I got my Zune a few days before the iPhone was announced.

It was a smartly manifested little brick to be sure, its combination of brown and green oddly compelling, but the iPhone represented an object so profound that multiple industries were warped by its mere proximity. You could hate the company utterly, vomiting at the sight of their vile and bitten crest, and then still tumble to this assertion’s fundamental truth: that their portable computer, which is also a phone and a bunch of other shit, changed the world.

Now they want to make a really big version of it, to which I say yes.

UPS is telling me that my Nook will arrive on the 25th, just two days before (most people believe) Apple is set to announce their thing, which is awesome. This is more or less how it always happens when I decide to make my move on a piece of technology. I’ll try to find something ironic to read on it before it catches on fire, burning itself out of existence.

It’s got to be so annoying to compete with Apple, at anything really, because it’s not like they’re doing something fucking crazy. Everybody’s had these ideas before. The difference, and this is grim if you are a competitor, but the difference is that everyone else spends a lot of time (and often, money) determining why those things aren’t possible. And then it comes out, for real, only you didn’t make it. Some other guys did. And when you come out with what is (on paper) a better version of the same thing, maybe even multiple times over, it’s too late. You made a “product” to compete with their “product,” tastefully arranging your regiment, only to discover that they hadn’t made a product at all - they made a narrative. A statement about how technology should interface with a life.

I’m not saying this to be mean, or get my kicks, or to engage in psychic vampirism. Competing with these fucking people must be a genuinely harrowing state of affairs.

(CW)TB out.

living in a high rise grave