“Today, as you may have heard, is the iPhone’s fifth birthday. Five years ago today, eager fanboys lined up for miles outside of Apple stores, fawning and frothing and damn near trampling each other in order to get their hands on the product Steve Jobs promised was ‘revolutionary,'” Kevin Roose writes for New York Magazine. “Since then, the iPhone has become a behemoth, a $100 billion annual revenue generator that has made Apple the world’s largest and most profitable tech company and enlisted hundreds of millions of people in the smartphone army.”
“It has also, quite possibly, ruined all of our lives,” Roose writes. “The iPhone has distorted, disabled, and otherwise blown a Grand Canyon–size hole in our social fabric… I’ve owned an iPhone since 2008, and, as with most owners, it has become a fifth limb. I am one of those hollow souls whose insular cortex lights up like fireworks every time I get a new e-mail or text, whose anxiety levels spike every time my battery dips below 15 percent. Everywhere I’ve gone in the past four years, my iPhone has tugged me away from the real world. I’ve spent vacations with my eyes on Instagram, played Words With Friends during movies, and treated my Twitter feed with the deference usually reserved for royalty. I am, in short, an iPhone addict. And so, very likely, are you.”
Roose writes, “It’s true that the iPhone is a wonderful and unique device, one that deserves to make billions upon billions of dollars for Apple. It’s also true that it has turned my social circle from a group of reasonable human beings — ones who read books, had long, meaningful conversations, and were occasionally filled with the milk of human kindness — into a bunch of panicky, overstimulated, screen-fixated automatons… Yes, there are other phones. Androids and the few thousand BlackBerrys left in circulation share some of the blame. But the iPhone, as the dominant device in the demographic that is responsible for the bulk of the planet’s creative output, is the most culpable of all.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Listen, it’s an article about an Apple product and, as even before we’re faced with a week having Independence Day (U.S) stuck smack in the middle of it, pickings are already few and far between. In our unending quest to scour the Internet to bring you Apple-related items, this hackneyed trifling of recycled pablum was all we could find at the moment. We apologize.
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