iPhone4

[Nessus]

Is stupid really stupid, or are you really smart?
That's how you stole my heart

Who-o-ah, I'm with stupid!

[RandBlade]

BUMP. Am surprised nobody replied with a serious suggestion of xyz smartphone is better than the iPhone4 because ...

When the power goes out, for a decade or more, he'll wish he had those matches. And tomatoes. Fuckin' loser bitch.

Seriously? What box of matches do you carry around that would last you a decade or more? As for tomatoes - I don't think they'll be particularly fresh after a week (or any left), I'd hate to imagine how rotten 10 year old tomatoes would be. The very thought makes your suggestion patently absurd.

As I said in another thread, I read Lucifer's Hammer at an impressionable age. I often wonder if I'll make it when the power goes out. Interestingly it DID go out for an extended period, over the entire North East of the US, some time ago - summer of 2003 iirc. That was fucked up. The pumps stopped so there was no water and you couldn't even fill up your gas tank to take your car somewhere else. If the power had stayed out much longer, things would have got ugly real quick. As it was, I was quite proud there was no looting or other violence.

Also, I've always been fond of the "If you were stranded on a deserted island, what would you want with your..." or the odd "...you're stranded in the Canadian Wilderness after a plane crash with the following items..." team building exercise. I also do a lot of back country camping so I've given a lot of thought to what you need and don't need to carry on your back. Fun stuff.

Fun, yes. Serious - no.

Seriously, we have power. We have food. I can get light not from a match but from a switch. I've attempted growing tomato plants in the garden - but for fun, not for necessity. If I need a tomato I go to ASDA - or I'd go to WalMart in America.

Nobody needs an iPhone, they just want/have them.

Surely you covered needs/wants in grade school Rand

Indeed I did, and I prefer Maslow's hierarchy of needs to any survivalist dogma. While Maslow's pyramid is simplistic, I have my basic physiological needs met already which means my needs are higher up. Yes, I need a smartphone. If they didn't exist, I could do without, but they do and I couldn't do my job as well without one as I can do it with. Try saying you don't need the internet to a businessman nowadays and that absurdity is why the idea of me not having a smartphone any more is equally absurd. I work on my phone on a daily basis and am "on call" literally 24/7.

I am responsible for 7 businesses and I can on my phone at any time see all vital statistics for all 7. How many people are on the clock, of what types, what the labour expenditure is, what our sales currently are, how that compares against the same day last week/year, how we're doing week-to-date, again vs last week/year. How many customers we have yet to serve, how much we still need to do to serve them, what our service stats are like today and in the last half hour. If one location is struggling I can send help from another, if labour's out of control one phone call can bring it down. Even down to how many phone lines are currently engaged. Etc, etc, etc - with this I can macro-manage the business from wherever I am, making bottom-line differences of hundreds or thousands of pounds difference. All on my phone. Just as importantly everybody knows all this data is a fingertip away. Compared to 5 years ago when we didn't have this data available 24/7 sales are up, service is better, labour is down - everything is improved because Big Brother is never far away.

Making a profit - is that a business need?

[EyeKhan]

Seriously? What box of matches do you carry around that would last you a decade or more? As for tomatoes - I don't think they'll be particularly fresh after a week (or any left), I'd hate to imagine how rotten 10 year old tomatoes would be. The very thought makes your suggestion patently absurd.
Fun, yes. Serious - no.

Matches and tomatoes is just a metaphor for the most basic things one would need to survive if our thin veil of civilization were scratched off by some big disaster. Don't take it so literally. And arn't you repeating yourself or something?

Also - I've seen photo and video on the new iPhone's high definition screen and its very impressive. I've never seen anything look that good on a mobile device.