TommyPeters

The dark and the uninitiated. A decade ago, I handed the nascent iPhone to a friend (a lawyer) and asked him for his opinion. He gave me four points why he was rejecting it:- 1. It felt like a bar of soap and would slip off his hand. 2. It did not have a physical keypad as in the Blackberry he was then using. 3. Loading emails were slower than on his BB, given that attachments were loaded with text but on his device, only the text was loaded which was what professionals required on the go. The attachments, he said, could be read at his convenience on his desktop, besides web browsing required a ‘20/20 vision’ as opposed to surfing on a desktop, and 4. Touching and swiping to open apps were adolescent behaviour and not natural, as opposed to scrolling and clicking on the BB. I thanked him for his opinion which I stressed I valued but before I left, he asked me for my take, more on his opinion, than on the iPhone itself. I told him that points he offered for rejecting the device were reasons for the uninitiated such as myself to embrace it, for the following reasons:- 1. He is a lawyer and a good one at that, but I had the sense he had scant knowledge of computers and devices and how they would pan out in the future. 2. Given his training, he is rife with opinions, even on matters that are not in his domain. 3. When faced with a question from an ‘inexperienced person’ he would find it hard to refrain from a ‘no comment’ response, and to digress, 4. In 1998, I told him that the 1st generation iMac drew a similar strain from his brothers at-law who were dissing the new ‘slit-eyed’ USB because 9-pin printers and devices at the office were not compatible. Looking back a decade, the judgment of my friend on the new iPhone was a classic example on why reasoning in the dark could offer spot-on clues for the uninitiated, in the clear. Looking back two decades, dissing the USB-C Mac by detractors may prove to be another classic example on why a passionate analysis in the dark would give clues for the uninitiated, in the clear. Great post, Daniel!