The Stepford iPhones: Can anything stop them?

I know that I’m a latecomer to the Apple revolution, but I’m seriously getting into it all now.

For the longest time, I held out against getting a Mac. Everyone and their mother (although not my mother or her mother… the women in my family tend to be the least technologically savvy people on the planet. They’re also all insane. My future looks pretty bleak) kept telling me that I needed one, but I said no. I was happy with my Dell products.

I don’t say this often, but I was SO wrong.

The same with getting an iPod. I had little teeny tiny mp3 players for a while, and I didn’t understand why I would want an iPod. They were bigger and a pain in the butt. And the shuffles didn’t even have displays! I liked being able to see what song was playing, thank you very much.

Then my dad got me an iPod, and I don’t understand how I lived without it.

Now I have a Macbook Pro (which I typed all of these blog posts from), and I don’t have any idea why there are any other computer companies left. I thought I’d never get used to not having two mouse buttons and pushing “command+c” and “command+v” to copy and paste. But just a couple of weeks after getting the Mac, I now get angry at school because I push the wrong buttons on those stupid, worthless Windows machines.

As my dad says, Macs just work. And he’s right. My Mac is delightful.

And with my wonderful Mac came my first iPod touch.

Which means that it’s only a matter of time until I switch to the iPhone.

For years now, I’ve been telling everyone who will listen that I don’t want an iPhone because I like having actual keys for texting. I’m one of those ridiculous individuals who texts so much that I can do it completely without looking. Like I can hold my phone behind my back and text accurately. On a full QWERTY keyboard. That probably means there’s something wrong with me and I’ll have full-blown carpal tunnel syndrome and arthritis by my next birthday. (Even though I’ll STILL only be 25 on my next birthday. Amazing how that works. I’m not turning older than that until I have a publishing contract. So if you want me to disclose my real age, go buy more copies of my book!)

I’m not QUITE at vampire speed. But I’m close. (The video clip is kinda NSFW… but hilarious. I <3 True Blood!)


But the problem now that I’ve played extensively with the iPod touch is that I realize that, with a little more practice, I could probably get used to texting without looking on an iPhone.

My main reason against getting the iPhone isn’t the keypad though. It’s that everyone who has one becomes completely and utterly obsessed with it. Like beyond how obsessed I am with Bruce Springsteen. It’s seriously scary.

When I look at my Facebook news feed, a good third of the posts on there are from my friends talking about their iPhones. And some of these people have families and pets! But they talk about their phones MORE THAN THEY TALK ABOUT THEIR CHILDREN. And if you try to take their phone away from them for ANY reason, they turn into Gollum from Lord of the Rings and start lunging at you talking about “my precious.”

My dad is a perfect example of this. He got his iPhone kind of late compared to a lot of people. He kept his Motorolla Razr WAY longer than anyone else I knew, and, despite usually being the first person to bring new technology home, kept claiming he didn’t need a smart phone.

Then he brought home his first iPhone, and I swear there was more fanfare for that than when he brought ME, his first-born child, home from the hospital.

Literally. (Although, as he pointed out, the reason for that was that I didn't come with any cool apps.)  He was emailing me pictures of his phone for weeks. And when he upgraded to the iPhone 4, I’m pretty sure that became his favorite child.

He cradles it in his arms, and I’ve caught him talking baby talk to it a few times. At least his background picture is of Rosie, my puppy, and not of the iPhone itself. But I don’t think he has a single picture of me or my brother on there. Just the phone itself and my dog. There’s something wrong with that.

Family gatherings have turned cliquey because of the iPhones. The iPhone people sit together and compare apps, and the non-iPhone people sit together and form a support group for family members of iPhone owners. I’m not even exaggerating. My dad now says that he has a mixed family: he and my brother are iPhone people, my mom and I aren’t. (The implication being that my mother and I are far inferior beings because we haven’t evolved to using iPhones yet.)

I worry sometimes that he’s planning a Stepford Wives style takeover, where one day we’re normal people who are living non-iPhone obsessed lives, and the next day we’ve been murdered and replaced with iPhone-using animatronics housewives.

So while my conversion to using a Mac may hasten my switch to using an iPhone, if you get the idea that I’m no longer human because my phone is suddenly all that I talk about, send help! I may still be alive in a dungeon somewhere with an older, deactivated cell phone, while the fake version of me compares apps with my dad and brother.

But worst case scenario, I bet Stepford robots can text without looking, even on an iPhone.