Let’s face it. iPhones are awesome. You can do practically anything on an iPhone: it even comes with a built in friend named Siri for when you get lonely. The iPhone is like the eighth world wonder compared to the Motorola Razr you had back in high school.
But iPhones are insanely addictive, maybe even akin to a drug at this point. You know there’s a problem when you and all your friends spend the entire meal staring at your phones instead of talking to each other. We love you, Apple, for creating such a fantastic piece of technology, but we also hate you for diminishing our attention spans even further.
So why are we so obsessed with this gizmo? Let’s disect the wonder that is the iPhone, one wonderful app at a time:
First on the list is Instagram, the application that makes every photograph seem “artsy” and every person photographed seem absurdly photogenic. I’ll admit that I do spend countless minutes I’ll never get back trolling through the different filters (my personal favorite is X-Pro II) and looking at my friends’ recent uploads, but do we really need an application to make our bowl of cereal look like a work of art? Do we really need to spend minutes on end trying to figure out whether to use “Sepia” with a thick border or an inverted “Valencia?” Realistically, no. Sadly, for our generation and our own personal entertainment, however, the answer is “#yes.”
Moving on to sweeter things, Candy Crush seems to be the latest game craze addiction, even more so than Temple Run or Angry Birds were in the past. Who knew that “crushing” candies to “clear the jellies” or making cherries and apples disappear would become such a popular pastime? Advancing to the next level of Candy Crush is almost as great as winning the lottery, and gaining all five lives back is the most rejuvenating feeling in the world. Too bad completing this game won’t get you too far in life.
Meanwhile, Snapchat is a nifty app that allows you to take a picture of anything (and I mean anything) and send it to your friends for a certain, predetermined amount of time. While we all love snapchatting, isn’t it a little excessive to send a picture of your friend to all your other friends who are sitting at the same lunch table with you and the friend you just took a picture of? Yes, yes it is. Do we care? No, because we all love getting pictures from cute guys, even if it is a group snap chat and you’re not the only girl that happens to be on their snapchatting mind (none of us like to admit this happens—we must be unique!)
And finally, let’s “face” it: The fact that every iPhone now comes with the Facebook application already waiting to be installed is aggressive yet fantastic at the same time. At this point in time, if you don’t have a Facebook, what are you even doing with your life? (Probably something more worthwhile than Instagramming your Ramen noodles) Refreshing our Facebook pages up to ten times a day has become a part of our daily routine, but it’s probably a bad sign if we catch ourselves scrolling through our Newsfeeds and not even realizing class ended a couple of minutes ago, or that we almost just got hit by a car.
Moral of the story is that the iPhone sounds awesome, right? It comes with applications to pass the time, to make you look like a bronzed goddess, or even to stalk your ex-boyfriend who went out with your girlfriends this past weekend while you were sick in bed. Sounds awesome! Until you realize that a couple of hours have passed and you still have that to do that midterm paper worth 50% of your grade by midnight.
At which point you find yourself thinking, “Damn you for distracting me, iPhone,” but continue to crush some candies and Snapchat all your friends picture of your half finished Word document.