The past few weeks haven’t been great for Apple. First they were implicated in the stolen celebrity nude photo disaster, which reminded everybody how easily clouds leak. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think the iPhone is generally marketed as a diabolical timewasting device with the potential to wreak a grotesque and devastating invasion of your personal privacy. They tend to focus more on all the cool colours it comes in.
Then they launched the horrible-looking Apple Watch, which does everything an iPhone can do, but more expensively and pointlessly, and on a slightly different part of your body. Only an unhealthily devoted Apple fanatic could bear to wear a Apple Watch, and even that poor notional idiot would have to keep putting their iPhone down in order to operate the damn thing. It’ll scarcely be used for telling the time, just as the iPhone is scarcely used for making calls. It’s not a watch. It’s a gaudy wristband aimed at raising awareness of Chinese factory conditions. Or a handy visual tag that helps con artists instantly identify gullible rich idiots in a crowd.
Apple also unveiled the all-new bigger iPhone 6, and the all-new even bigger-than-that iPhone 6 Plus, which is the size of the Isle of Man and aimed at people who literally have deep pockets. By releasing two differently sized rectangles, which in turn differ from its previous range of differently sized rectangles, Apple has selfishly exhausted the global supply of differently sized rectangles. From now on, all rectangles, no matter what context they appear in, will have to be the same size. Wars will be fought to decide which dimension becomes the standard. And when mankind finally settles on a compromise, Apple is going to start on ovals.
As part of the iPhone 6 publicity blitz, Tim Cook also announced every iTunes user in the world would be getting U2’s new album free of charge. It was downloaded automatically on to millions of users’ phones, like a sinister virus. Music is meant to be catchy – but not until you’ve heard it. The album, which I haven’t listened to yet, is terrible: even worse than their last one, which I didn’t listen to either. I don’t want to listen to any U2 albums in case I discover I like them, and have to violently reassess my own self-image. For the past five years, it’s been delightfully easy to ignore U2. Then Apple comes along and slings them under your nose like a bowl of bum soup you didn’t order. What do we have to do? Start lobbying Google for U2’s right to be forgotten?
Still: new watches, new rectangles, new music – these needn’t really affect you if you don’t want them to. But the other new development – the launch of iOS 8 – is impossible for iPhone users to ignore. It’s curious that we, the users, are supposed to look as if we are eagerly anticipating these operating system updates – a load of digital dogwork Apple nonchalantly drop into our laps on a regular basis.
Updates are awful. All you want to do is watch TV and rot in your own filth. Instead you spend the evening backing up your phone, downloading a gigantic file and sitting around while your phone undergoes an intense psychological makeover, at the end of which it may or may not function. Often, it takes an hour or more. Fiddly, time-consuming admin – it’s like having to change the water in a fish tank. I can’t be arsed: it’s why I don’t have an aquarium. I’d rather let the fish die.
But if I hold out, gradually nothing will work on my existing phone. They’ll freeze me out by degrees. Cut me out of the club. Plus I’ll miss out on great features such as slightly different icons and a terrifying new form of predictive text that precisely mimics the sensation of talking to an idiot who keeps finishing your sentences for you. (Either my thumbs have grown clumsier, or predictive text in general has grown a lot more aggressive recently. I can’t type anything without it continually popping up to blurt random words on my behalf – it’s like being in the Beastie Boys.)
Part of the problem is that smartphones are so horribly addictive, as moreish as smoking. The difference between smartphones and cigarettes is this: a cigarette robs 10 minutes from your lifespan, but at least has the decency to wait and withdraw all that time in bulk as you near the end of your life – whereas a smartphone steals your time in the present moment, by degrees. Five minutes here. Five minutes there. Then you look up and you’re 85 years old.
That little rectangular screen is so hypnotic, so omnipresent, I feel lost and sick the moment mine’s tied up doing something as uninterruptable as an update. While it sits there, blank, progress bar inching along at a snail’s pace, I glance at it nervously, like an owner watching his dog undergo an operation – not out of anything approaching sympathy, but the selfish concern that if it dies, I might not be able to check my email for five minutes. I suppose if I had an Apple Watch I could at least fiddle mindlessly with that instead while waiting for the phone to spring back into life. Come to think of it, that’s probably the Watch’s sole purpose. They should market it that way. Big winner.
