iPhone users are delusional, consultants say
Many people I know are frightfully attached to their iPhones. They treat them as if they were a peculiar and exotic lover, one they can hardly believe they have managed to seduce.
The finely calibrated minds at Strand Consult have taken this analysis to a particularly simple conclusion: iPhone users are, the consultants say, really quite nuts.
The Strand thinkers released an opinion entitled “How will psychologists describe the iPhone syndrome in the future?.” It focuses on the sorts of people who buy into Apple’s great success.
Here’s a flavor of the somewhat-skeptical nature of Strand’s feelings: “Apple has launched a beautiful phone with a fantastic user interface that has had a number of technological shortcomings that many iPhone users have accepted and defended, despite those shortcomings resulting in limitations in iPhone users’ daily lives.”
The consultants’ likening of iPhone buyers to kidnapped hostages may raise more than the eyebrows of many an Apple fanboy (fanperson?). Indeed, it already has the Mac world aflutter.
“When we examine the iPhone users’ arguments defending the iPhone, it reminds us of the famous Stockholm Syndrome–a term invented by psychologists after a hostage drama in Stockholm. Here, hostages reacted to the psychological pressure they were experiencing by defending the people that had held them hostage for six days,” Strand declared.
The implication is surely that Apple has mugged millions of people with its beauty, dragged them off to a very dark cellar in some barren land, turned them into slightly bonkers Barbarellas, and then recruited them as soldiers for the cause.
This is the sort of thing of which the Church of Scientology is normally accused. But for some strange reason, it’s a rather chilling but pleasant shower to read something that isn’t mere worship.
Strand claims that it closely analyzes the financials of mobile operators. And if you also happen to order its wonderfully free report “The Moment of Truth, a portrait of the iPhone,” you will discover the 10 great myths about the iPhone. Here are just two: it doesn’t attract new business for operators, and it is not a technologically advanced mobile phone.
I know you’ll be rushing to read these fine tracts, and I feel sure that a couple of you might wish to drop Strand Consult a note. To encourage you a little, I’ll warn you that Strand also seems to believe that some of you Apple customers are, well, liars.
The consultants put it quite sweetly: “In reality, the iPhone is surrounded by a multitude of people, media, and companies that are happy to bend the truth to defend the product they have purchased from Apple.”
Apple customers are liars? The media too? Surely not.