Re: Used to love my iphone - Heroin works that way. One has to upgrade daily.
...to more and bigger amounts.
About 18 months ago, a colleague here in my office won a brand-new-in-box 16GB iPhone 3G-S as a door prize at a seminar he was attending. He showed so little interest in it that it took a week of asking him to bring it in so I could have a play with it (being in IT, one's expected to know about such things).
After a coupe of weeks or so of familiarizing myself with it, I put it back in its box where it has remained until this article prompted me to dig it out, now it's on my desk as I write.
It really worries me. Whilst no one here has yet succumbed to addiction to any brand of smartphone let alone this iPad--like the pharmacist who is always surrounded by tempting narcotics--the temptation is always there.
Whilst its owner will never be interested in it, the rest of us techies could be tempted, so we've entered into a pact--a unanimous agreement of monitoring each other: if any one of us gets too interested in the device then the others have agreed to grab it at the first opportunity and run over it with one of the warehouse forklifts!
You think I'm bullshitting? Well I'm not. Shame El Reg doesn't allow images to be uploaded or I'd post a few photos of me putting it back in its pristine black box with pretty icons on top.
Laudanum was one legal, and that the beginning of the 20th C. so was cocaine, it was even in Coca Cola--and it took a few years for everyone to realise how truly addictive the stuff was. Same with smartphones, problem is that even the regulators are addicted, so we can't expect the problem to be fixed anytime soon. We've people texting whilst driving, texting whilst crossing over busy highways and getting killed--then there was the bloke who fell down a manhole last week. The world's gone mad with smartphone phone addiction--futzing and time wasted has easily doubled, and that's the least of it.
Smartphones are the greatest marketing coop of all time, they leave Bill Gates at his peak for dead. There's never been another product in history that's as addictive and as corrupting as this 'electronic heroin', not only is it so seductive that most of its users haven't a glue that they're hopelessly addicted but to top it off it's totally legal worldwide.