iFever spreads online

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Ho, ho! The Daily Torygraph reports that…

Apple’s frenzied US launch of the long-awaited iPhone has spread to the internet, where fans are now willing to pay up to four times the retail price.

The iPhone was rolled out across America amidst huge hype on Friday evening, and the devices are now commanding up to $2,000 on eBay.

Americans began queuing for the latest gadget, which combines a mobile phone, music player and web browser in one, up to five days before its launch.

Although Apple has declined to comment on the number of iPhones it sold over the weekend, analysts have estimated that up to 200,000 were sold in the first day…

Hmmm… I just looked on eBay.com and the first iPhone I found was an 8GB model which went for $730 plus $15 for shipping. That doesn’t seem too much of a mark-up for an allegedly ‘frenzied’ market.

Technolust

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This morning’s Observer column…

A new spectre is haunting the planet – technolust. We psychiatrists define it as the self-indulgent craving for attractive gadgets offering at best only marginal improvements over older devices but inducing fleeting, orgasmic, smug superiority in their possessors.

Technolust was thought to afflict only a small minority of the population – generally investment bankers with more money than sense and pony-tailed geeks with neither. But developments in the US have led scientists to fear that the condition is reaching epidemic proportions and affecting people regarded as immune to infection…