By David Kingsbury | From BayLines Express, May, 2022
Crinkled-up papers, tangles of wires, candy wrappers and other random paraphernalia are scattered over the desk of my little home office. A few weeks ago, I took a bulldozer to it as a spring-cleaning project. As my fingers were fumbling around, and to my surprise and delight, I came across a familiar boxy little hard plastic object. It was my very first iPhone: my 4S that I had retired five or six years ago! I assumed I had thrown it away after moving on to a first-generation SE.
Like a first teenage crush, I retain a special fondness for my first iPhone. I got my 4S in Spring 2012. It dawned on me that this was the tenth anniversary of that life-altering purchase. I remembered back to the romantic thrill of that spring. Every day, it seemed I learned some incredible new thing that could boost my everyday quality of life. First was Pandora music. Then came various GPS apps. Then came the possibility of reading restaurant menus while actually sitting in the restaurant!
The Look Tell Money Reader remains one of my all-time favorite apps. It was one of those rare apps that does one and only one thing, but does it flawlessly. Assuming my 4S battery was completely dead, I plugged it into the wall and waited. After a couple of minutes, the phone started talking. I flicked around to find my Look Tell Money Reader. It was still there! I swiped a dollar bill over the camera, and just like in the olden days, it promptly said, “One dollar.” The app was discontinued a few years back, but was still reliably performing its magic on my 4S dinosaur!
Far from an early adopter of the iPhone, I was even somewhat of a contrarian. Before getting my own iPhone, I would go out to dinner with blind friends and say, “OK, let’s talk about anything but your dumb iPhone!” Back then, you couldn’t get blind folks to shut up about their iPhones. The newest hot app, I O S enhancement, acrobatic finger gesture, or funny thing you could make Siri say, were all topics for endless banter and one-upmanship. Then I got my 4S. I turned into just one more of those lemmings going over the cliff like in the iconic Apple ad at the 1984 Super Bowl. Nobody could shut me up either.
It became my mission to convert my girlfriend, DeAnn, to the wonders of this device. Sometimes I impressed her. Other times not so much. At the Paparazzi Italian restaurant on Newbury Street in downtown Boston, I suavely picked up the bill, took a picture of it with the KNFB Reader. We waited in anticipation for it to read the total. Silence. We waited, and waited some more. Still silence. “Oh well,” nonplused DeAnn said, “That’s technology for you.”
Deflated, I said, “let’s cross the street and get some ice cream.” Fifteen or 20 minutes later, while waiting in line at Ben and Jerry’s, my phone chirped up and announced, “Sixty-four dollars and fifty-seven cents!”
Another time, and while once again waiting in line for ice cream, I adeptly figured out how to read the full list of 39 flavors before getting to the counter. I ordered the same mango sherbet I would have picked anyway, but having the possibility of making a more informed decision impressed both DeAnn and me.
One final anecdote to demonstrate the power of this captivating device. DeAnn (now successfully converted) and I went to Washington several years ago and stayed in a hotel with lousy Wi-Fi. Pre-2012, I might have asked, “What is Wi-Fi?” Post-2012, the question became, “How could anybody live without it?” Two or three days into our Wi-Fi-less existence, we went into a Starbucks, ordered our coffee, and sat down. We both then whipped out our iPhones, connected to the Starbucks Wi-Fi, started texting, read the news, checked our emails, and so on. After awhile, I turned to DeAnn, and exclaimed, ”We’ve been sitting here in our parallel universes totally ignoring each other for 45 minutes, This is so cool. I feel so hip, modern, and millennial!”
It’s ten years later now. Adolescent crushes are fleeting. First loves rarely endure into middle age or beyond. The prophetic visionary Steve Jobs has been replaced by the glorified bean counter Tim Cook. Apple still does those silly annual events where their nerds breathlessly announce the latest new iPhone features, against the backdrop of flashy light shows and booming music. But with the exception of the geekiest Apple devotees amongst us in the blindness community, the general reaction is rarely anything more than a collective yawn. Yet every now and then, it’s good to step back and consider the long sweep of history. We often take for granted many things that are now at our literal fingertips, but were Unimaginable just a few short years ago. What is the next technology that will transform our lives? Self-driving cars? Artificial intelligence getting intelligent enough to accurately describe pictures? Or, like the iPhone, something totally unforeseen, but once it exists, we will marvel at how we ever lived without it.