Lining up for Apples

I’ll confess. I don’t have any Apple products. No iPod. No iPad. No iMac. No iPhone. And I’m okay with that. I have an Mp3 player, and a telephone that lets me send and receive calls. I can even take pictures with it, albeit with crappy resolution. And while I admire the marketing guru’s at Apple for turning a want into a must have, you know that your country has nothing to worry about when hundreds of people line up, some for more than eight hours, just to be the first to purchase the newest iPhone. The unlocked 32G phone sells for $800. In some countries people line up for water. In Jakarta I saw people line up for cooking gas. Here, clean water flows uninterrupted from our taps, so we can line up for expensive gadgets.

Okay, so some people justify the need for an $800 phone (I know it’s more than just a phone), like the woman interviewed in the newspaper, who said the phone (she bought two) will serve as “her all-around communications, social networking, and video device.” Sounds like a line from the Apple marketing machine.

But what’s with lining up overnight for the device? I know it’s not a new phenomena, because when I was younger parents would line up for hours and then beat on each other just to get their kid a cabbage patch doll. And more recently people would line up for hours, because their children just had to have the latest video game system for Christmas. It seems a little odd to me. Does someone really need a phone that bad, or is it more about status and bragging to your friends that you have the latest and greatest? I wonder, because one guy who lined up for a new phone also lined up a few months ago to be one of the first to get his hands on a new iPad, and surely he wasn't the only one. And no doubt when Apple launches a new iPhone in the next couple of years, those same people will be complaining about how terrible their phone is, and they'll camp out overnight, so they can be the first to get a new one. Meanwhile, in another part of the world, someone will line up for hours hoping for some clean drinking water.