6 pm, Friday, the 29th of June, 2007. The Menlo Park
Mall, New Jersey, USA. A new phone, tom-tomed by Steve Jobs twenty days earlier,
is about to be launched. Somewhere in that serpentine queue outside the Apple Store
stands a girl desperate to be among the first few to actually hold the phone,
and be, as she called it, a part of history.
That was the iPhone, and that was my daughter. To her, Steve
Jobs remains the incarnation of God – Brahma, the creator. Since then, Apple
has released seven different
generations of the iPhone, and sure enough, Puja has been among the first few
to hold each and every one of them!
How this girl, who was so `technologically challenged’ at school
(maths and science were monsters to wrestle with, and lose to repeatedly) could
grow into such a technological wizard and such a gadget-n-gizmo freak is beyond
me.
Me, I was quite happy with my Windows PC and Nokia/Blackberry
phones, and remained stubbornly immune to her attempts to convert me to Apple.
And I had good reason to. Consider.
I had just about mastered Wordstar, when along came Word
Perfect, and I had to unlearn whatever I had learnt, and start from scratch.
Having just about done so, I was asked to junk all that and switch to Microsoft
Word! Ditto with Lotus 1-2-3 to Excel, and PC Storyboard to Powerpoint.
I was pissed off, to say the least. And now here was my daughter
asking me to junk what over 80% of the world was using and switch to something
that was reportedly marginally superior, but much less popular. Enough is enough, I said.
 |
| Puja on FaceTime! |
Then she presented me with an iPhone 4S for my last birthday,
and I was stuck. Shifting all my contacts and data from my Blackberry to the
new phone was a hellish experience, and took three days and practically all
my patience.
Now don’t get me wrong.
I’m technologically sound - a telecom engineer who had specialised in
EDP in the Army, and here I was being goaded by an Arts graduate with a Diploma
in, wait for it, Fashion Design!
Since the iPhone quite adamantly refused to talk cordially to my Windows PC, she
handed me her MacBook Pro, and asked, nay ordered me, to just get on with it!
And when we visited her in San
Francisco (a pilgrimage to Jobs’s mansion in Palo Alto was, of course, a must),
seeing me drool over their Retina display iPad, that was handed down to me as
well.
So now I have an iPhone, an iPod Touch, a MacBook Pro
and an iPad! I have been well and truly converted!
The question that still irks me is what took me so
long?? And why is it that a product that is so decidedly superior (and I mean decidedly as in `zameen-aasmaan ka faraq’ versus `unees-bees ka faraq') should actually command such a meagre share
of the market.
The answer could fill quite a few posts, but it
basically lies in the regrettable fact that Jobs, though brilliant, was also
the quintessential asshole! Yes, part of my `conversion tutorial’ was reading
Walter Issacson’s voluminous biography of Jobs.
Puja is back from SF, and was yesterday on the
MacBook for some documentation. She threw up her hands in despair “You still
use Word?” she shrieked “For heavens
sake Pa, get Pages!”
Hmm… I think I’ll pass. Surely, I need to draw the line
somewhere…
