The mixed reception of Apple’s new doohicky-gizmo-thingamabob, the iPad has made me re-evaluate several things:
What do we “need”? What do we want? What do we feel obligated to own to keep up in the modern world?
Here’s a little personal history of my own attachment to gadgets.
I didn’t own a cell phone until April of 1999. I think that’s pretty late in the game, right? (At least, for someone who was under the age of 75) Eleven years later, I so attached to my cellphone that I sometimes have trouble remembering what life was like before it:
“So I guess if we wanted to talk to someone we had to, like, make plans to talk on the phone? Is that how we did it?” Did I used to go around saying things like “I’ll call you later. At 10:45 am.” Weird.
I first browsed the internet in 1995 via AOL and I can even recall my first words in a chat room: “Are we on the world wide web?”
I wasn’t even sure. (It’s funny how things fade in and out of vogue. Do people still congregate in chat rooms? Or are we all too busy tweeting to Wolf Blitzer on CNN instead? Has cable news become one giant chat room instead?)
Back to my own timeline:
I believe I caved in and actually bought a Palm Pilot (sans phone) in 2002 (again, a little late) and I gotta say, that was a complete washout. After spending couple of hours learning their secret wandstroke language I suddenly realized “Hey, for jotting down notes, collecting phone numbers and general to-do list, a piece of paper works nicely too.”
I did, however, jump on the Smartphone bandwagon (summer of 2007) and never looked back. I now look back to my recent past as “the dark times” (or “pre iPhone” as it will someday be referred to in the Smithsonian’s “Evolution of Man” diorama) when all I was able to do on my phone was, like, call people and stuff.
As far as the future…
eReaders: I’m smitten but unconvinced. It sounds like a Palm Pilot all over again. And my inner Luddite tells me I’ll miss the sound of flipping pages, the smell of old books, and frankly, the sweet satisfaction of a good deal at the local book store remainder bin ($2 for Pictures at the Revolution? Sweet! I almost bought that for full hardback price six months ago!)
The iPad, however, poses a whole series of intriguing new questions for me…
If I have an iPhone and a MacBook laptop, what do I need this middle-sized thing for? Symmetry? Because we like things in threes? Like The Three Bears: “This iPhone is too small. This MacBook is too big. This iPad is just right!” (Tell me that’s not a iPad commercial waiting to happen)
On the other hand, is symmetry worth $499? And lest we forget, not everything works well in groups of three. Did we learn nothing from The Godfather Part III???
I think it boils down to this:
Do we — as a society — need another “thing” to fiddle with?
Let’s go back to 1999 again, shall we? Just for a moment. Cell phones are prevalent, of course. But there is a modern-day phenomenon I would never have predicted way back in ’99:
We eat with our phones on the table.
That’s right. Our smartphones have become utensils. Fork. Knife. Spoon. iPhone.
Go to any restaurant. Doesn’t matter if the person is dining alone or with company. The phones are out. Maybe both parties are texting and/or surfing simultaneously. But even if they’re not, the phone remains out there, in reaching distance, like a Colt .45 at a poker game in the old West. Just in case.
We can’t put our smartphones away. What if we miss a call? Or a text? How will we take a photo of our Whopper with Cheese and post it on Facebook if we don’t have immediate access?
So I realize now what would make the new iPad essential for me:
A hot plate.
You know, just a little one, off to the side — so while we sit at the table and surf the web and text and tweet and listen to Vampire Weekend and video chat and podcast and do our taxes and buy movie tickets and play World of Warcraft (iPhone edition) and sift through our Netflix queue and play with our iLight Saber and look up realtime baseball scores and check for local sex offenders we can also keep our cup of lentil soup piping hot.
You heard me, Steve Jobs. Get on it. You’ve almost snagged me again.
