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Wednesday, November 26, 2008

My iPhone is dying

I bought an iPhone on opening day in 2007. That makes it about 17 months old.

Since that day, my iPhone has been:

• Run over by a car
• Catapulted from a treadmill (at least five times)
• Flung across macadam parking lots (at least twice)
• Suffered a cracked screen (not sure which mishap)
• Been bent back into shape when a particulary harsh fall dented in a corner

But now, alas, it is dying. The battery holds a charge for about three hours, and then plunges off the table (figuratively, not like the catastrophes described above).

I am almost certain that getting a new battery would cost as much as upgrading. And the new phone has 3G (just introduced in Maine) and a real GPS chip (although the location services in my first generation phone are more than sufficient).

As predicted when I bought it, the Steve Jobs version of planned obsolescence wins out:

Apple will fix these things. If the iPod is any lesson, our first-generation iPhones will get some great fixes in software updates. And then some great new addition will come to the phone that will not be available to us, because Apple will have completely re-engineered the innards of its next-gen device.

And I will buy it, just like 40GB iPod that replaced my 20GB, and the 60GB that replaced the 40. Because Jobs' greatest success has not been in transforming the computer, the way we listen to music, or the cellphone. He has done all that, for sure, but what he has also done is the entrepreneur's dream mashup: He has merged the guaranteed obsolescence of the fashion industry with the whiz-bang of the technology industry. And I don't begrudge him his fortune for having done so.

I'll be getting a new iPhone soon.

posted by Tim Beidel at 11/26/2008 10:04:00 AM

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