Dave's Fiction Warehouse

I wonder: Has the iPhone made the world a better place, or a worse one? Always a popular subject and more in vogue this month now that the iPhone has turned 10. (Any anniversary that’s a multiple of five is red meat to pundits caught in the dog days of summer.) And so Timothy Egan and David Brooks both have nice columns on the subject in the New York Times. Both regard smartphones in general as a mixed blessing at best. Tim Egan compares it to the printing press, if the printing press had only been used to disseminate total bullshit (hashtag #thatfuckingtrump). Brooks says the iPhone has made it too easy to cancel engagements, or bail on commitments of any kind. He wonders if that doesn’t dissolve the social glue that keeps us civilized. Both are valid points. When you have a device that “does everything,” “everything” presumably includes the bad as well as the good. Personally, I like the maps, the reviews, and being able to reliably coordinate an airport pickup. The rest of it I coul...

I am a petty, bitter man, especially when it comes to iPhone fanatics raving incessantly about the amazing capabilities of the device. About half the posts you see on Twitter pose some variation of the rhetorical question, "is there anything this iPhone can't do?" Turns out you can also fry eggs on it. This amusing post describes the overheating problem being reported by some users of the new iPhone 3G S. "Toasty doesn't even describe how surprisingly hot it got," one user reports. Another put it under his pillow and awoke with a scorched ear. Being petty and bitter, this is the sort of thing that brings a smile to my face. Not that I hate iPhones, of course, or those who wield them. I have an iPod Touch myself, which is currently at an undisclosed location in California, being scrutinized by a team of Apple techno-shamans who, like me, cannot fathom how I managed to brick it while trying to upgrade the firmware to version 3. No, I'd step up to an iPho...