It Currently Requires a Small Amount of Patience to Buy a New iPhone ⇥ vice.com

Jason Koebler, in a Vice article bizarrely titled “It Is Currently Impossible to Exchange Money for an iPhone”. It’s bizarre because millions of people in the United States and around the world are buying new iPhones, often in exchange for money. But Koebler can’t buy a new iPhone — though, reading this, you’d imagine that it’s the last thing he wants to do:

I think that buying a new phone is a shameful but occasionally necessary activity to continue living in the modern world. I disagree with most of Apple’s corporate philosophies on recycling, repair, and its walled-garden, monopolistic approach to the App Store. I do not like spending time in Apple Stores, nor do I like giving the company money, but I appreciate Apple’s commitment to privacy and security, and my current phone is more than three years old, has been repaired three times, and no longer takes photos or connects to WiFi. It is, unfortunately, Time for a New Phone.

This is a weird way for one to convince themselves that they are not actually excited by technology and are resigned to the fact that they must exchange money for goods and services. I can imagine Koebler standing in a long line for brunch on a Sunday morning trying to convince himself that it’s an infuriating rip-off to pay twenty dollars for a halved English muffin with two poached eggs and some hollandaise overtop; and, instead of admitting that, yeah, it is actually kind of nice to indulge in this modicum of expensive joy every once in a while, he bashes out an article with the headline “It Is Currently Impossible to Exchange Money for Breakfast”.

Anyway:

The problem is that, at the moment, it is nearly impossible to exchange US currency for an iPhone 11 Pro.

Well that certainly narrows the vast scope that the headline suggests.

256GB iPhone 11 Pros (the objectively correct phone to buy, if you are going to buy a new iPhone) don’t ship until the end of the month if you order one online, and they’re sold out in stores all over the country according to the company’s website.

Oh, so it’s still not impossible, it just takes a couple of weeks? And this staggering level of impatience for a new product — that is, apparently, a reluctant purchase — is being displayed by the same guy who wrote and linked to an article in the previous paragraph about how you shouldn’t buy a new iPhone unless your old one is completely broken.

It’s fine to admit you like stuff and are excited by new things — even things from Apple. Nothing bad will happen to you; you will not be stuffed into a cannon and fired into the cloud hanging over Cupertino made of Steve Jobs’ reality distortion field.