The Short Life and Quick Death of the iPhone Wizards

So, just like that, eight short months after its conception, my beautiful iPhone is obsolete.

I mean, I knew the wizards who live inside my phone would be replaced eventually, but I didn't know that Apple would crank out better, faster, stronger, meaner wizards within the year. Yeesh. I've had condoms live in my wallet for a longer time.

And this corrects the one thing about the iPhone that kills me, which is it's battery. I love my phone, but its battery lasts less than prom-night-first-time sex. I'll go to New York in the evening and take a bus back Saturday morning and my phone will be dead by the time I hit Hartford, leaving me without Simon and his buddy Garfunkel to soothe my troubled, throbbing head.

I'm very happy with my iPhone, but they do this every time. Remember the first generation iPhones, which were like $600 and buggy as a bog? And then new ones came out a year later and they were half as expensive and so much better? And all those poor schlubs who bought the first ones were like that guy who really wanted to nail that girl and so they asked her out and they had to date her for three months and spend so much money on her and then finally, when they were able to do it, it was a little meh? Especially when, one year later, they saw their friend buy the same girl two tequila shots and then BOOM. Victory.

So yes, sometimes life isn't fair.

The fact that it has a compass kills me. One day I came home from the bar and watched a little TV so the spins would go away. And one of those damned commercials came on where "There's an app for this and an app for that." And one of them was a compass. And I'm like, "OH MY GOD A COMPASS THAT IS THE MOST AWESOMEST THING EVER MY PHONE CAN BE A COMPASS THIS THING IS SO COOL IT CAN HAVE A COMPASS."

So I ran to my computer and, with the kind of reckless disregard only harnessed on Black Friday by the natives of Long Island, immediately purchased the compass application I saw on TV. For the low price of five dollars. And then I forgot about it.

In the morning, I noticed the new app and it was about as useless as you could expect. I'm a guy who calls "camping" the act of driving out to a campground, parking the car, picking up the cases of beer, carrying them ten yards, and saying, "here's good," before passing out three hours later on top of a log.

And now here I sit, in the middle of the the densest urban landscape in America, and I have a compass on my phone and am out five dollars. That's one beer, people. And what bugs me is that, without that beer I won't get lost. And I won't need the goddamned compass. Gar.

Of course, if I'm ever lost in the woods, the iPhone will run out of power before I can figure out how to read the compass anyway.

Damn you, Jobs. Damn you.