Some list posts range over abstractions: best phones, coolest laptops, mean-spirited gifts, not this one.
This concerns a single, precise class of item. Everything here is a crap gadget with diamonds glued on it. Not gold. Not wood. Not the crushed glass sold to idiots as "Swarovski crystals." Diamonds.
Yes, you know. The abundant stones that would be as worthless as other gemstones were their extraction and trade not controlled by a monopolistic cartel.
This concerns a single, precise class of item. Everything here is a crap gadget with diamonds glued on it. Not gold. Not wood. Not the crushed glass sold to idiots as "Swarovski crystals." Diamonds.
Yes, you know. The abundant stones that would be as worthless as other gemstones were their extraction and trade not controlled by a monopolistic cartel.
Resembling an art deco dildo, the Vertu's trashy exterior conceals a phone so ordinary a Motorola executive teleported from the mid-1990s might wonder if it was next year's Startac.
"Featuring" 644 white diamonds and 428 black diamonds for a grand total of 1,072 diamonds, this Vertu costs something north of $80,000.
But not at resale.
The World's Most Expensive Computer Mouse
The most remarkable thing about the $24,180 "scattered diamond" is what obvious junk the underlying mouse is. Looking like an escapee from one of those 1980s Soviet labs where they tried to clone western technology, it has all the style and ergonomic quality of a plastic briefcase.
But no, this one has a "constellation" of 59 diamonds sprinkled to "bring color into office life and make working truly fun!" They'll also arrange the rocks into a monograph, if you want to make it even more worthless when you need to get rid of it.
24kt Gold and Diamonds Macbook Pro
If it appears at first blush that our "only diamonds" rule has been broken, fear not. It is not Computer Choppers' MacBook Pro that we are interested in here, but something that sits upon it. Yes, the Apple logo.
There's something delicious about that totem of minimalism being slathered in ostentation. But wallowing in shadenfreude is useless. In the context of good taste, if in few others, Cupertino is a house of angels.
On the bright side, these diamonds take a crap gadget — the thing merely glows — and manage to interfere with even that limited utility. Well done, Computer Choppers!
Diamond USB Cross Thumbdrive
There is no gadget more banal or commonplace than the USB thumbdrive. There's also no shortage of examples dunked in superglue and battered with carbon. It is a relish tray of rot.
It is the sickly addition of religion in this cross-shaped one, however, that sinks it beneath the crowd. Bravo! That it's handcrafted from mahogany trees in the developing world is a deliciously cruel bonus.
Bejeweled Gameboy
Swiss Supply is a true believer in trash, having made only the most cursory effort to integrate diamonds into its remarkably low-end selection of toy: Nintendo's original Gameboy.
While I am again loathe to carry gold into the geode, it's hard to resist in this case. The creators of the $25k Gameboy not only dunked the thing, but elected to press a texture in it. Why? So that it would more closely resemble one of those cheap cigarette lighters they used to sell in gas stations in the 1970s.
Diamond MP3 Player For Dogs
That the JooZoo MP3 player is cheap junk stamped with a few useless rocks becomes triplydamn. Thirdly, it's marketed as responding psychically to their moods. eyetwitching due to the spin. Firstly, there is the fact that it exists at all. Secondly, it's intended for an animal that doesn't give a
For lacing their copy with pseudoscientific blather like "JooZoo encourages physical movement or increases blood flow rate by sound wave stimulation," the thing's creators should be packed off to mine Diamonds with their bare hands.
Apple's least desirable product this side of the new millennium gets a $40,000 boost courtesy of chubby graphite. What's to say? Nothing. Pure, distilled tack.
Oh, and yes, they called it the iDiamond. Imaginative, huh?
The Million-Dollar Cellphone
Looking more like a medieval relic than a phone, the so-called "million dollar cellphone," by Goldvish, is so heavily coated in the things that it hardly looks like technology at all. If it were crafted as a trinket for a meso-american king to hurl into a lake, at least it might have slowly unraveled under the pressure of centuries of deep water, returning the stones to the earth.
As it is, however, we know that this revolting carbon banana is out there, somewhere, existing. If the only thing it has to cope with is air, it might well outlive humanity itself, so densely is it shielded.
Do you want this to be all that the aliens find amid the radioactive decay, thousands of years hence? Do you? Destroy it now, before it has a chance to diminish the intergalactic caliber of Earth's future ruins.
High Concept Card
If you think the diamond-studding enterprise couldn't be executed with less subtlety than a million-dollar telephone, you'd be wrong. Behold GK Power Bank's diamond-studded credit card. It is a monument to the uncouth and the philistine. It is a simple ontological fact that nothing sleazier can be.
The marketing is pure class war, describing the card's very purpose as to allow easy "differentiation" between those with real money and those without—a silken ruff in an era that lacks such convenient status indicators. It is needed because the most common spending method, credit cards, are available to the general public and provide no "upgrade" path for the "uber-rich."
There's a truism well-expressed in Austen's novels: the only people who display wealth are those with less of it than the people they wish to emulate.
Dishonorable Mention: Nokia N95
Nokia's N95 is not at all crap. It is excellent. Encrusted in a thick snot of cultured diamonds and given a $24,000 price tag, however, even the most capable and well-made technology loses its shine, even as it gains its sparkle. The incongruity of the addition is a reminder of its purposelessness.
Diamonds are not forever. Given enough time, they revert to graphite. Diamonds are not rare, either: they are abundant, and lab-made rocks can't be distinguished from natural examples without the help of specialized equipment. The apparent value of this valueless stone is all in our heads — it is expensive because the cartel that controls its sale, DeBeers, says so.
In other words, don't spill bullshit in your geek. The tech industry creates quite enough of its own.