iPhone Excitement Isn't Just For the Fanboys

I almost never wait in huge lines for anything.  I camped out once for football tickets in college.  Once.  I also once waited six hours for an iPhone 4 when it first came out.  It was my first smart phone and I had been putting off getting one way too long.  That was it though.  Yet I know people who have waited in ever decreasing lines for each iteration of the iPhone.  The reduced lines are definitely part of the sizzle wearing off and the iPhone being just another smart phone.  Yet even at 8 pm last night there was a line for iPhones outside our local Apple store.  It didn’t wrap around the mall like in the iPhone 4 days but the end of the first day still having a line for an iPhone 8 was pretty telling to me.

I was there to get my brand new iPhone 8 a new case.  I’ve been a relatively content Samsung Galaxy S5 user since it first came out but as that little device started dying earlier this year I decided to replace it with an iPhone instead.  I was in no huge rush and wasn’t going to wait in lines, so I just ordered it through Verizon and was supposed to get it next Friday.  To my surprise this thing showed up today.  I won’t review the iPhone 8 except to say I’m really enjoying it, but it needed a case.  Mind you, this is the “you call that an upgrade?” iPhone, according to the press.  This is the “Apple just put a new processor in an iPhone 7 BFD” iPhone, according to the press.  Even its yet to be released bigger cousin iPhone X is considered a yawner by many.  Only the members of the Apple cult are even interested in these phones, supposedly.  Sure, these devices are considered pedestrian nowadays.  Yet here we were on opening day with people standing there for I don’t know how long waiting for the supposedly complete yawner iPhone 8 who is playing a very second fiddle to the still yawner iPhone X.

Apple cult members I know are not interested in some lower end new thing, they want the latest and greatest devices.  That wasn’t even available yesterday.  That means all those people are standing around for this lowly iPhone 8 weren’t predominantly cult members.  They were people that just want a new phone to get shit done; the same mentality I have.  So if Apple cult members who just swoon at whatever Apple puts out as their top end hypothetically innovative thing is aren’t the crowd that means that for all the pooh  poohing in the press, Apple is still doing a far better job scratching the need for the average consumer than Android is.  No, it’s not some quantum leap forward into something we’ve never seen before.  No, it’s features are not entirely new.  That’s more of a plus for me.  I don’t need different for the sake of different, I want different for the sake of better.  While it is comical to watch the Apple RDF morph relatively pedestrian tweaks trying to coax out oohs and aahs from their launch event crowds, the fact is these devices and their OS  “just work” better than what the competition has to offer, and probably will for some time to come.