Nobody Knows Anything

Otto pinged me the other day and said, “You’ve had your iPhone for 8 days and there’s no post yet?”

Well, he has a good point there. So without further ado: my new iPhone!

The iPhone really is better than sliced bread. It’s better than sex. It’s better than chocolate. It does everything you want or need it to:

The iPhone makes coffee for you!

The iPhone will help you hash out story ideas, and sometimes even takes over the writing for you!

The iPhone will play with your kids and read them stories, while you dash out to the store to pick up a few staples!

Who wouldn’t want one of these things?

But seriously folks.

I like my iPhone, I really do. I look forward to getting calls on it in a way I never did with my v60. I even look forward to missing calls because the voicemail is really much, much easier to use than old cell voicemail. (Pause for a moment of Homer-esque shuddering.) I don’t actually think the iPhone is better than sliced bread or sex or even chocolate sex, but it is better than my old phone. Syncing contacts: a snap. Uploading photos to have a really cool (and sharp-looking) wallet of photos of the kids: the only hard part is picking out which photos of the kids. I haven’t uploaded any videos to it because, well, I don’t have any videos. (Although I am thinking about getting the Ninth Doctor episodes of Doctor Who to check out while the kids are swimming.)

I haven’t had a problem with the Edge network yet. Sure, if I were on my Macbook and it took that long to get my mail, I’d probably be annoyed. But this is my phone, not my business machine. I’m not expecting to surf the web at top speeds. I’ve used the web browser to do such crazy things as a)look stuff up when I’m in Barnes and Noble and wondering, What was the name of that author again? and b)play iPhoneSudoku.

Do I recommend getting one? Hell yeah! If nothing else, baby needs a college fund! (Actually, two college funds. I think both of them are going to give college a shot.)

Do I say you have to have one? We don’t keep Kool-Aid frozen pops in this house, sorry.

The coffee is excellent, however.

Friday afternoon I told Darin I wanted to go to the mall and see the iPhone hysteria first-hand. But then Simon got sick, so that plan was cancelled.

Saturday afternoon we did make it to the mall, because I needed to get a dress for the party that night. While I was off shopping for dress, shoes, and makeup, Darin did such things as go to the Apple store and discover the 8 gig models were already sold out.

Saturday night we went to the big iPhone party up at the Exploratorium, which totally rocked but did not have the party favor I was hoping for. Most of the Apple employees there had iPhones, and 99% of them had gone to their local Apple dealer to buy one. Just in case you’re wondering if the employees believe in the product. And no, they did not serve Kool-Aid at the party.

Sunday morning Darin checked the iPhone website and headed down to Oakridge to get me one. It turned out that Oakridge was totally sold out on Saturday, but for some reason the website didn’t update.

Sunday afternoon all the stores in California had red dots.

I ordered my iPhone from the online store. I’m hoping the estimates for when it will ship are just a wee bit off.

(And I haven’t spotted one in the wild yet, but I keep checking every time I see someone on the phone.)

I want one. NOW.

Stupidly, apparently I accepted a class action suit settlement with Verizon a while back… and they decided that their contract extension kicks in NOW. As of TODAY. So my contract isn’t up until 2009. (I wonder how much it costs to buy out of it.)

I saw this quote on CE Murphy’s blog — “The new Apple iPhone is, to quote rob_donoghue, basically made entirely out of sex.” — and repeated it to a few friends of mine. To which one of them responded: “which I like putting up to my face, but that’s not about making phone calls.”

I am so ahead of him in the line to get one of these things.

Come to think of it, my Verizon contract will probably end before I can get my hands on one of these things, so maybe I should just sit tight.

Oh, I want one, NOW.

I own an iPod. Darin got me a very nice 15 gig one for my birthday in 2004. Once we finally figured out how to use the iTrip play-through-the-radio attachment, it became a permanent fixture in my car.

I have an iPod Shuffle. Last year Steve* gave every Apple employee one as a thank you for a great year. Darin said, “Are you going to use that? Because if you’re not we should give it as a gift to someone.” I tried it out, and it’s become a permanent part of my exercise habit. Have tunes, will do boring cardio workout at gym.

My brother-in-law has worked on iPod for years. Darin worked on the iPod before it came out. My running bud, Rob, worked on iPod for four years, up until a few weeks ago. (And he never told me about the video iPod, the bastard.)

I know plenty about iPod. I know who’s working on iPod (though none of them will tell me what they’re working on — Darin and Mitch don’t even tell one another what they’re working on, and they’re brothers). It’s old hat to me, right?

I have an iPod Nano in my hands, and I can’t stop playing with it. It’s so small. It’s so cute. Look at the screen! It’s so thin and tiny — and yet can fit so much music, so many podcasts!

I want to go running right now, just so I can try it out.

Apple is amazing at creating plug-and-play electronic crack. So why haven’t they taken over the world? Jeez. It’s so frustrating sometimes.

§

Darin knew way ahead of time about the MacBook announcement at MacWorld. And didn’t tell me about it.

My friend Otto IM’d me: “So Darin knew and didn’t tell you? Divorce!”

Me: “No, no. A fully tricked-out MacBook, that’s what.”

Apple was nowhere near this controlled when I worked there. It seemed like everyone had the Mercury News on speed-dial. These days, Darin tells me about something, he gets fired. (I’ve decided it’s better to hold off on knowing and get the MacBook eventually, instead of collecting unemployment.) It’s better for the company, obviously. I’m just amazed they’ve managed such a veil of secrecy.

What’s hilarious is, whenever Darin and his brothers — only one of whom works on iPod — discuss the iPod, iTunes, or downloading, in the middle of whatever it is they’re saying they’ll throw in, “Don’t steal music.” I wonder if they have hypnotic programming sessions where everyone learns to say that.

* Seriously, if you’ve got to ask “Steve who?”…

Hey Steve — I was just at Costco with my kids. We went to the kids’ software aisle. Okay, not the smartest thing I’ve ever done, what with the grunting and the pointing and the shrieking (and that’s just the other shoppers there—bah-dum-bum-bum).

There was a lot of software there, most of which my daughter wanted and most of which we couldn’t get because it runs under Windows only. Yeah, I’m a Mac owner; I’m used to that.

I wasn’t quite expecting it with the Pixar software, dude.

Could you look into this? Find out why a couple of the Pixar titles are available on Windows only? I hear you have some pull with the Pixar people, so maybe you can get them to expand their damn software line to include Macintosh, eh?

Sincerely,

A Mom. And Mac Owner.