In the outer space

This changes everything. Again.

While I was writing this article in the summer of 2010, the mobile telephone operators in Spain were marketing the fourth generation of the iPhone, Apple’s flagship phone. The scenes used for the media launch are now so familiar that the slogan used for the product seems rather ironic: «This changes everything. Again». Yet again, they were huge queues in the stores featured on the TV news, a calculated lack of stock that meant that many people were left without the product, and the resigned indignation of having to pay the telephone companies that managed to turn the act of contracting a new line into a sophisticated form of extortion.