For as long as I have cared about technology, I’ve hated Apple. I’ve hated their products. I’ve hated their users. Alright, so I tolerate their users. I do so, however, in the most begrudgingly possible way. But their MacBooks, their iPads, and their iPhones I have absolutely no toleration for. In stark contrast with most of the technology using world, I actually value my freedom as a user. In the land of desktop computing, that’s no problem, because I can just load some flavor of Linux onto all my machines. In the land of mobile, that’s a huge problem, as Linux-based options have turned out to be nothing but broken promise after broken promise. So I’ve settle on Android, where I’ve been very happy, and very free of iOS. Unfortunately, I have an incredibly uncanny ability to lose my phones. In these situations, I usually have to scrape up whatever I can find, and call it a victory just to have something that works. Fortunately enough for me, I’ve always had the dumb luck to chance across an Android in these situations.
Until now.
Finding myself in a position where I badly needed to get a more powerful phone (I’ve been using a backup phone for months now), I had the incredible fortune to have my roommate offer me the use of a spare phone which he doesn’t need for the time being. There was, of course, a small catch with this offer. The catch wasn’t that I needed to clean his room or buy him beer. It was far, far, worse… and if you’ve been at all paying attention to what I’ve written in this blog post, you know exactly where this is going.
The catch, was that it’s an iPhone 4S. Now initially, being a pig-headed software snob, I immediately declined his offer. Then after I took a second to think about the stupidity of turning down a phone which was quite a bit more capable than the jokester of a brick I’m currently hauling around, I decided to lay my prejudice aside. Besides, this seemed like a golden opportunity to spend months blogging about everything I hate about Apple. Thus, the iPhone challenge was born.
Today, I make my way to the AT&T store to have this horrific device activated, and over the coming weeks, I’ll be writing regular blog posts about my (likely feeble) attempts to cope with change, so you can marvel at my pain through every step of the transition.
Believe me. You aren’t going to want to miss this. Probably subscribe to the RSS feed.