Toting a non-Apple device around the world, for the first time in ages, has made me see the Apple-toters with new eyes. If youll allow me to be totally and arbitrarily judgmental for a moment: It struck me just how common the iPhone has become. And I mean that in the sense of not distinguished; not of superior excellence; ordinary, per definition 4 in my Websters New Universal Unabridged Dictionary: Deluxe Second Edition. (Ill stop short of citing definition 7: not refined; low; coarse.)
Before everyone gets upset, I would actually draw a distinction between Apple in general and the iPhone in particular. The latter has become a brand unto itself, one that has long since crossed over from cool (meaning something embraced by a minority that thinks of itself as having elite taste) to acceptable, meaning its a sort of cultural default, like a Polo shirt or Nike sneakers or, for that matter, Windows (in its heyday at least).
Its the brand for people who dont want to think all that hard about what brand they are buying, and just want whatever everybody else will accept without question. Its bourgeois.
Theres nothing wrong with that, per se. Nike sneakers and Polo shirts are acceptable for a reason: They are perfectly fine. And to state the obvious, producing an acceptable default product is an excellent position for a business to occupy. (This is why trendmongersfor a brand to lose its cool so often miss the point.)
But what I'm getting at isn't business. It's personal. Personally, I don't go for Polo ponies and Nike swooshes. I'm not interested in mindlessly signaling that I have bought in to whatever the market has decided is "acceptable." Maybe you've had the same feeling: It's precisely the fact that the iPhone has attained this status in popular culture that made me curious about alternatives.
By now the (perhaps justifiably) offended iPhone loyalists among you would surely like to point out to me that the HTC One, , is not exactly setting the world on fire. The product is a minor sideshow in press coverage of the Apple-Samsung battle; the ; and its . I wouldnt be surprised if most iPhone owners dont even know what an HTC One is.
This doesnt bother me in the least. First, I like an underdog. Second, any time a brand emerges as a default, I get suspicious: Surely I can do better than whatever the majority thinks is acceptable. I think with my HTC One Ive done exactly that. And this is not dissimilar from my insistence on sticking with Apples computers when their market share compared to Windows alternatives had shrunk to practically nothing. As long as I could identify what made my choice better, I had to. And that, as you know, worked out just fine.
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