Good article. I'm trying to think of other products which inspire this sort of pointless religious war. Cars are the big one; try reading the comments section on autoblog one of these days.
Typical Ford POS. Glad to see they haven't changed at all...same irrelevant company with the same irrelevant, mediocre products.
Gm is just not good at making decent cars.i cannot think of a single GM car that i would ever consider purchasing..
Given that cars are so expensive and visible I can kinda see how people get their identity so caught up in them (though I strongly suspect that most of the people with the sorts of opinions expressed above are probably too young to drive). Phones, however, are a mystery to me.
Calling the things we carry in our pockets today "phones" is nothing more than an artifact of history. (In fact, my iPhone is a terrible phone.)
Smartphones are devices we use constantly, all day, probably some absurd number of times per hour, and it is a statistic that is surely going up. It's hard to think of any other product we have a more intimate relationship with. It's become more and more of a tool that we cannot live without. These are the attributes of a product that cause an emotional attachment, and is the reason people get so worked up about "phones". (You'll note this ferver didn't really reach a fever pitch until after "phones" were no longer phones.)
> Smartphones are devices we use constantly, all day, probably some absurd number of times per hour, and it is a statistic that is surely going up.
I might be the odd one out here, but I'll often go days without so much as touching my phone. Either I have my laptop with me, which is better than my iPhone at everything save being a phone, or if I'm just looking to burn time I'll read my Kindle. I have friends who are constantly glued to their phones, and I simply don't understand the attraction.
"devices we use constantly, all day, probably some absurd number of times per hour"
So, they're like phones, then. ;) When I was a teen, my peers and I used our phones (some of them even were landlines) constantly. But the fashion attribute was minimal, and the functionality was pretty much identical regardless of brand.
Not that that kept me from feeling immeasurably cooler than everyone else when I got a nice and tiny Nokia 8290...
>Calling the things we carry in our pockets today "phones" is nothing more than an artifact of history. (In fact, my iPhone is a terrible phone.)
Really? In what other way except "battery life"?
Sound reviews found it had excellent sound, and same goes for reception. And the reliability of the phone network, even for simple calls, if far better than what it was back in the day.
And the contact list, search function, visual voicemail and ease of use for those functions is far better than most, if not all, pre-iPhone phones.
I live in emerald hills and I'd say about 80-90% (no exaggeration) of calls drop within the first 60 seconds. (Not an iPhone thing, a AT&T thing, of course.)
Video game consoles are possibly the worst, as it is extremely important that one's fourteenth birthday present be the correct one.
Meanwhile, phones are relatively cheap and disposable, so I agree the holy war is a mystery to me to. Perhaps its the same 14 year olds as with the consoles.
Almost anything that involves subjective judgement can cause this sort of thing, I think.
Because at that point it is about you. At a certain point, iOS vs Android or Ford vs Chevy comes down to something personal. Something about you made that choice, so you better defend who you are(not what the product is).
Any object can inspire wars of belief in those who use them quite frequently or the amateur observer. Get in with golfers and hear the rage or praise over different brands of clubs. We just don't see this behavior in its totality because most of us are not involved in every niche under the sun. It seems amplified where the item is personal / customizable or expensive.
The topic that inspires the most vitriol by far is anything to do with Israel or Palestine. The comments on any YouTube video or nasty even by YouTube comment standards.
Typical Ford POS. Glad to see they haven't changed at all...same irrelevant company with the same irrelevant, mediocre products.
Gm is just not good at making decent cars.i cannot think of a single GM car that i would ever consider purchasing..
Given that cars are so expensive and visible I can kinda see how people get their identity so caught up in them (though I strongly suspect that most of the people with the sorts of opinions expressed above are probably too young to drive). Phones, however, are a mystery to me.