Last week was quite a week for novelty and inspiration. Alongside the USA’s dramatic victory over Algeria in the World Cup and the longest tennis match in history, Apple also rolled out the latest incarnation of its incredibly popular iPhone.
In Japan, where the launch for the iPhone 4 began on Thursday morning, Apple’s exclusive wireless carrier had sold out by early afternoon. In the United States, more than 600,000 pre-orders for the new phone crashed the system on Wednesday. One eager soul in Dallas camped out at an Apple store a full week before the launch. Some in the telecommunications industry are expecting that Apple will sell 9.5 million of them by the end of June. (Compare that with the first iPhone release in 2007, when it took about 2½ months to sell 1 million.)
In my own neighborhood here in London, there was already a queue around the block by the time the Vodaphone Store opened at 10 a.m. Men and women in suits tapped out texts on their soon-to-be-outdated iPhone 3G’s. Mums sipping Starbucks tried to keep restless toddlers in their strollers. In short: Dozens of people delayed the start of this stunningly beautiful June day by several hours, all so that they could be the first to get their hands on this latest i-toy.
Read the rest of this post at www.PoliticsDaily.com…
image: iPhone 4 line on launch day at San Francisco Apple Store 125 via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.
June 28, 2010, 10:27 pm
So far as I’m (your basic dinosaur)concerned, the whole business is too nutty to be worth much in the way of comment. However, I do note from poor old print media that people are being butchered on a remarkably high scale in Africa in wars over which gang of murderers gets their hands full of the (highly toxic) minerals which are essential to these toys. Said toxic minerals are either thrown into trash or, by those who choose to recycle, sent to Africa, where children are employed? forced? to take them apart with their bare hands. Some U.S. manufacturers of this poisonous junk piously insist that they never buy from war criminals. Do they expect us to believe that the middle men who do the buying get “I ain’t no criminal” certificates from these people?
June 30, 2010, 6:47 pm
I was using the first gen iPhone (it was 2.5 years old). I did not recycle when I upgraded to the iPhone 4 or sell it. I re-purposed it by giving it to my brother so he can use it as a iPod, camera, web browser, and also use the thousands of free apps. So he’ll be using it for everything but phone calls at no cost to him.
June 30, 2010, 8:27 pm
great! another friend said the same.