Recycling

I had planned to sit out this cycle of iPhone — no, really. I really did. But then, there came an opportunity that persuaded me otherwise.

My seven-year-old has an iPod Touch (his beloved iPod Touch) that he's been using for some time now. It doesn't have a built-in microphone, so I bought a little device (about the size of a push-pin) to serve that purpose. And it works, but it plugs into the earphone jack to do it, which means that the sound is switched off when he uses it, which means he can't use applications like, say, Talking Carl.

That, and he really doesn't have enough storage space. (He was six years old when I bought this — I thought 8 GB would be more than enough.)

So I came up with this brilliant, persuade-my-wife idea: we could wait for Christmas, and hope for a new iPod Touch with a built-in microphone (which seems just about inevitable, though there's no guarantee), or — here's the brilliant part — if I were to buy a new iPhone, I could give him my older model. He gets a built-in microphone, he even gets a built-in camera, and twice the storage space.

I could sell it (I've done that twice before), and make enough money to cover the costs of a new iPod Touch — and then some! — but then, there's still no guarantee that the kind of iPod we want will be coming. (And it's much easier this way.)

She agreed that this was a good idea (even better, it could be in time for my son's birthday, in August). So I'm getting a new iPhone, after all.

I was expecting to have to go stand in a long, long line, as I had the last two years. But June 24 (the date the new iPhone was to go on sale) would be the last day of school, with dismissal at 9:30 AM. So if I were to wait in line, I'd have a seven-year-old with me, with all the patience of, well, a seven-year-old. (It's just as well I didn't — the lines at most Apple retail stores this morning have been, according to many reports, completely ridiculous.)

Thankfully, it turned out Apple would be offering pre-orders again this time. (I actually complained politely about this last year, and I'm pleased that it might have had some effect.) So I'll preorder the week-or-so before, sit back, and just wait for FedEx to arrive.

That seemed like a perfectly reasonable option. But then, everyone else had the same idea. It took all day, off and on, to successfully place an order. And just in time, too. Not too long after that, advance orders were expected to ship in the beginning of July. (Not too long after that, they were shipping in mid-July.)

The new iPhone arrived yesterday, a day early.