Sophie is getting the shopping thing down these days -- the cultivation of consumer culture in action. She asked me to put her little shopping cart in the car today when I told her we had to go to the store.
There are a lot of inferior qualities of using the iPhone, but the spontaneity, convenience, and ease of grabbing a moment is pretty attractive. Looks like Steve Jobs got an hear full after announcing that Apple would be cutting the cost of the phone just two months after its release.
Early adopters always pay the biggest bite for new technology, especially when the hype surrounding a product is so pervasive. Think of all those folks waiting in line to buy an iPhone on the first day of its release only to find out that two months later the price would drop nearly $200. Kind of makes people look a bit foolish, including Jobs.
What Jobs has figured out is that there is a huge difference between wanting and needing something. Apple leads the way in making people want stuff, especially iStuff. The iPhone is no exception, because with it we can basically go around creating social documents of our lives in the first part of the 21st century, doing what the Polaroid had done for our parents generation. The thing is that our parents couldn't email the moment around the world in seconds and been seen by so many so quickly. It's the quirkiness of our techno-consumer culture.