Passing on the iPod and Vista

The iPhone goes on sale to the public today and the customers are already queueing up outside AT&T and Apple stores to fork over $500 for the 4GB model and $600 for the 8GB model.
When you figure in the two-year contract and the monthly minimum charges, an iPhone represents a $3,000 commitment. That's a shitload of money for a trendy phone with no track record other than Apple's reputation with computers and iPods.
I like to think of myself as a technologically savvy gadgeteer. My life is full of things that run on chips. My Suunto Advizor watch has more computing power than was avilable onboard any of the Apollo moon missions.
My Treo 700p smartphone is way more powerful than the first PC I owned back in 1991.
But I find myself in the unexpected position of saying no to the two biggest tech products of 2007: the iPhone and Microsoft Vista
I'm won't be an iPhone user for a variety of reasons, chief among them the price and the fact that I have such a long-term commitment to Sprint that it would cost me a fortune to buy out of my contract. There are lots of other reasons like questions about battery life, how scratch/damage-proof the glass screen will be, how hard/easy it will be to type on the touch-sensitive keyboard, and the fact that I like having access to more than 40GB of music and video on my 60GB iPod and would see paring that down to 8GB as a step backward.
My Dell XPS computer, purchased last December, was sold as Vista-ready and I got the Vista installation disc shortly after the new operating system was released.
But I listen to Leo Laporte and other tech experts enough to conclude that there are no compelling reasons for me to switch to Vista.
I've seen it in stores and it's pretty, and it supposedly is more secure.
But on the downside, it's a memory hog. If I choose to run Vista with all of the pretty bells and whistles, I will probably need to add at least one more GB of RAM and still should expect most applications to run slower than they do with XP.
And my Nikon Coolpix IV ED negative/slide scanner won't work with Vista because Nikon has yet to write a Vista driver for it.
Here's the most recent word from Nikon, posted to their nikonusa.com website on June 11:
We are currently looking into compatibility for the following models.
SUPER COOLSCAN 9000ED, SUPER COOLSCAN 8000ED, SUPER COOLSCAN 5000ED,
SUPER COOLSCAN 4000ED, COOLSCAN V ED, COOLSCAN IV ED
So why would I want to change to an OS that runs slower and takes away my ability to digitize negatives and slides?
It's not much of surprise that a lot of folks are asking Dell to offer buyers a choice of XP or Vista on new computers. Dell has already taken the remarkable step of offering Linux Ubuntu as an optional operating system, so it looks like they pay attention to what the marketplace wants. And it looks like the marketplace is not that impressed with Visa.