Why I'm not getting new gold iPhone

Why I'm not getting new gold iPhone

SINGAPORE - Someone asked me if I had an iPhone 5s. Without hesitation, I said "yes" with a carefree swagger.

The questions came thick and fast. How did I get one so fast? How did I beat the queues? Did I pay someone to queue for me?

The last question I made up after reading an article about lazy, rich people getting poor, fit people to queue for them at Disneyland.

Apparently, this is a new social phenomenon. It's not.

In Singapore, people have used other people to queue for Hello Kitty dolls for years. They're called parents.

To save time, I simply waved my iPhone in the air to settle the matter. I was then spoken to as though I was a dribbling child spinning around in a circle, shouting "go pee pee, go pee pee".

I was informed in an impatient, patronising tone that I didn't have an iPhone 5s. I had an older, regular iPhone. So I wondered aloud what the difference was between the two phones.

Well, you'd think I'd enquired about the differences between democracy and fascism. Or Justin Bieber and One Direction. Or Rihanna singing live and lip-syncing at the Singapore Grand Prix. You know, the important stuff.

The differences were reeled off, but I fell asleep after the fingerprint reader bit and slipped into a coma soon after.

Apparently, the fingerprint reader is a state-of-the-art security function, which means my wife would have to chop my finger off every time she wanted to call her mother on my phone.

I recognise the security benefits of a fingerprint-activated unlocking system, but at the risk of being flippant, may I ask, if I absent-mindedly leave the new iPhone 5s on a bus and someone comes along and pinches it, how will the fingerprint reader help?

The thief can't use the phone, but neither can I.

It's not as if I can run through the streets with my finger in the air shouting: "Yoo hoo, has anyone seen my phone? It matches this fingerprint."

Such a drastic course of action will not retrieve my phone. It will just scare the general public.

So take away the fingerprint reader and I'm struggling to spot the differences between my older iPhone and the latest whizz-bang product.

And that drives the IT geeks crazy. If you want to irritate these guys - and that's the sole purpose of my existence - just say the following: "So the new iPhone 5s and my iPhone can both make calls. I can send e-mails on both phones. I can watch Miley Cyrus twerking on both phones. Then the phones are exactly the same."

Watch the veins in their foreheads pop.

Just to humour these folks, I'll say that I did consider queuing all night for a phone that is almost identical to the one I have now - apart from the CSI fingerprint thingy - but then I decided to get on with my life.

Of course, I am then accused of overlooking the phone's biggest selling point, its marketing home run, the jewel in its PR crown - this particular iPhone 5s comes in gold.

Now gold has its uses. In the classic James Bond movie Goldfinger, an actress was painted head to toe in gold and she looked extraordinarily sexy.

In The A-Team, Mr T covered himself in gold chains and he looked extraordinarily dumb. In almost every episode, he struggled to outrun the military police with half a jewellery shop around his neck.

But a gold iPhone against your ear is a status symbol apparently. The device supposedly tells people that you're a rich, international jet-setter.

It doesn't. From a distance, it looks like you're wearing a huge gold earring.

When I was growing up, there was a middle-aged barmaid who worked in a fleapit of a pub that my father frequented.

She loved large, tacky, dangly gold earrings. Small children could swing from those earrings.

Now when I see people with those long, gold iPhones next to their ears, I think of that old barmaid winking at me and saying: "When you hit puberty, give me a call."

I'm really not happy about that (I wasn't happy with the puberty line either. She was still using it on me when I was 25).

So I have no intention of spending a small fortune on a phone that does everything my existing phone does apart from the finger-unlocking feature.

(Incidentally which part of my anatomy does Apple think I was using to unlock my phone before? My big toe?)

Nor am I interested in another vulgar, superficial display of materialistic wealth that we seem increasingly obsessed with in Singapore.

And most of all, I'm not going to put anything long and gold against my ear and risk looking like a middle-aged, sex-crazed barmaid.


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