Monday, August 11, 2008

What Does Your iPhone Say About Your Wealth?

From today's New York Times:

Many Fail to See the Humor in ‘I Am Rich’ for the iPhone

Last week, an application turned the iPhone into a megaphone to proclaim: “I Am Rich.” That is the name of a downloadable program that promised to do nothing except signal to the world that its buyer was wealthy enough to have spent $1,000 to download an image of a multifaceted ruby.

Created by a German software developer, Armin Heinrich, it was written pretty much as a joke. “I found that some users complain about prices for iPhone applications above 99 cents,” Mr. Heinrich said. “I regard it as art. I did not expect many people to buy it and did not expect all the fuss about it.”

I thought this was quite amusing. Plenty of people spend lots more than $1,000 for things that have no real purpose other than to signify wealth-- this guy just boiled that down to its essence!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I thought the whole thing was kind of silly but Apple was a bit heavy handed in taking it off. That guy could've made a lot more than he did!

Anonymous said...

It's funny how much publicity this guy is getting for this application. I wonder how much he's sold because of it. I've heard of this stupid application from at least 5 major sources now, haha.

BTW, I tried doing a search for it and it looks like they took it off the Itunes store.

S said...

I must say that the developer of this application demonstrates how people can take advantage of the rich and self-absorbed people in society. He created something that totally targeted that group and he made a small profit on it until someone found a problem with the principle of the application. At least we know Apple has some sort of backbone!

But it is funny that you say how people spend that much, if not more, money on things that signify wealth. This instance it was just captured in the hottest device in the world right now. Society is quite interesting sometimes!

Anonymous said...

I don't see the problem. Doesn't HAVING an iPhone kind of say "I'm rich"? I wouldn't say its removal says Apple has a backbone; it says Apple has no sense of humor!

S said...

The more I see people that have IPhone's, the more I conclude that anyone can get them, regardless of your wealth. This might be a bad comparison, but back in the day, did we consider every kid that had a pair of Nike Air Jordan's rich? Each pair retailed for at least $125 and we are talking about shoes here! Everyone had a pair of J's just like every other person has an IPhone these days.