For some weeks now my jacket pockets have been bulging in an unsightly manner as I have gone about the world with a BlackBerry Bold 9900, two HTC Android handsets, the “Rhyme” and the “Sensation XL with Beats Audio” and the all new Nokia Lumia 800 running Windows for Mobiles 7.5 “Mango”.
Apple‘s loss last week was enormous. I wrote all that I felt I could in the blog farewell on this website to a man I was lucky enough to know a little and admire a great deal. Most are probably now profoundly sick of hearing either how much he was under or overestimated as a man and as a figure of his times. I never knew of any human beings whose achievements were exactly estimated.
The word “estimate” is the clue here. I only know that if I had grandchildren and they heard me tell of my meetings with him they would feel as I might if my grandfather had told me about meeting Henry Ford, Rockefeller or Irving Thalberg. It might be, after all, that Aldous Huxley overestimated Henry Ford by making the dystopian future in his Brave New World name its calendar after him.
I last saw Steve Jobs a year and half ago. I spent an hour alone in his company while he showed me the latest piece of magical hardware to have come from the company he had founded in 1976, the yet to be released Apple iPad. Naturally I was flattered to have been approved by him to be the one to write a profile for Time Magazine and to be given a personal demonstration of the device of which he was so clearly proud and for which he had such high hopes. The excitement of him then handing me an iPad (after I had duly signed severe NDAs prohibiting my flaunting it in public until the embargo date had passed) and being able to play with it before the rest of the world had even seen one tickled my vanity and I would be dishonest if I did not confess to the childlike excitement, the pounding thrill, the absurd pride and the rippling pleasure I always feel on such occasions – emotions that have long been pointed out as pathological symptoms of the wilder shores of unreason that Apple idolatry induce in people like me and as a part of Steve Jobs’s almost Svengali like powers of persuasion, and Barnum-like huckstering.
On Bank Holiday Monday Channel 4 are screening one of those “100 top” programmes they like to make and this year I had the pleasure of being allowed to choose my 100 favourite gadgets. I don’t think you’ll guess which comes first. Besides, I didn’t really approach it as a beauty pageant. The winner might as easily be a kitchen essential as a digital doodad. The fact is I have always had a quite inexplicable love of gadgets and feel myself blessed to have been born into an age in which they seem to have come thicker, faster, newer, sleeker and more miraculous than ever before. In the programme we didn’t want to get all ontological on your arse and never made an attempt to define or limit the meaning of the word. A gadget, for our purposes, was more or less what I decided it was, and in the end it doesn’t really matter who wins the Palm D’Or. Though naturally your burning curiosity will keep you watching all the way to the finish because …. well, you’ll never guess. You’ll just never guess…
But it’s talk of palms, d’or or otherwise, which brings me to the sad story of the week. Of the year. Of the decade.
The early days…
I’ve always been a lucky sod when it comes to my love affair with all things tech. It is a passion that coincided with my having a career that allowed me to be able to indulge in the kinds of insane spending spree that the speedy inbuilt obsolescence of gadgetry has always necessitated. At some time in 1985 I astonished my friends by brandishing before them professionally printed material. I remember the late and blessed Ned Sherrin goggling in disbelief when I came into a radio studio with a piece of A4 on which my script had been perfectly printed.
“You send your scripts to a printer?” he shrieked.
I nodded gravely. “These are fine scripts,” I said. “They deserve memorialisation.”
It was only after being harangued for insanity, hubris and dementia that I finally confessed that I had invested in a new kind of printer. You must remember (or be told because you are far too young to remember) that in 1984 printers were dot matrix machines that produced only a faint simulacrum of what a printing press could manage. In 1985 Apple brought out the LaserPrinter, Aldus produced a programme called PageMaker and I had splashed out £7,000 for one and about £40 for the other. A ridiculous sum, but I was now a Desk Top Publisher. The PostScript language, kerning, leading and justification were all I could think about.
Less than ten years later I ambled into a film studio and started taking photographs of the set with a QuickTake camera, much to the astonishment of the cinematographer and his crew.
“What’s more,” I said, “I could upload the photographs to my computer and email them to a friend.”
“What’s email?” they all wanted to know.
That digital cameras, perfectly printed pages and email are now all as platitudinous, quotidian and meretricious as takeaway coffee is easy to take for granted and I certainly don’t expect credit for being an early adopter or some kind of wise prophet. I was also an early adopter of many disastrous failures. The Newton, the Microwriter AgendA, early, bulky and dreadful Sony electronic books, iRex iLiads weird tone-dialling devices – any number of freakish gadgets that were either before their time and technology or simply deluded and hopelessly hopeful were all grist to my crazy mill.
iRex
The Mac, the LaserWriter and QuickTake camera were (niche and generally unprofitable) Apple products and it’s hard now to believe that there was so long a period when friends and the entire tech press gleefully crowed that my aging Mac peripherals and spare parts would in future have be bought at specialist hobbyist shops because Apple as a company was doomed. Well in 1997 Steve Jobs returned to the company he co-founded and that had fired him 12 years earlier and everything changed, but enough of that.
Some of you may have spotted that I recently tweeted the existence of a new service called Pushnote. In the interest of transparency, openness and the general calming down of doubting Thomases and cynical Susans everywhere, I shall declare right away that I do have shares in this new venture. It may be in my interest for you to use Pushnote, but I am not lying when I say that the only real interest for me is the personal one of watching an idea take flight (or not). The service is entirely free, we have no IPO plans, no ambition to get a quick valuation and sell out, nor will we host advertisements or track your comings and goings and sell those on. I have no expectations of making money from this. For me it’s a little like gardening. I don’t do the real thing, but I can see the pleasure in planning out, digging, drilling, seeding, watering, tending and watching the first sproutings of new growth. Not everything takes root and sometimes one misjudges the soil, the climate or the situation, but the process is fascinating and rewarding in and of itself.
