Don't Mean To Rain On The Parade Of IPhone Buyers But....

Cool today, but trash tomorrow

By PAUL BERTON

Given the hype, you'd think Apple's iPhone, introduced last week in the United States, is going to change the world.
Consumers are going ga-ga over the innovative touch-screen technology, the sexy packaging, the features, the je ne sais quoi that seems to accompany everything with an "i" in front of it.
But of all the things that have or might still change the world, the iPhone will never be among them.
The microchip? The World Wide Web? Wireless technology?
When history is written, it might be all of these (and it might none), but it won't ever be the gadget that packages it. The iPhone is just another trinket among dozens, hundreds, thousands . . .
All history's gadgets, lumped together, have not changed the world as much as marketing gurus would have us believe. They never will.
When humans learned to capture and create fire, that changed the world.
When we learned how to grow food, agriculture changed the world.
Written language changed the world. The development of gunpowder, maybe; antibiotics certainly.
The invention of the printing press, electricity, the telephone, the internal combustion engine, television, the automobile, the airplane -- perhaps.
But the iPhone and modern hand-held devices? Not hardly.
They're just part of an increasingly tedious line of must-have but don't-need consumer items soon to be reclassified as landfill when something smaller, sexier or system 4.2 appears on the market.
Think of all the telephones and computers in the dump. The sexier the gadget, the faster its journey to the trash or the storage shed: electric carving knives, revolutionary vegetable slicers, mini vacuum cleaners, bread makers, orange juicers, ice-cream makers ....
It's dubious how much we needed it in the first place, and it's a certainty most of it is garbage today, which is exactly what today's iPhone will be tomorrow.
Some people may be desperate for them now, but the iPhone won't ever be as useful as a pair of good shoes or a toothbrush.
And it won't change the world.