I make and receive about three phone calls a week. All to and from Barb.
"Want me to bring you some Chinese?"
"Pick up some dog food. We’re out."
"Did you try to call me just now? (No) Huh."
So I don’t really need a cell phone. Let alone an iPhone. But boy are those buggers cool? All my pals have them and love them. Can’t imagine going back to whatever they had before.
And next month we’ll probably see the new and improved (3G) iPhone and the flames of my iPhone lust will be whipped as by Santa Ana winds.
When asked why I don’t have an iPhone, I mumble some variation of what you just read. But the real answer has more to do with my MacBook Pro. I always have it with me and have big chunks of my life recordable or accessible there.
Think of the MacBook Pro as a sleek, high-performance racing car. And the iPhone as a sexy, top-of-the-line motorcycle (Candy Apple Red).
It would be fun to ride the motorcycle (zoom! zoom!) but that would mean leaving the MacBook Pro in the garage. What a waste. Why not take both along? I could, but that would be like towing the motorcycle behind the sports car on a trailer. Cumbersome (and silly).
I’d love to see some data on this. Do new iPhone users tote their laptops less often? Perhaps at the molecular level, we are laptoppers or iPhoners. I think I’m the former.
There are very few occasions when I would be able to use my laptop, but choose instead to use the iPhone. They’re just completely different devices, even though they do a lot of the same things.
I can’t do much “work” – other than email – on the iPhone. But then again, lots of my “work” consists of being online, and there are times when I can do that via my iPhone much more easily than on my laptop. Then there’s the fact that it has a really cool iPod built in.
This is sort of like what you say about blogging. Until you do it, you can’t understand it. Until you are sitting in a car or a waiting room with 5 minutes to kill, and are able to check out your Google Reader instead of staring at the people in the parking lot around you, you won’t see much use for the iPhone. Once you’ve experienced that, you’ll wonder how you ever killed 5 minutes before.
I’m both an iBook G4 user and an iPhoner. Since adopting the iPhone, I don’t think I carry the iBook any less than I did before because I think I use them for distinctly different functions… But, I do use the phone infinitely more for actual phone calls than you do, so that might also make a difference. On the other hand, you have the especially unique folks like our mutual friend Chuck who carry their MacBook Pros, their iPod Touches, and their Treo’s (or whichever non-Mac smart phone Zimm uses)… Great analogy with the bike, though. Hurry up and get that iPhone, though. Not as cool an accessory as a Fez, but it’s right up there.