing and product placement.
And for that brief moment in time I cough a glimpse of what its like to be an iPhone user. I no longer am annoyed by their pointless rambling, illogical justification of their obscenely over-budgeted electronics, but I pity them. They're people too, but are past help, and the best thing we can do is support them, boost their esteem and praise their iPhone while we use our android phones, making huge returns on Apple stock (win/win).
And all of sudden we snap out of it and he comments on some "study" he read about how the iPhone's touch screen was more accurate blah blah developers make the most money off iPhone blah blah hes going to make apps and strike gold blah blah jobs said it could happen even though theres a 90% change he'll never recoup the $100 membership fee blah blah while I load up some flash porn..
