by Evan James

Apparently it is no longer possible to watch even two hours of vitally important teen television dramas on the CW without being bombarded by iPhone commercials, all of which are set to cutting edge music that signals in an increasingly smug way just how thoroughly Apple knows what you think is cool, sometimes even before you do. If you haven’t seen the newest batch of these commercials yet, all of which revolve around “solving life’s dilemmas,” their neurotic, self-satisfied, bugaboo-conjuring voiceovers go a little something like this:

I. The “What’s That Strange Music?” Dilemma

You know when you don’t know what song is playing, and it’s driving you crazy? With the Shazam app from the app store, you just hold your phone up to the song like a strung-out control freak every time you hear a sound you don’t recognize. Your heart will race as every passing note plunges you deeper into a paroxysm of hellish musical ambiguity, and in seconds, you’ll know who sings it, where to get it, and whether or not it actually qualifies as music under our authority, all while speeding down the highway at seventy miles per hour.

That’s the iPhone: saving you from three minutes of the unknown, one app at a time.

II. The Restaurant Roulette Dilemma

You know that age-old dilemma: where shall we eat tonight? With the Urbanspoon app from the app store, you can spend the next five minutes standing on the street corner fondling your phone, finding restaurants that are across the street from you. Instead of asking somebody, planning ahead, or taking the enormous risk of wandering into a nearby restaurant, you can shake your phone like a maniac until it tells you where to go, how to get there, and whether to order the pork chop or the steak. Yeah, that sounds good.

That’s the iPhone: showing you who wears the pants in the family, one app at a time.