The New Black – An Apple a day …

Brandi DeLancey

So who doesn’t love Apple (the brand, not the fruit)? The sleek sexy designs. The uber modern technologies. I have to admit, even I drool each time Apple outdoes themselves yet again and comes up with something “new” that I STILL can’t afford to buy. But there are many people out there willing to spend their life savings to own everything Apple puts out, the day it hits the stores no less!

Now, I can appreciate the hard work that this company obviously puts into their products just as much as the next guy, but when do we consider it overkill? Take the iPad for instance. Is it a laptop? Is it an iPod? It costs about as much as the new iPhone does, but you can’t make a phone call from it. It is about the same size as the new MacBook Air, but doesn’t come with a keyboard. So, my question is, if you own the iPhone, why do you need this thing? Why spend the extra money? Well, I’ll tell you why. Because it’s NEW damn it! Not to mention that everyone else has one … so I must need it. Right?

Quite frankly, why do you need anything else when you have the iPhone? This thing can make calls, it can surf the web – it can even surf the web while making calls – and it serves as an iPod. There are hundreds of thousands of “Apps” available ONLY for this thing, allowing you to do anything from checking your account balance before you buy that shirt from the Gap to actually picking out the outfit that goes with it! You can take beautifully detailed pictures of yourself, from a universally flattering downward angle while standing in your bathroom with it and share them with all of your friends on Facebook. You can “produce” your own independent film of your three-year-old shaking his/her booty to the latest popular club hit that is, in my opinion, a bit inappropriate for you to be allowing them to listen to in the first place. And to round it all out, I have seen this thing replace a full bands-worth of instruments to play a song live on a subway train! I’m seriously considering buying the domain name iPhoneforPrez2016.com. I’m telling you, that thing will be Internet gold!

But I digress. Where was I? Oh, the iPod. This gadget has had more facelifts since its inception in 2001 than Heidi Montag has had plastic surgeries! Since the First Generation of this mp3 player on steroids was unveiled, there have been 5.5 MORE generations of the iPod, two generations of the iPod Mini, four generations of the iPod Shuffle, six generations of the iPod Nano, four generations of the iPod Touch and two versions of the iPod Photo (whatever the hell that is). That’s almost three new iPods a year for the last nine years! Are you kidding me? Do we, as a society, really demand an updated product every four months? I guess we can’t live without listening to our music on something that is smaller than a matchbook and about as colorful.

Speaking of small … the “new” MacBook Air, what is it, a clip board or a laptop? The smallest version is about the size of a regular piece of paper. The only difference is that they probably frown upon writing on it and turning it in to your teacher as homework. In order to accomplish this groundbreaking reduction in size, it has no optical drive, only Flash storage. Lord forbid you don’t have a way to get that CD-ROM version of WoW onto a thumb drive! But according to the in-crowd that possesses this product, it’s the greatest thing since … well, since the last MacBook Air.

Why, I ask, do you need to spend $1000 on a laptop the size of a manila envelope when you could get something of comparable size for less than half the cost? Why you say? Because it’s not a Mac! No one sits across the aisle from me on the plane wondering what sort of fascinating life I lead when there is a small HP printed in the bottom right hand corner of my laptop, even if I did put one of those apple stickers on it that came with my iPod! It’s just not the same. * humpf *

By now you are probably sensing my bitterness in not owning these much desired items … well, your senses are right on point, my friend. Not only did it take two years of convincing to get my first iPod, but I’ve also been trying to work up the courage to make my first iMac purchase for the last year! Every time I add the stupid thing to the shopping cart, pick out all of the accessories and programs I want and get to the part where it tells me how much they are going to suck out of my bank account; I get cold feet!

Is this sticker shock or is it because I know the very second I complete my order and get that email confirmation, Steve Jobs is going to pop up through some holographic portal pointing and laughing in his black mock turtleneck talking up some bigger and better system that will sell for the same exact price I just paid for last year’s model? I just can’t live with that kind of let down.

But I guess you cool people can.

Brandi DeLancey lives in North Carolina where she is taking over the Internets one website at a time.