Terrific reminiscence on the failure of the past meets (too early?) the success of the present. “Today, of course, it’s an entirely different story: we’re all intimately familiar with the concept of the little computer in our pocket. We fell repeatedly for watered-down Palm handhelds which, in reality, we used rarely; we replaced them with iPhones, which we use too much. Now the same critics who shit-canned the Newton for the wrong reasons are shit-canning the iPad for the wrong reasons.
The iPad, though, unlike the Newton, is going to win, and win on an epic scale.”
Intensive writing over a long period of time is exhausting in ways I find difficult to describe without sounding somewhat precious about it. You feel disenfranchised by reality, a half step behind and off to one side of your own skin, your view oblique, with most possibilities of genuine reaction cooled by being filtered through the habitual appraisal mechanics of your trade. You find an off-hours world crammed with the enticing stimulations of good books, good art, good conversation, but that creative effort necessary to these appreciations is too much akin to the process that uses you up in your work, and so, too often, aware of sloth and guilt, you surrender to the undemanding unvarying flatulence of network television, to magazine fare styled for the lip readers, to social contact with people so curiously predictable in their attitudes you know their lines before they say them. – John D. MacDonald
The Ross Sisters. Ever heard of them? They bring an interesting definition to “twist and shout.” Be sure to watch past the harmonizing when things get... bendy.
It’s official. Consider this an equivalent moment: ditching the telegraph for the telephone, the landline for the cell, internal combustion for electric. We’re losing the keyboard slowly. Slowly losing the mouse. Slowly but inexorably moving into the realm of gesture and voice. And thought. What happens when we communicate with our ideas and our ideas talk back? Joy. Apple.
The President has some fun. Yeah, and linking him to an Apple product is just plain nuts, I know. But I’m high on some new, inventive, simple, helpful brilliant thinking. And Steve Jobs thinks pretty well, too.
