Yes, this is more than infatuation.

I love my iPhone.

I confess that it feels ridiculous to speak of such affection toward an electronic device. Technologically speaking, I don’t tend to be either savvy or swift. In fact, I prided myself on milking six years out of my previous cell phone. I had purchased it when we lived in China in 2004. It was a phone–nothing more. When I purchased it, the very fact that I was joining the “cell phone world”, with a couple billion members at that point, felt like a quantum leap in my technological posture. When that phone finally gave out, I asked my wife to buy me the cheapest, plainest phone she could find. Bells and whistles were neither wanted nor welcomed. Part of the motivation behind moves like this is to minimize the learning curve typically associated with new gadgets. The other part is that I’m a cheapskate. Even when I had a cell phone, I was a pay-as-you-go, my-bill-is-$100-per-year customer, and quite proud of it.

You can imagine the shock of those around me then when I confessed just before Christmas that I was considering an upgrade to an iPhone. Continue reading →