Geekfoolery

I read an article about Steve Jobs in a news magazine about a year or so ago that asked the question, “What kind of technical gadgets does the world’s most demanding designer of technical gadgets buy?” The article described the man in the black turtleneck visiting a cell phone store, looking over their wares, no doubt unable to stop wondering why the hell that feature was implemented that way, and why do I have to do this when I want to do that, and what is that button doing  there? It is like forcing a world-class chef to have the potato skins (loaded) at the Burger Basket at the strip mall.

Based on today’s announcement at MacWorld, it appears that Steve Jobs won’t ever have to suffer the indignity of having to buy sub-standard cell phone from pimply kid at a wooden cart in the mall again. The new Apple iPhone, with its touch screen, and camera, and Wifi, and bluetooth, and OS X, and Safari browser, is going to change the world!

Wait, sorry about that, I was stuck in the Reality Distortion Field for a moment there. It can happen to anyone, really. I was following the breathless updates posted to blogs, live from the MacWorld Keynote this morning… “Steve is coming on stage… he’s wearing a black turtleneck and jeans…” Comments on the blogs ran the full gamut from “I want to have the iPhone’s baby” to “all you mac fanboys are insane.”

So really, what does this new iPhone mean? Jobs says it’s going to make history, but c’mon, people, it’s a cellphone! We already have cellphones, some of them pretty darn slick, too. We’re not talking about a cell phone market where people are still lugging around their lunchbox phones or their bricks, we’ve got the clamshells and the candy bars and the Pop-Tarts®. Are the big cell phone makers so out of it that Apple can swoop in and take a big chunk of the pie?

It’s hard to say. When the iPod was introduced, it was neither the first nor the biggest nor the cheapest device you could get. But somehow, Steve Jobs took what everyone already knew was technically possible and even commercially available and turned into something that everyone had to have. And so far, no one else has figured out how to do it as well as he can.

So now we’re looking at a cell phone… the iPhone… and it’s a beautiful piece of work, and the question is will everyone want one?

That question remains to be seen.

But I want to finish with one thing that happened to me today that speaks to how many of us have come to expect Apple products to function.

My daughter gave me a floppy disk today with a Word doc she had created at school on a Dell. I had met her at the library after work, and they had computers and printers and could print the file for dime, so we stuck the disk in the library PC.

Couldn’t read the file.

Took the disk home and dug up my old USB floppy drive and plugged it in to my HP laptop. Couldn’t open the file.

So I powered up the old Performa 575… an Apple Computer that I bought on sale after it was discontinued 10 years ago. Opened MS Word 5.1 and the file opened right up, and the only reason my equally ancient StyleWriter II had trouble printing was a stray bit of debris caught in the mechanism. Once I cleared out the crumbs, we printed the file and all was well.

So with that in mind, if I hear that Steve Jobs has a phone to sell, I think it is definitely going to be worth a look.

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