One shiny-new iPhone, sir? That's seven-hundred quid and a subscription to The Priory. Or, save yourself the cost of a new bit of kit and simply update your old phone to iOS 6. The price? Free. The cost? Loss of your marbles after an entire weekend spent failing to recover all the stuff you think you can't live without.
In reality it's all bollocks though, isn't it? Apple or Android, almost nobody does more than a tiny fraction of what may be possible. If you use your iThing for music or media you have to recharge it every five minutes and if you try to use it for 'work' you will simply become deranged as your whole intellectual ability tries to tunnel-vision its way onto that tiny screen. Narrow focus; narrow vision; narrow productivity... narrow life possibilities.
Don't even attempt to convince me otherwise. 99% of all smartphone owners use them exclusively for email, messaging, Twitter and the occasional Google search. Apps, you say; it's all about the Apps. Pardon my French, but is it fuck. Apps are what we used to call... now, what was the word?... Oh yes - toys. For every useful app there are a thousand useless, buggy betas, alternatively crashing and freezing their way into the very core of your mental well-being. (I predict a whole new skein of entitlement-based, application-induced insanities to make merry work for the nut-docs.)
Even the pub - once the balance-restoring (or removing; there is that) social haven of happy babble - is now a sterile, strife-inducing continuation of the desperate need to stay in touch with everybody, everywhere, all of the time. The sight of a table of four friends all sitting, eyes-down and thumbs a-blur, is a depressing indictment of the way in which social technology is eroding, not enhancing your all-too-brief experience in this vale of tears we call Earth.
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