Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Slim-Phone & Fat-Treat

The upheaval created by the launch of the new iphone 3G last week astounded me. At the apple stores around the city, one witnessed a long queue of people snaking into invisibility who had actually base camped for hours to buy one of these phones. They could have spent the summer weekend hiking, fishing, or even peeling potatoes and watching TV at home. Yet they chose to half cook themselves in the blazing sun for hours, reminding me of the queues in front of the ration shops or the puja pandals in Calcutta to catch a glimpse of the much hyped pandals that looked like the Louvre museum or a casino in Las Vegas.

My friend, who happened to be one of the iphone maniacs, argued that while the previous model sold a million copies in 74 days, this one sold a million copies in 3 days. A quick calculation told me that in 3 days, one out of every 300 people in the US is a proud owner of an iphone 3G. Impressive. But the tech challenged and the often ridiculed clumsy cohort of people’s category that I belong to, all I ended up asking was- “What is the big deal about possessing a device whose primary function is to make people talk?” Seriously, I failed to realize the reason for this craze. I mean one could easily wait a couple more weeks and then buy one of these when the madness had somewhat subsided. True, it had the cool built-in GPS and great storage and stuff like that, but I’m sure my laptop combined with google was pretty capable of fulfilling the same needs of mine.



Sure the phone is great to touch and great to look and even greater to possess. My friend was quick to shrug off my thoughts as those being chronically an extreme version of insensitivity and ignorance. He actually looked hurt that God had not programmed me to be able to find an iphone cool. He himself stood in line for a good 3 hours in the blazing sun on a weekday, and at the end of it, all I saw was smiles and excitement on his face. Sure he hasn’t seemed this enthusiastic about checking out the chicks inside a store. What was that English word describing this syndrome? Hype? Don’t we call it “Hujug” in Bengali?

Anyway, the main point of this post is not what you have read till now. We shall talk of more important things here. The important thing being-


What happens when one fine day you become the proud owner of an iphone 3G?

You end up spending 22% on treat taxes.

Good for me, an iphone craziness survivor.


sunshine.

3 comments:

RukmaniRam said...

"You end up spending 22% on treat taxes." ha ha ha!

P.S: Is it only coincidence that the tags read "craziness, men, technology"? :D

piyela said...

iphone is not about technology.... its about the looks, best user intractive screen...... definitely hype is carrying the numbers.... but 1 million is too much to sell in 3 days.... but ya standing in a line is stupid thing to do.... who in the world can stand for more than 3 hours on a weekday.. "jaane woh ya jaane na"

Ambuj Saxena said...

Are you sure they sold those million bricks in US itself? Last I heard, it was a worldwide figure.