Sour Apples

Monday, June 9, was a minor religious holiday for my sect, the Cult of Mac, for yea, on that day the Prophet, Steve Jobs, gave unto the masses a new iPhone, one that is better in almost every way than the first iPhone - faster, featuring more hardware and software geegaws, ready to be hooked into a universe of new applications, and - most importantly - cheaper. Like the ad says, it's the first phone to beat the iPhone.

The "trub," as we say around out house, is that while the phone is much cheaper than the "old" iPhone (which isn't even a year old), the calling and data plans available from AT&T are not. In fact, they're even more expensive than the old plans. And there's no alternative to them: the iPhone is still exclusive to AT&T here in the states. Compete much?

In short, no iPhone for me.

On the other hand, every day I see, on a forlorn bench outside the basement bathrooms in my office building, this box:

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The box only gets more and more full. In fact, so far as I can tell, the only time the box has been (temporarily and fractionally) emptied was when I took out two of the discarded phones for a little compare-and-contrast exercise:

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Check it. The ancient Motorola is more than six inches long, and no, it doesn't fold up. The little Sprint-branded device opens up to just about the same length, but weighs exactly half as much, and presumably did about ten times more.

Then again, they're both just good-looking bricks now.

Forecast: Significant blowing and drifting, with the possibility of heavy accumulation in rural areas.