There seems to be a flood of people telling the world why they won’t be buying an iPhone – I’d like to join that flood.
It’s not that I don’t like whizzy new technology – I do. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the iPhone’s user interface – it’s gorgeous. But.
But I don’t need it, I can’t afford it, and I am very unhappy with Apple’s tie-in tactics.
I don’t need it because I’ve got a phone. Okay, I got it in 1999, but hey, it’s the phone they had in The Matrix (almost). What more can you want? It does calls. It does texts. Problem solved.
I can’t afford it because it’s ridiculously expensive and tied into a high price contract. (At least, high price compared with mine.)
And most important, Apple is putting on its habitual ‘do it our way or not at all’ stance and I really don’t like that. Not only are you tied in to a single network, but when US buyers used hacks to open their iPhones to other networks, Apple issued a software upgrade that killed their phones. This isn’t 21st century thinking, it’s 19th century protectivism.
Get a (modern) life, Apple.
There has been an increasing dissatisfaction at Apple in general. I have read many times how users are getting unhappy with iTunes, and how unstable Mac computers are becoming. Shame. I have a 1-year old iPod and I chose it as I thought that the interface with iTunes was superb.
I back up your refuse to purchase a luxury phone such as the iPhone. Possibly, there are many more things in our lives that we really don’t need. I wish I could get rid of my Vespa altogether and get a Tandem bike instead. Thinking about it.
I read the title of your post, and came thinking you were sick of all the talking on the interface and the design, etc, but I would like to subscribe to your protest!…
First, it will take a long time before I ever consider changing my Nokia 1100 for anything else, specially anything without a small LED torch in it.
Second, I too love Apple’s designs and innovations, but their closed policies make me sick. They are all pro open-source when they had to make OSX, but that was it…
I’m just not too sure this is just 19th century thinking frmo their parts. It might be that they wouldn’t be able to hold their jobs and profits with more open “business models”… It’s 19th century thinking by all the consumers!!…
If you don’t like the iPhone, you probably will look forward to the first Android phone, the open platform just announced by Google. And yes, I have an iPhone and like it.
Martin – I do like the iPhone, but I can’t justify buying one and don’t like the way they are selling it.
The reason I’m not getting an iphone is that there are already phones out there that do everything it does and more, and they’re hundreds of dollars cheaper. Look into the N series phones by Nokia. The N95 has a touch screen with tactile feedback, 8GB memory, 3G(unlike the iphone), wifi, a 5MP camera, and runs Symbian.
The great thing about those phones is that they’re first and foremost phones. They have good call quality and battery life. They also tend to have large amounts of memory, excellent cameras that also do video(unlike the iphone), and support user-modification through the ginormous Symbian developer community. I can get push email(blackberry style) on the go that stays synced with my desktop, unlike the iphone.
The thing I detest about Apple’s marketing strategy is that they use the first round or two of buyers as unwitting beta-testers. People stump up cash for the privilege of working out the bugs in Apple’s first couple rounds of releases.