Confession time. I don’t own an iPhone yet. Does that lose me some geek cred? I sure hope not.
Besides an unwillingness to change to AT&T’s infamously spotty network – and my contract with Verizon – I’m just not an early adopter.
I usually wait and see on most hyped-up gadgets to make sure they’re actually worth the hype and the hullabaloo. Because six months or so later, there’s always a price drop or a crucial added feature. And unless you won the lottery, if this stuff happens right after you buy, you’re kind of screwed.
This happens with cell phones all the time. I got a Motorola RAZR as my first phone when it was the new hot thing, and expensive.
Before you know it, it’s old news and I was using a screwdriver to even keep it together.
Every time I turn around, there’s a new BlackBerry with some new bell or whistle to keep businessmen and elected officials busy and broke. However, Apple is the top offender of tech companies.
As sure as the change of seasons, Steve Jobs will come out every so often to talk up trimming an ounce off a MacBook here, adding radio to an iPod there, and cut the prices faster than a wacky-waving-inflatable-arm-flailing-tube-man salesman.
The people who bought an iPhone at its 2007 launch at $499 to $599 nearly got hosed just six months later. Apple had to pass out a lot of free money to quell the anger.
Today, a 3G-capable iPhone will run $99 for an 8 gigabyte version. That’s just one sixth of what it was just two years ago.
Not even the stock market dropped that fast. But people keep lining up.
The Turtlenecked One is counting on the lottery winners, the gullible and those who don’t own a Mac yet. OK, so maybe the last two are pretty fertile markets.
It’s also a common video game trend. I got my Xbox 360 as soon as my name came up in Electronics Boutique’s waiting list in February 2006. The premium console with the cramped 20 GB hard drive ran me $400.
Today, I could get the Xbox 360 Elite with HDMI output and six times the storage space, and still have $100 left to spend on games.
To make matters worse, my family’s new Sony Bravia HDTV doesn’t even have a component video input – just three HDMI – so I’m sort of out of luck if I want to play downstairs.
Sony, too, practically goes by a timer before releasing slimmer versions of their monstrous hardware.
They turned the Playstation into the PSone, marketed a screen and made it pretty portable, unlike its older Sega brethren, the Nomad.
By now you’re probably thinking, “Suck it up, Tyler.” Yes, I know. I consider my $400 Xbox 360 an investment in all the awesome times I ended up getting out of it between then and now and so on. I also got the bragging rights of saying I got it at launch. And maybe the people who got their $599 iPhone in 2007 feel the same way.
Or if they’re that lottery winner – who is a real friend of mine, by the way – they just got the new one and called it a day.
Tyler Tech: Good things come to those who wait
Published: Sunday, October 25, 2009
Updated: Sunday, October 25, 2009
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