I should have trusted my instincts. I knew the iPhone wasn’t going to turn water into wine or cause AAPL to double and split overnight — and really, I figured the week after the iPhone would be a great time to buy once everyone realized it was iMediocre. Nevertheless, I didn’t want to be left out in the cold and decided to think long term, so I bought a metric butt-ton of AAPL, back when it was worth $2 more than it is today. Hooray, net loss.

Would you people go out and buy more iPhones already???

Oh wait. Maybe you just don’t want to take it up the iButt like Josh and his iBrick and countless other unhappy customers. The short version: the iPhones apparently work great and are in fact quite amazing (I was particularly impressed with how it survived immediate punishment quite unharmed), but they won’t do a damn thing until they’ve been activated with AT&T cellular service. No music, no calendar, no surfing the net on WiFi, nothing.

Steve Jobs showed us the iPhone at WWDC and said this was a new iPod; he lied, it’s not. He said this was a revolutionary internet device; he lied, it’s not. iPods play music as soon as you buy them. Internet tablets can connect to WiFi as soon as it sniffs one out. In reality, the iPhone is yet another symbol of the rape of the American consumer by a plutocratic oligopoly of the big cellular providers. Oh, people were so excited about the prospects of Steve Jobs and his miracle phone changing the way the wireless business worked, forcing AT&T to give us a list of voicemails, freeing iTunes users from overpriced carrier-controlled music downloads, and bringing mobile handset WiFi to the ($500-to-spare) masses.

But in the end, Steve Jobs bent us all over to take it up the collective keister by allowing AT&T to hobble his saviorPhone so that without an AT&T contract, it doesn’t do a damn thing. So much for changing the industry, Steve, you gutless snake oil salesman.

When Steve Garfield popped through town with his Nokia N95, I asked him what carrier he was using so I’d know what I’d be switching to in order to have such a fine toy. He said he didn’t actually have phone service on his phone. He was basically carrying around a digital camera with built-in WiFi for uploading his pictures and videos to the net, and a PDA with built-in bluetooth to keep his contacts and appointments synched with his computer. He didn’t have to be anyone’s bitch to get 90% of the functionality out of his multi-function device, and even without a wireless carrier (AT&T and T-Mo are your choices for this baby), I’d still shell out $750 for such a fancy toy, because frankly I don’t like talking to people that much anyway.

I hope a lot of iPhone owners don’t like talking to people, either, ’cause thanks to Steve Jobs and AT&T, they can’t.



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