iFail - How Consumerism Backfires

So, I've been hearing a lot of complaints recently about the errors associated with the iPhone 4, and I have to say I am not surprised in the least. In the past decade most companies have become more interested in new fancy gadgetry and less interested in making sure that the products are of a high lasting quality, making people pay more for something that will need to soon be replaced. I always feel sorry for my amigos who go out and buy things without doing what I feel is the necessary research, though I do admit to occasionally laughing to myself when their free time is devoured by downloading patches and updates to phones that they pay so much for.

I won't say that I'm completely anti-materialist - after all, I love my gadgets, and cannot imagine going a day without the internet or cell phone access - but I feel that there are boundaries which one really should set in regards to what is necessary and what isn't, and in this time of economic uncertainty we really should be trying our best to weed out the unnecessary expenses from our lives, and the continual iPhone upgrades certainly seem like an unneeded cost to me.

Of course, I must always remember that I'm incredibly conservative when it comes to my money, and I can't hold others to my rather restrictive standards. And I do believe that some people have more needs than others when it comes to gadgets, so what is fine for one person may not be needed for another. Like, I have no real need for the Internet on my phone, nor do I need the wide array of apps that phones like the iPhone or Droid provide. But someone like my BFF Ly would get a lot of benefit from the Droid that she owns, as she doesn't have a working home computer to check mail from, making the Internet access beneficial, and she gets horribly lost whenever we go ANYWHERE, making the direction app very useful in her case.

I think the most important thing is to try and ignore the societal pressures towards technological conformity and instead assess ourselves and our lives so that we can ultimately make the best decisions for us and not the best decisions for these greedy multibillion dollar corporations.