IPhone7 has given me that 'syncing' feeling

I need to pace myself with this as the elephant in the room with Apples announcement a fortnight ago (which we were all aware of beforehand but we chose to ignore like Han Solo being 'killed' off in the new Star Wars) has got me rather annoyed to say the least.

The last few months have not been the best for Apple having just been told they owe ￡13 billion in taxes. I'm sure you shrewd individuals will realise that, that is a lot of money and to put that into perspective that’s more than I earn in a week. Like most Apple and tech enthusiasts I was gripped to the Apple conference where they were announcing their latest products. Now I might be wrong here but I don’t think the iPhone is generally marketed as a diabolical time wasting device with the potential to wreak a grotesque and devastating invasion of your personal privacy. They tend to focus more on all the cool colours it comes in and the fact its smaller than the last one which becomes irrelevant as the first thing you do when you buy it is purchase a case for it.

We also had the second coming of the Apple Watch that they’ve launched- which does everything an iPhone can do, but more expensively and pointlessly, and on a slightly different part of your body. Only an unhealthily devoted Apple fanatic could bear to wear an Apple Watch, and even that poor notional idiot would have to keep putting their iPhone down in order to operate the damn thing. It’ll scarcely be used for telling the time, just as the iPhone is scarcely used for making calls. It’s not a watch. It’s a gaudy wristband aimed at raising awareness of Chinese factory conditions. Alternatively, a handy visual tag that helps con artists instantly identify gullible rich idiots in a crowd or pickpockets to lock on to their next victim

Apple also unveiled the all new bigger iPhone 7 and the all-new even bigger than that Iphone7 Plus, which is the size of the Isle of Man and aimed at people who literally have proverbial and metaphorical deep pockets. By releasing two differently sized rectangles, which in turn don't differ from its previous range of differently sized rectangles, Apple has selfishly exhausted the global supply of differently sized rectangles. From now on, all rectangles, no matter what context they appear in, will have to be the same size. Wars will be fought to decide which dimension becomes the standard. And when mankind finally settles on a compromise, Apple is going to start on ovals.

At least they learned from the launch of the IPhone6 as they had that mishap of that horrific virus that was automatically downloaded on to it- that bloody U2 album. The album, which I haven’t listened to yet, is terrible- even worse than their last one, which I didn’t listen to either. I don’t want to listen to any U2 albums in case I discover I like them, and have to violently reassess my life.

Now while we are on the subject of music, the ‘dumbo in the room’, the removal of the headphone port, the removal of a 138 year old technology. Now Apple are innovative and were the first company to remove the CV Drive from their laptops which analysts said would kill their market share but it didn’t but is this literally a step too far? Having seen the ear buds my first reaction is ‘do they not understand the true purpose of having wires on your headphones’

1.     You don’t lose them as you wrap them round your phone.

2.     It's also a great indication of how pissed off the universe is with you by how badly said earphones get tangled up.

3.     As my other half says they’re an obvious sign that she doesn’t want to talk- actually she does seem to have them in all the time, like literally all the time when I'm with her.

So now, I have to stick two cotton buds in my ear, I also need to take another charger out with me and if I lose one of these cottonbuds AirPods I need to buy two at the uber reasonable price of ￡169. Do the Chinese workers in the Apple factories even make that in a year? For a so called wireless phone there are now more wires than ever before.

But Apple enthusiasts are a little like Donald Trump fans in that they will blindly follow Apple products to the end of the earth even if they release an IPhone with a Mario Run style game but a Chinese Worker Run game which plights the story of said worker in his attempt to not commit suicide at the IPhone factory- they will revel in it.

So this change has allowed Apple to make the new iPhone slimmer and waterproof. Unusually for Apple, with it's control of PR similar to that of North Korea, the iPhone’s details were leaked just before the presentation by way of Amazon.com. Amazon posted its page of iPhone 7 accessories including specs on the phone, and by Apple tweets that appear to have gone out ahead of plans. The presentation lacked Apple’s traditional “one more thing” at the end and did not include news about Apple’s lines of computers or tablets. Shares took a slight tumble and were down 0.23% from the beginning of the day to the end of the presentation.

While consumers will be able to use their old headphones via an adapter, which will come with the new phone, or plug in a new set, the ultimate aim may be to push consumers to snip those tangle-prone wires altogether for a wireless headset – preferably one made by Beats, the company Apple bought for $3bn in 2014. Again those over rated dignity losing bit of hardware but they do have great adverts.

So, just in case you forgot Apple might have started out as an innovative company but they now want to suck more blood out of its consumers than a zombie apocalypse. They shouldn’t even call it a phone; it should be Apples ZombieRectangleEffortToRecuperateOwedTaxMoney or Z-RETROTM which sounds a bit like rectum so it could catch on or just end up as a 'bottom'-less joke.

Still- new watches, new rectangles, new music, new games – these needn’t really affect you if you don’t want them to. But the other new development –the launch of IOS10 is impossible for iPhone users to ignore. It’s curious that we, the users, are supposed to look as if we are eagerly anticipating these operating system updates – a load of digital dogwork Apple nonchalantly drop into our laps on a regular basis.

Updates are awful. All you want to do is watch TV and rot in your own filth. Instead you spend the evening backing up your phone, downloading a gigantic file and sitting around while your phone undergoes an intense psychological makeover, at the end of which it may or may not function. Often, it takes an hour or more. Fiddly, time-consuming admin – it’s like having to change the water in a fish tank. I can’t be arsed- it’s why I don’t have fish anymore. I’d rather let the fish die.

But if I hold out, gradually nothing will work on my existing phone. They’ll freeze me out by degrees. Cut me out of the club. Plus I’ll miss out on great features such as slightly different icons and a terrifying new form of predictive text that precisely mimics the sensation of talking to an idiot who keeps finishing your sentences for you. (Either my thumbs have grown clumsier, or predictive text in general has grown a lot more aggressive recently. I can’t type anything without it continually popping up to blurt random words on my behalf – it’s like being in the Beastie Boys.)

Part of the problem is that smartphones are so horribly addictive, as moreish as smoking. The difference between smartphones and cigarettes is this: a cigarette robs 10 minutes from your lifespan, but at least has the decency to wait and withdraw all that time in bulk as you near the end of your life – whereas a smartphone steals your time in the present moment, by degrees. Five minutes here. Five minutes there. Then you look up and you’re 85 years old.

That little rectangular screen is so hypnotic, so omnipresent, I feel lost and sick the moment mine’s tied up doing something as uninterruptable as an update. While it sits there, blank, progress bar inching along at a snail’s pace, I glance at it nervously, like an owner watching his dog undergo an operation – not out of anything approaching sympathy, but the selfish concern that if it dies, I might not be able to check my email for five minutes. I suppose if I had an Apple watch I could at least fiddle mindlessly with that instead while waiting for the phone to spring back into life. Come to think of it, that’s probably the Watch’s sole purpose. They should market it that way. Winner, winner, IPhone-dinner.

P.S. if you didn’t know that Han Solo get’s killed in the new Star Wars you

·        Deserve to have the film spoilt

·        Live under a bridge

·        Are not human which would be impressive if you are reading this.

·        A fan of TOWIE