As a teenager, my friend Jennifer used to sneak into her mother’s room after bedtime and steal the phone. She would call the boy she was dating, or “going with,” or whatever we called it back then, and they would talk all night, sometimes till 4 a.m.
But something shifted a few years ago. She became afraid of talking on the phone. Just hearing it ring could provoke panic. Maybe it was the suffocation of carrying her cellphone all day long. (“There are these tentacles in you all the time,” she said.) But she rarely answered the phone, preferring to text message, and the voice mail piled up like unopened bills dumped in a desk drawer – frightening and unknown and ever present — until she couldn’t bear it anymore, and in a rush of guilt she would delete dozens of messages that had been left for her without even listening to them.
Sometimes she would text the person to find out what they needed: “Sorry I missed your call,” she would type, although technically she wasn’t, and technically she hadn’t. Instead, like so many people I know, she had simply stopped using her phone for the one purpose Edison intended: to speak to another person.
Jennifer calls this “telephobia,” and whenever she mentions it, friends nod in vigorous empathy: I have that. Me too. But “telephobia” is not quite accurate, because the truth is that most of us, Jennifer included, covet and depend on our telephones in a way that was unfathomable to previous generations, burdened by such clunky accouterments as Samsung video recorders and leather Day Runners big as a phone book. (Dang, phone books: Remember those?)
Instead, our phones have become so powerful, and so enmeshed in our lives, that a whole genre of journalism has sprung up around our thorny relationship to them: People who can’t break away from their cellphones for a mere conversation; people who rediscover the joy of life only after chucking them. Our phones are a 24/7 carnival of distraction – Facebook, Twitter, texting, Words With Friends – and the temptation to lose yourself, to become overwhelmed by the demands of a portable fun factory is an American experience currently being hammered out in a thousand trend stories (this one included).
People talk about how tough earlier generations had it, and I for one have no clue how to plow a field. But challenges simply mutate according to the demands of the day. I may be worthless with crop rotation, but I’d like to see a pioneer woman take a left-hand turn at a busy intersection while reading a suggestive text from the guy who is currently making her heart pound. Or, because we all know that’s a terrible idea, I would like to see her take that left turn and not read that text message from the guy. The internal fortitude it requires not to cave in to these seductions on a minute-to-minute basis? Massive.
But this is a story about talking on the phone, and why so many of us stopped doing it. It’s not news that this happened. A December 2011 Nielsen study on mobile media usage shows that voice calls have dipped 12 percent since 2009, while text messaging has exploded in the same time period, even tripling in volume among teens. When I asked friends whether they felt anxiety about talking on the phone, the response was more of a confused look: Why would I talk on the phone? A great 2011 New York Times Styles story by Pamela Paul talked about this shift, how much easier it was to punt our daily communication over to text and email, where we could fiddle with the knobs at our convenience, leaving a trail of evidence as to what we agreed upon and when. Even Miss Manners declared that the old-fashioned phone call was, well, kind of rude.
What I wish I heard more in all these stories about how we communicate — whether it’s about the death of voice mail, or whether or not Facebook is destroying our humanity — is the fact that it’s just plain scary to talk to other people. We avoid it not because people don’t matter — but because they do. And each of us brings emotional baggage to these interactions. When my phone rings, and I don’t recognize that number – forget it. I’m too scarred by the years I spent dodging credit card companies to take that kind of dare. I also don’t jump off cliffs, or do cartwheels on the highway. In fact, it’s amazing to me that there was a time when the phone rang, and someone just answered it. Who could it be? Could it be the guy who was currently making your heart pound? Oooh, let’s pick it up and find out! Now, when I see an unfamiliar number, I feel nothing but outrage: How the hell did someone in the 405 area code get this number? What could they possibly want?
Our social expectations evolve. After all, there was a time when door-to-door salesmen made the rounds in every neighborhood, but if anyone rang the doorbell in my New York apartment, I would cower like I’d seen a masked man outside wielding a crowbar. That’s just the moment we’re living in. We make ourselves wildly available online – dangerously available, some would say – and in real life, we are way more defended. Celebrities pay publicists hefty salaries to control their image, and then jump on Twitter and tippy-type away. Surely it won’t always be like this.
But we have so many alternatives for communication that agreeing on one dominant form is simply not necessary. A lot of people I spoke with despise the phone, and have for a long time. Why would they use it if they didn’t have to? “I’m pretty much always better in written communication than spoken,” a male friend told me via Gchat, where our conversations can thread throughout an entire workday, flaring up for 10 minutes at noon only to pick up steam again at 5 p.m. He adores instant message. “You don’t have to worry about interrupting the other person. You don’t have to listen to the other person while also trying to think of what you want to say. If the other person is telling a long, boring story, you can just let them tell it.”
A voice call, on the other hand, demands too much attention from him while offering not enough in return. No visual stimulation. Even a casual silence “can feel like a thousand deaths.” Not to mention crappy reception. As phones all go digital, the warmth of a land line has been replaced by an irritating buzzmuffle that requires constant affirmation. Can you hear me? Are you there?
Still, I was taken aback by the vitriol some friends have for talking on the telephone. “I really, really hate it,” a friend said over email, which is how she and I often have deep conversations. “Maybe it’s that there are too many distractions (TV, folding laundry) and I am guilty of giving in to them OR it’s that I can hear the other person doing the same thing. There just never seems to be a good time to sit down and speak into the void.”
Another friend complained that chatting on her iPhone was like “cradling a brick to my ear.”
And don’t even get people started on voice mail. Everyone detests it. “I cannot handle how uncomfortable it makes me,” said a friend, who is the kind of extrovert who can join any conversation. “There is an intimacy that seems too great, like a song that was written just for me.”
At a time when devices keep us at arms’ length, phone calls rocket the voice straight into the ear. It’s a revealing way to communicate. “The telephone conversation is one that really exposes nuances of meaning,” says Edward Tenner, a visiting scholar in the Rutgers School of Communication and Information, who is also the author of “Our Own Devices.” “So much of language is not just the words as they might appear but the inflection or accent, the deciphering of sarcasm.” Tenner and I spoke by phone, naturally, where the land line he used was nearly decadent in its clarity. I felt, at times, like he was in the room with me. “People have become much more guarded about their public persona,” he continued. “They will manage it on social media and dating sites. They will present carefully tailored pictures. When they’re in an actual conversation, there’s more revelation than they’re comfortable with.”
But that’s different from not wanting to converse at all. In fact, what I heard in these conversations was not a retreat from connectedness but a desire to do it better, to play to one’s own strengths. I happen to love long conversations on the telephone, probably because I think I’m pretty great at it – I’m highly verbal, thrilled by the joust and parry of a good debate, and the pure audio allows me to stop worrying about stupid stuff like how I look in this dress, and what your eyes are staring at right now OMG there is something in my nose. Because my closest friends are scattered across the country, I make regular phone dates that I treat like actual dates. That’s not to say I play Barry White and sprinkle rose petals on the bed (though, sure, when the mood strikes), but I do commit to offering that person my full attention for an hour, or an evening, or until the batteries on our phones go dead. A phone call offers a connection you can’t get anywhere else — not from a text, or email, or Gchat. Not even from a face-to-face conversation.
Then again, I also understand my friend Jennifer’s irrational fears of the phone. How do you say no to someone on the other end? How do you untangle yourself from an awkward conversation? Avoiding those messy, human questions can be awful tempting. But Jennifer found her anxiety, or her “telephobia,” or whatever we’re calling it was getting in the way of her life. “I was not available for people,” she says, “and that bothered me a lot.”
So she made a resolution to call a friend every weekday for a month. They didn’t always have long conversations. Often they were quite short. She says it was nothing short of amazing, though. I don’t want to pretend that Jennifer made a few phone calls and, poof, her life changed. But I also don’t want to undersell how transformative it can be to stare down a real, live fear and slay that sucker. In her month of voice calls, Jennifer grew a little closer to people in her life, but she also grew a little closer to the person she wants to be, who is not someone ducking into the closet whenever the phone rings.
The tricky thing about technology is letting it work for you, but not letting it do all the work. Otherwise, you don’t grow. Personally, I hope in the future we have robots that can do difficult things, like standing in line at the DMV or waiting for a text message from the guy who is currently making your heart pound. Until then, I have my friends to help. I can call Jennifer – and I know she’ll pick up.
Last Saturday night at 10 p.m., I parked my car in the driveway, hustled myself inside as it began to rain, and locked the door behind me when I realized: I did not have my iPhone.
So weird. I’d just had it, like, 10 minutes ago, when I checked my voicemail at a friend’s place. I started to call her to ask if it was lying around, which is when I realized: Not having an iPhone means you can’t actually use your iPhone.
That night, even as rain pelted the windows, my home felt eerily silent. Like so many people, I do not have a separate landline, and I do not have cable TV. Without that small and all-powerful device within arm’s reach, I was in exile. Typing emails on my laptop (because I still had wireless) seemed a bit like scribbling on parchment in the amber glow of an oil lantern. I would send the emails and receive nothing in response. Gah, is this thing even on???
The next morning, I walked out to the car to head to my friend’s house when I discovered where my iPhone had been all night — lying face-up on the driveway, inches from the driver-side door of my car, water still pooled on its black screen.
An iPhone suicide.
I thought I could save it. A friend who once dropped his iPhone in the sink told me rice sucked out the moisture, though it could take a while. I cradled the little guy in my hands and rushed it to the ICU of my kitchen, where I nestled it in a bowl filled with brown rice. (Nice to know that brown rice was good for something.) As the days passed, it languished, unblinking, in its starchy bed — and my life without an iPhone began.
This is not one of those uplifting stories in which the author disconnects from technology but finds meaningful connection with the people in her real life. I’m not all that addicted to my iPhone, and it has never deterred me from long, deep conversations with other humans. This is also not one of those screeds wherein I tell you what a hideous, overhyped device the iPhone is. To be honest, I think the iPhone is the single greatest piece of equipment I have ever owned, and though I was reluctant to buy one, it took mere minutes to determine that I held in my hands the stuff of which history was made. No, this is a story about giving up an iPhone — or trying to, anyway — because the cost of keeping one had just become too high. That was my problem: I loved my iPhone, but I could no longer afford it. It was too much phone for me. I was like one of those homeowners sinking into debt, realizing too late they are heaping money into a sinkhole to pay for a life beyond their reach.
This is about my iPhone foreclosure. It didn’t exactly go as planned.
It made sense, in 2008, for me to buy an iPhone. I was an editor who needed to check email often during the day and work on-the-go. I liked the way the iPhone looked, and what it said about me. It telegraphed to strangers that I was tech-savvy and fashionable and high-powered (though I was none of those things). But if I’m honest, I was also afraid of slipping into irrelevance. There is an anxiety in this hyper-connected digital age that you must adapt to new technologies — or you will perish. You’re not on Twitter? Enjoy your life as a dinosaur. You don’t use Facebook? Welcome to 1988. And so I took a big cannonball dive into my fancy two-year contract and wished for the best.
But problems began to emerge. Not with the iPhone itself — but with me. For all my phone’s superpowers, for all its techno razzle-dazzle, I knew relatively little about how to use it. I texted, sure, and I could set the alarm. But I would guesstimate that I learned 10 percent of the iPhone’s functions, maybe even less. It’s like I had a magic wand in my purse, and I was using it to scrape glass off the windshield.
In July, when I reupped to my iPhone 4, I actually carved out an entire afternoon to figure out the sucker. But that afternoon came, and I was less interested in reading CNET stories than I was in listening to Marc Maron podcasts, one after the other, which I actually just streamed from my laptop. The iPhone might be capable of changing the world, but alas, it can’t change me. There is nothing I find more deadly dull than an instruction manual. If I can’t figure it out by tapping around for 10 minutes, it ain’t gonna happen.
There were other issues, too. My having an iPhone was like driving an elegant horse-drawn carriage in the demolition derby. Mere weeks after purchase, I was texting as I walked past an elementary school one morning when my shiny new phone tumbled out of my hands and landed on the sidewalk with an unmistakable crunch. Little kids passed by me as I literally stomped my foot on the ground and said, for perhaps the first time in my life, “Oh fudge. Oh fudgety fudge.” My gleaming, flawless companion now had a split right up its middle with two branches coming off it, like a line-drawn tree.
After I moved to Texas and shifted into part-time work, my iPhone bills started to climb. Frankly, they were staggering. I switched plans, but the next month the bill was even bigger. This was a problem, because financially, I didn’t have much wiggle room. A year ago, I paid off and cut up several credit cards — a slow crawl back from when they were maxed out, at 29 percent interest — and I only purchased items with the money in my bank account, as opposed to simply purchasing items with the magical thinking that money would appear somewhere down the line.
I was still trying to scheme a way to pay those massive iPhone bills when the poor guy drowned himself outside, and I had to wonder: Why was I holding on to this thing anyway? Why was I going broke for a piece of equipment I didn’t even know how to use? Since I’d started working from home, the only thing I really used my iPhone for was to talk. And that’s the one function where the iPhone isn’t all that great. I’m not just talking about dropped calls. Have you ever tried to hold the iPhone against your ear for long periods of time? It’s like cuddling with a curling iron. The iPhone is for typing, for deep dives into Internet underworlds, for home videos and schedule management and working from the back of a taxi cab and tweeting quips about a ham sandwich to your 2,000 followers. If you want to lose three hours chatting with your friend on a Monday night — not so much. And that’s too bad. Because as the world grows more digital, an ever-percolating mix of emoticons and instant messages, I find myself drawn toward the warm sound of someone else’s voice in my ear. Skype is just not my bag; I resent any device that draws attention to my shiny forehead.
So that was it: I had to give up my iPhone. It felt good just to say it. It gave me a jolt of consumer rebellion. I fired up my old iPod nano and pulled my cracked old second-gen iPhone out of the drawer to see if it still took pictures (it did). See, I didn’t need a fancy new iPhone after all! I could make my own smart phone out of the misfit tools I already owned. I felt so practical, so boldly against the grain. I was leading a charge away from high-priced must-have doodads and back into the calm waters of clunky flip phones. I was going to save so much money. I was going to make a statement. My phone wouldn’t say, “Ooh look at me, I have an iPhone!” It would say, “My phone doesn’t define me. Also, I’m working part-time.”
But the powers that be don’t make it easy to give up your iPhone. In fact, they make it very very hard. When I arrived at the AT&T store, brimming with pluck, I was met by a friendly employee, his hair gelled into a perfect triangle.
“You know, thanks to a one-year warranty, you could purchase another iPhone for just $200,” he said.
“That’s OK,” I said, smiling. I did not feel like explaining to him that a proper “warranty” would not involve paying the exact same amount you did in the first place. I did not feel like complaining to him about the injustice of the Apple empire, because I had a plan. “I’ve decided to downgrade to the flip phone for the rest of my contract. You can just give me your cheapest one.”
He began to shift on his feet. His eyebrows started to flutter. “But those flip phones cost $200, too. Because you’re not eligible for a new contract.”
Wait, what? I had not anticipated this. It had never occurred to me that anyone would have the gall to charge $200 for a piece of machinery that was roughly as current as the horse and buggy. Shouldn’t they be giving those away on the street to homeless people? “So wait,” I said, trying very hard not to be That Customer, though my strained voice hadn’t gotten the memo. “Those clunky old flip phones cost as much as another iPhone would?”
He nodded. It was silent, except for my sighs. “You could look on Craigslist,” he said finally. “If you find an AT&T branded flip phone for sale, you could use that.”
Great. Just what my afternoon didn’t need — freaking Craigslist. Now I was going to have to drive 60 miles into the suburbs to buy a Samsung that had been jacked from some poor old lady.
I rubbed my forehead. “How much would it cost to just cancel my contract?” I asked.
“$250.”
Oof. This revolution was getting awfully inconvenient. I had to wonder: How much did I want to pay for freedom from my iPhone? Would I be saving that much money in the long run?
Earlier that afternoon, I had dumped my old iPhone in my purse. Not the one that died, but the one I shoved in a drawer last July when I upgraded to my fancy new widget. I had this idea that I’d use it to take pictures from now on. It was clunky all right, the bottom half of the screen so shattered it practically turned everything into abstract art. I wasn’t certain if I wanted to keep using it. But I knew I needed to get a cellphone — some kind of cellphone — today. Like, now. And so I sucked it up, and set it on the counter.
“And how much would it be to just power this up again?” I asked.
He smiled and clapped his hands together. “I could do that for you for free.”
Apple Inc. unveiled a faster, more powerful iPhone on Tuesday in its first major product event in years without Steve Jobs presiding.
New CEO Tim Cook led the show after Jobs, who has been battling health problems, resigned from the post in August.
Cook, wearing a navy blue button-down shirt and jeans, opened by calling his nearly 14-year tenure at Apple “the privilege of a lifetime.” Those in the audience clapped as he entered, but the reaction seemed more muted than what Jobs had recently received.
Cook said the latest iPhone, which came out in June 2010, sold more quickly than previous models, but the iPhone still has just 5 percent of the worldwide handset market.
Apple is hoping to grow that with a new model. The new iPhone 4S has an improved camera with a higher-resolution sensor. The processor is faster, which helps run smoother, more realistic action games. It’s also a “world phone,” which means that Verizon iPhones will be able to useable overseas, just as AT&T iPhones already are.
Apple is including a “personal assistant” application called Siri, which responds to spoken questions and commands such as “Do I need an umbrella today?” It’s an advanced version of speech-recognition apps found on other phones.
The new iPhone also comes with new mobile software, iOS 5, that includes such features as the ability to sync content wirelessly, without having to plug the device to a Mac or Windows machine.
IOS 5 will also be available on Oct. 12 for existing devices — the iPhone 4 and 3GS, both iPad models and later versions of the iPod Touch.
Apple said Oct. 12 will also mark the launch of its new iCloud service, which will store content such as music, documents, apps and photos on Apple’s servers and let people access them wirelessly on numerous devices.
Apple also touted the popularity of its products and unveiled a new line of iPods, including a Nano model with a multi-touch display that promises to be easier to navigate. Apple made no mention of its Classic model, which many people had speculated the company might discontinue.
The event took place in Apple’s Town Hall room, where the first iPod was launched a decade ago. Cook said Apple has sold more than 300 million iPods worldwide so far, including 45 million in the 12 months through June.
The iPhone came six years later and has gained millions of fans, thanks to its slick looks, high-resolution screen and intuitive software. There were 39 million iPhones sold in the first six months of this year.
Apple’s stock fell $11.76, or 3.1 percent, to $362.84 in afternoon trading Tuesday.
Joel Simkai, a slender, young-faced man, is eating granola and yogurt when I meet him for coffee. He is the founder of Grindr, a location-based app that allows gay men to “connect with guys in (their) area” and “browse men.” Since its launch, Grindr has grown to 2 million users and gained a reputation as something of a hookup widget for the gay community. (The app has a simple interface that shows photos of the closest 100 users at any one time, and allows you to chat and exchange photos with them.)
Now Joel and his team are about to launch their second program, code name Project Amicus, which has been referred to as a “Grindr app for straight people.” “Users can expect a unique mobile app experience unlike anything currently on the market that caters to how women and men communicate together,” boasts the press packet for new project. But does a straight version of Grindr even make sense? According to Joel, Amicus will do far more than help people have sex (which he argues is not what Grindr is for in the first place).
I interviewed Joel about his two apps — and what, exactly, the point of a “straight” Grindr would be.
How did Grindr get started?
Throughout my whole life I’ve always been walking into a room and wondering, “Who’s that?” Or when you walk into a subway and make eyes with someone, and then nothing happens. There’s all these missed connections throughout your daily life, and I just feel like, “I wish I could have said something.”
And as a gay man, you’re always wondering who else is gay. I used to use online chat rooms and dating sites for many, many years. I would talk to people in Minnesota, or Ohio, or wherever. And then as it got more advanced, I’d talk to people in New York. But it’s a big scene; there are a lot of people here. So location wasn’t even the biggest factor in meeting other gay men. At the end of the day, I realized it would have to be new technology.
When the second-generation iPhone came out with the GPS unit and the ability to write and distribute the apps, all these things kind of came together. All the pieces fell into place and I said, “This is it.”
Foursquare became famous for being able to track friends, and Dodgeball allowed you to see how you were connected socially (i.e., how many friends you had in common) to anyone else checked into a given space. How would you say Grindr is different from that?
Well, I’m not interested in helping you find your friends. I’m really interested in having you meet new people. It’s like, “You and me, we’re both here, let’s get together and see if there is some kind of chemistry.” There are so many invisible walls, and Grindr is really just a tool to break those down. I was just at New York Pride, and I met an Australian couple who said they had met over Grindr and they just got married.
Do you consider Grindr a dating app?
I’m less interested in what happens after you meet. Maybe you like them, maybe you just want to chat, and maybe you’re like, “This is not for me, I want to get out of here.”
If Grindr is at least partly being used to meet guys and hook up, how will this project you’re launching work for straight women?
Well, this new app is an evolution: taking what we know from Grindr and putting it on the next level. It’s not even focused on dating. Its code name is Project Amicus, and it’s a lot more about friendship, like a girl meeting another girl, and they are both straight. Or she can meet a gay guy, or whatever. It’s really about helping you meet people. There is that issue right now, of “How do I meet new people? Where should I go? What should I do? I’m bored!” And it’s really a tool to help you figure that out.
Will Project Amicus be open to men too, then?
Yes, though we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about women when developing this project. I’m a guy; I have a harder time getting into the mind-set of a woman. We’ve definitely made extra efforts to think about the woman: what she wants, what she’s comfortable with, who she wants to socialize with.
In terms of making a “Grindr for women,” I think, “Well, isn’t locating the nearest straight dude just called ‘Going to a bar’?”
Right. Well, I still think of both programs in terms of someone who wants to meet new people, people they want to meet, that special someone, someone to spend time with.
So you don’t think of Grindr as being focused on hookups or one-night stands?
I don’t care what people do, as long as it’s legal. You know, I’m happy people are using the program. It’s a whatever-you-want-it-to-be app. Some people want to hook up, some want to network professionally. You know we did a survey, and the majority of people said they used Grindr to find friends. It’s all kinds of things.
So if it’s a friend thing, will Grindr’s app feed its profiles into Project Amicus?
No. They are two separate apps.
So there is a distinction in terms of the purpose of what these two programs are supposed to do?
The new project is a social app. Grindr is somewhere between a geo-social app and a dating tool. People from Grindr can join the new project, but we keep them separate, because they are two different things.
Angry Birds: taking over your computer first, and then your mind.
Last night I mentioned my love/hate relationship with Angry Birds to a friend. “Oh, I’ve never played,” she said, “I don’t like video games.”
“Angry Birds isn’t a video game,” I replied. “You only play it on your phone or iPad.”
On a more fundamental level, though, I don’t believe that one “likes” or “dislikes” Angry Birds. It’s more like the drug Substance D in Philip K. Dick’s “A Scanner Darkly”: you’ve either tried it, or you haven’t. If you’ve played Angry Birds once, chances are you own the game and your friends have to hide your phone from you so that you’ll make eye contact with them during conversation. Perhaps you even wrote a fan fiction about the iOS game. If you haven’t played it, you don’t understand what’s so fun about throwing birds at pigs. So let’s be clear: It’s not fun playing Angry Birds. You just have to.
Up until now, people without portable Apple products were spared this mind-numbing waste of time. But like a horrible, mutated virus, Angry Birds has now spread into your computer in the form of a Google Chrome app, launched today. That’s right, now you don’t even need Steve Jobs’ technology in order to get sucked in to the addictive fowl-launching fest. Best/worst part? It’s free, unlike the 99 cent version you buy as an app for your i-thingies, so now you have no excuse not play it … except maybe your sanity.
Hector Camacho is a former firefighter who got a nasty burn while unplugging his new iPad from the wall. I’ll give Hector the benefit of the doubt that, considering his past profession, he probably wasn’t attempting to do so while in the bathtub.
We’ve all heard rumors that a man who keeps a MacBook on his lap for too long can become sterile, but is there any truth to physical burns caused by Steve Jobs’ products? The cases are few, but they do stand out: a defective USB port on an iPhone 4 that ended up totally melting the phone after it was plugged into the computer, another phone that set a desk on fire, and multiple instances of blotchy burns on the legs of men and women who keep their heated MacBooks resting on their body.
So far, though, iPads seem to be the safest bet in terms of not electrocuting/burning yourself with your own technology, but maybe that’s because the product has been around for less time than other Mac items. Sparks and burns can be caused by anything from overheating a processor to faulty wiring on the ports. The reason that these claims seem to be more prevalent with Mac products than other phones or home technology is that, well, iPhones, iPads and MacBooks dominate the market, and are much more in the public eye than their competition.
To be on the safe side, Apple does issue a warning on its computers regarding potential burns:
When you’re using your MacBook Pro or charging the battery, it’s normal for the bottom of the case to get warm. For prolonged use, place your MacBook Pro on a flat, stable surface. Do not place your MacBook Pro on your lap or other body surface for extended periods of time. Prolonged body contact can cause discomfort and potentially a burn.
Also be advised: Your MacBook does also have the ability to kill you:
This computer system is not intended for use in the operation of nuclear facilities, aircraft navigation or communications systems, or air traffic control machines, or for any other uses where the failure of the computer system could lead to death, personal injury, or severe environmental damage.
So if you tend to use your MacBook as a warm (very hard) pillow during a nap at a nuclear reactor plant, do so at your own risk.
(Credit: Anatema via Shutterstock) 
(Credit: calvindexter via Shutterstock) 
Angry Birds: taking over your computer first, and then your mind. 
A flaming apple may cause grievous injury. 
