They gather at midnight for their annual ritual. The same group of people crowd around this building year after year to receive their sacred treasure. Some have stayed for days, camping in tents, counting the hours until the relic is unveiled. Crazy cult? More like Apple fanboy. However, at times, worshiping the company’s latest product does seem like a religion.
But religion isn’t something that should be taken lightly. Take the recent riots that tore through the Middle East. Trailers for a movie that negatively portrayed the prophet Muhammad led to numerous riots and the invasions of the U.S. embassies in Egypt and Yemen, eventually climaxing with U.S. Consulate attack in Libya, where four people were killed, including U.S. Ambassador John Christopher Stevens.
We were shocked by these fatally horrific events. We were devastated with what happened, especially considering the root of the conflict involved one person creating an anti-Islamic movie. Most of us thought the rioters were overreacting. A single person’s opinion, we insisted, could not possibly be enough to agitate an entire country. But we are guilty of overreacting like this as well.
While we may not start riots or kill ambassadors, we do have a tendency to overreact all the time. Take the new iPhone for example. Those who receive the token at midnight don’t notice the major improvements over the prior version, but instead criticize its minor issues. Despite its glamorous new features — such as a screen so large that it can hold five rows of apps, which clearly defies the laws of physics — the negatives are always ripped apart and publicized more than its additions.
Take the new Maps app for example. A dispute between Apple and Google has led to the removal of Google Maps from Apple products, forcing Apple to design a replacement GPS system in order to keep the feature available to its users.
But it doesn’t work.
There are glaringly obvious mistakes. Bodies of water are missing. Bridges are absent. It apparently labeled a fast food restaurant as being underwater. But those are just tiny flaws, right? Once you get past those miscues, and the disappearance of some unheard of monument called the Statue of Liberty, it’s a perfect application!
There are plenty of other unpopular features on this new smartphone, but the real problem lies in the fact that the discussions of these issues seem to overshadow the cool new features, such as the expansion of Siri and the incorporation of Facebook.
We may not kill people over the newest smartphone, but we do tend to highlight its mistakes rather than its advances.
So while we often point out the flaws in others for doing what we think is bizarre and crazy, we have to remember that we are often very similar to those we are critical of.
There is clearly a huge difference between poking fun at Apple’s newest Map app and killing an ambassador, but the events are still somewhat similar, even if one is much more extreme than the other. People have a right to get this angry when it comes to an issue so significant.
Who wouldn’t get mad if their favorite McDonald’s was in the middle of the ocean?
