We moved aside the Cray Computer for the desktop, enjoying its novelty to attend to our computing needs without filling out our entire garage space, then realized we couldn’t simply log that piece of ingenuity on our backs if we needed to move and create.
We whopped and hoorayed when Techieverse broke the chains that clamped us to our tables, so we eagerly adjusted from desk-slaves to lap-slaves. Cheerfully, we waltzed over to laptops and notebooks, happy to keep clicking away at our keyboards even while we were camping in the bushes several miles away from any form of Civilization.
The pranksters at Apple decided to rattle our saddles (if you think this is a nursery school rhyme, or the fruit here has anything to do with the forbidden tree, you really shouldn’t be reading this article) by creating a device that combined a personal computer, a book store, a mobile gizmo, and your very own mini-tv. It felt good but different, special but constrained, and seemed to be ported to a galaxy that we loved the look of, but needed to define as it attempted to lay waste to our newly acquired Alienware.
I decidedly don’t want to start chugging out data on the amount the Fruit Guys must have poured into R&D, or the tests and trials (makes you think of religion for a second), the board meetings about this foolish idea that has Steve thinking he could run them back to the ground where he had miraculously picked them up from. Yessirie, a touch phone had worked, but what about a touch laptop; were people willing to push work off the ledge of entertainment? I guess Steve must have won in the arguments.
And suddenly, we were greeted with a gadget thinner than virtually any of the textbooks we used in school, smatter than our smartphones, absolutely more involving than any CD-ROM-yoked device through the liberty of apps, and cheaper than our laptops (although this part is quite arguable considering on which side of the economy you are on, or on how bullish or bearish your account is feeling at the moment you are reading this article).
We certainly toyed with the idea of flicking our fingers across a board like techno-sages, whipping up applications to simply amuse, teach, and entertain us or to banish our boredom for several healthy hours. We anticipated a time when our knapsacks would remain in the closet or in the back seat of the car; the laptop it carries may even get used to keeping the desktop company atop our writing tables.
Most have cheered about it, a few have snickered at it, but everyone is buying it. The ones who haven’t are either saving up for it, spasmodically praying for a cheaper model, or looking up the number of that wealthy uncle so they will call him up a week before Christmas in the hope something slim and snazzy would be gift-wrapped for them come the eve of the 25th.
So now we can try it, retrieving files and documents from our laptops the same way we used our laptops to retrieve data from the desktops in the heydays. We can now make excuses why we should leave our mobiles phones at home, and still retain the mobility of a gizmo that can do work, share work, reroute work or avoid work with one effusive swipe of our fingers across an interface for definite adventure.
