I never met Steve Jobs and I’m really only a very recent Apple convert, and so I’m afraid that I have no touching personal stories to tell (which is fine, because the Internet seems to have a bounty of them, anyway). However, I still felt a pang a distinct pang in my chest after learning of his death, so I took to YouTube to re-watch some of Steve’s older keynotes. What I found there was not only a video time capsule of a living, breathing Steve Jobs, but a quick and sobering glance at how far my iPhone has come.
I Want the One with the Bigger Gee-Bees
I had pre-ordered a 16GB iPhone 4S in black last week (white was tempting!) and, after speaking with a few friends, had been questioning the wisdom of my purchase. I knew that I wanted a modern iPhone because my 3GS is slowing down on iOS 5, but I had never really stopped to think about storage capacities above 16GB because I was so used to only being able to afford the base model as a a student. However, when friends pointed out that the 8MP pictures and 1080p video on the 4S would inevitably take up more space, I started to get a little nervous. Had I jumped the gun on this upgrade? Should I have shelled out the extra $100 to double my storage space and ensure that I would never, ever have to think about space again?
Thankfully, seeing the first iPod, iPhone, and other famous Steve-powered keynotes on YouTube last night rid me of my geeky angst. As I watched Steve Jobs of various sizes present sets of pre-iPhone 4S products, I realized how much I may have been sweating the small stuff.
Missing the Forest for the Trees
All of the super cool tricks of the 2007 iPhone are now standard in 2011. Multi-touch displays, phones with smart sensors, intelligent software keyboards, and pinch and zoom web browsing are available across basically all smartphone and tablet platforms. It’s true that Apple didn’t invent all of these ideas, but as Apple fans are wont to say, they were the first ones to really get them right. The first ones to make them mainstream. None of my friends in high school knew about Windows Mobile or Palm, but everyone knows of — or hell, owns — an iPhone in 2011.
What really struck me about watching those keynotes was how excited Steve was about all of the “state-of-the-art” technology of 2007, and how he stayed just as excited in each of the subsequent presentations. Granted, you could argue that his behaviour on-stage was his way of getting Keynote attendees involved, but I think it’s safe to assume that a big part of that spark in Steve’s eye was genuine excitement. When he presented that first iPhone he was totally geeking out over a fixed-focus 2MP still camera, 8GB max storage capacity, a (recessed) earphone jack, leaving behind the “baby apps” of WinMo and Palm, and awesome EDGE connectivity.
There was no compass; no auto-focus, front-facing or video camera; no iA Writer or Angry Birds; no (limited) multitasking; no iCloud or Google Exchange sync; no Retina Display, and no Siri.
Re-watching those videos was like viewing an interesting little time capsule. It was like watching an old video of myself playing with Lego as a kid, then glancing at the dusty plastic bricks on a shelf in my room, and then looking down at my 3GS and asking myself where all the wonder had gone. Lego (not “Legos”, by the way) and iPhones have brought me so much joy over the years, but it can be so easy to forget how that excitement feels and why it’s there, especially when we tend to perceive change only from one year to the next.
“Isn’t this Cool?”
One of the types of questions that Steve would ask during or after a given iPhone demo in 2007 was, “isn’t this cool?”
Now that he’s gone I figure it might be good to remind myself to ask that question every once in a while, just to keep myself grounded. So while I may still wonder about whether or not I should have picked up a 32GB 4S (with 4x more space than the original high-end iPhone), I’ll also try to remember how exciting current-gen tech is, and how far Steve has brought us since 2007.
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