I’m slowly turning to the dark side.
I’m slowly starting to develop an Anti-America view point. Don’t worry, I’m not going to start bombing anything or doing anything that would be concider ‘evil’. I’m just not very happy with the general public and corporate image of the USA right now.
I know most of the reader ship of my comics is Americans and by no way take this personally, But this rant must be made…
Here’s the story. Earlier this year, I bought an iphone. I know there are some anti-iphone people out there, and it’s your opinion. I complete enjoy my iphone more then any cell phone I’ve had to date. I can check my emails, comics, watch movies, watch TV, listen to music, listen to audio books on long drives, I can play games to occupy myself when I am no where, have information on a moment notice, oh, yea… and it even makes phone calls.
The only thing I didn’t like about it was its screen was smaller then I’d prefer, and it wasn’t very useful for reading newspapers or books. You can do all of that, but it’s not so great for it. So I started looking into purchasing a Kindle for reading my books and uploading my manual materials. Then I heard about ‘IT’. What ‘IT’ you may ask, I found out Apple was releasing its answer to Kindle, aka an Ipad…
Overjoyed that my favourite little device was getting a big brother, I like most of the world anciently awaited its release. And when it came out, I waited a bit longer to see what reviews it would stack up before purchasing one.
Well, living in Canada (by the way, if you didn’t know, I am Canadian. A real one, not a American who wears a Canadian flag when he travels aboard. Which you should all stop doing BTW. We worked hard to establish a good international reputation. But I’m not going to get into THAT right now) Apple wasn’t going to release the Ipad in Canada till late April… ok… I can wait. So I did… I patently waited till I found out that Apple was going to delay it’s realise of Ipad to Canada by a month. Why might you ask… US demand was so high that Apple couldn’t keep up with it, and there for decided not to ship out it’s foreign supply, but sell them domestically instead.
ARRRRGGGG!!!!!!!
So this weekend I went to a conference in London, Ontario and I figured, hey Buffalo New York has an Istore. I could jump over the border, purchase an Ipad and pop back over and then continue on my way home. Sure it would cost more with the exchange rate, duty and paying taxes in the States and Canada… but hey… I’ll be getting an Ipad when I originally planned to get one, instead of waiting a extra month for. So that’s what I did. I went over, made sure to ask the sale’s rep all the questions I had (which I suspected he lied on a couple of them, which guess what, he did), I happily listened to his sales pitches trying to get me to buy things I wasn’t at all interested in and then I bought an Ipad with 1/2 the hard drive size I wanted (because the 64 Gig Ipads were sold out….gggrrrr….).
I jumped in my car and drove back into Canada, and the 6 hours home, all the while looking forward to trying my new ipad.
I finally arrived home, plugged the ipad into the computer to activate it (Which is another thing that bugs me… why can’t you just buy it and it starts up like it should. Why do I always need itunes to activate these things?)
Happily it worked. Unfortunely, since I’m Canadian, and my accounts with Istore and banking accounts, and everything else is Canadian, I CAN’T DOWNLOAD ANY OF THE APPS FOR THE IPAD. IT WON’T EVEN LET ME DOWNLOAD THE FREE ONES! Since the Ipad hasn’t been realised in Canada, they refuse to let you download apps for it. I attempted to change and even make a American account, but no dice.
So till Ipad’s are released in Canada, I have to use the default applications and/or my Iphone apps(which really don’t look too good on the ipad.)
All because the populist of the good old United States of America won’t let other countries have some fun!
Ggggrrrr….
As I said, I’m not trying to offend any of my american readers, but this whole experence hasn’t help me get a touchy feely feeling of the states… AAARRRGGG!!!!!!
Aw, that sucks. 🙁
I’m American and I don’t really use iPhones, but I know the feeling. My brother went nuts when he was waiting for SSM: Melee to be released in America and the date kept getting pushed back.
I suspect that if we were able to see physical representations of the logic and lines of reasoning that companies use for releasing stuff into other countries, it would look like a mess of rat tails (or the wires to my N64 controllers ^^; )
Aw. 🙁 I’m sorry, CD. Yeah, the whole deal with regional encoding is ludicrous, I think, but…this is a corporate thing, not -just- the U.S.
Still America enabled you to -get- your currently-useless iPad, didn’t it? ^_^
thanks, I know it was a corprate disission. It still bites though.
I believe it was the North Americian Free Trade Agreement that allowed me to get it. Though the ‘FREE’ trade seems to be anything BUT free… It cost me $82 extra in duties and taxes to take it over the border.
Sorry to hear that, CD.
Yeah, the corporate decisions American companies make oftentimes suck. And I, as an American, should know. But at least we’ve got it better than other countries full of corruption and bribery.
Just addressing the Americans-flying-with-a-Canadian-flag thing (my view): yes, a good portion of the world doesn’t like us that much, but if you’re ashamed to acknowledge your home country while in a foreign country, you may as well leave for good. We’re not perfect, but this is my home, and I’m proud of it.
I too am sorry for what happened CD … Canada is a great place … almost went there last summer … I was driving in NY and took the wrong turn and blundered into the border crossing … talk about storm troupers.
I do hope all works out for you
Yeah the region locking stuff is all super-annoying, and ultimately just ends up getting in the way more than serving a useful purpose.
It isn’t just American though; have a look at all the Japanese game consoles. Pretty much every one is region locked in some silly way just to “prevent piracy” – which it has never seriously impeded, much less stopped. The real reason was always to allow for price discrimination; Americans, Japanese, Canadians, etc all get to pay about 8 times as much as everyone else.
Hi check this blog abour oil crisis See You