Ah, my first editorial. I felt the need to write this after being at a small social gathering last Friday with a group of friends, none of them being Apple Geeks like myself.
After standing outside with the guys, we moved to the front porch to grill some burgers and I walked into the house to see what my wife was doing and to grab another beer. She was in the kitchen with all the other women, sipping on some wine and chatting. What magically appears from the host’s back pocket? It was a retina-displayed piece of sexiness. Any guesses? Yup, an iPhone 4. (This woman is an elementary school teacher but in no way any kind of techie, they still rock a beige PC with Windows XP at their home for goodness sake.) I tried not to get too excited, but don’t we all feel an instant connection to most people that have an iDevice, really? Hmm, I held back and grabbed another beer and headed back outside to stand around the grill in the ‘man zone’.
Fifteen minutes later, we marched inside with our standard issue Blue Moon Belgian White Ale and a couple platters of grilled meat. We filled our plates and found a place to sit. My wife was sitting by the host who had the iPhone 4 so I conveniently sat between them. “So, how do you like your iPhone?” I said. She responded, “It’s really nice and has lots of fun apps too, but it’s acting slow.” I pulled out my iPhone and she was right, her iPhone was slower than mine. To test this, I opened Safari to search for some rules to a card game we were going to play and mine did load faster than hers - strange. So I asked her if I could see it and she gladly handed it over to me. The screen was blinding me for one thing - I don’t use the full brightness but hers we turned up so far I almost put my sunglasses back on. After turning it down a bit, I noticed she was running iOS 4.0, not 4.1, meaning she didn’t have Game Center, HDR Photography, etc. Not a big deal to some but I like to have the newest OS on my devices.
Okay, back to the story. I double-clicked to Home button to invoke the Multitasking bar and I almost fell over. She had - and I’m serious - 15 apps open in the background and 13 of them were games. I also looked at her home screens and she had 2 pages (and 1 folder with 2 apps in it), nothing but games and Apple-branded applications. I asked her if she played a lot of games and she said “No, our (11-year-old) daughter plays games on it all the time.” “Ah,” I said, “you need to close the apps you don’t need to make your phone run faster.” (Meanwhile, my wife told her I was an Apple Nerd and I proudly told her that I was.) She looked at me like I was speaking another language. So - I showed her that by pressing and holding an icon, it makes it ‘jiggle,’ and the magic ‘red dash’ appears and you can close the apps that way. She had no idea that you could even do that, thanked me, and she wanted to know more. So I showed her rotation lock, battery percentage and what the location arrow meant in the upper right hand corner. I didn’t want to get to in-depth, we were at a gathering and my wife was poking me to take my turn at cards. We only scratched the service and at church that week she had a few more questions for me. That makes me feel so great to be an Apple user.
So I’ve been thinking - we Apple ‘Nerds’, ‘Geeks’, ‘Fanboys’, (whatever we call ourselves or are defined as) take for granted our knowledge and the amazing apps we either design, program, develop or use on a daily basis and forget about the average iPhone user. They purchase iDevices because they’re trendy, look cool, have thousands of games and Facebook; not that they track our CloudApp links, Twitter stats, preview iOS mockups or sync our notes and/or cloud-based storage. Even though all Apple users aren’t power users, we can still feel that instant connection with each other because we all have similar experiences, use the built-in features and admire the sheer beauty of Apple’s products. It’s easy to start conversations with one another, even if we span the entire gamut of usability. One example - as soon as Steve Jobs announced the FaceTime for Mac Beta, someone created Facelette, “it’s like chat roulette but with more apple products and stuff.” That site alone says how great our community is; we want to interact with these new technologies and share our ‘geeky’ lives with one another. I, for one, enjoy talking to any user of Apple products and showing them what Apple products mean to me and how anyone can be more efficient users.
If you read our site, or any other Apple/tech sites, you probably define yourself as one of those Apple ‘Nerds’, ‘Geeks’ or ‘Fanboys’. I like to think that we’re all part of an elite group of individuals that come together to share our experiences. I think Josh Helfferich said it best yesterday, “People ask me all the time why I love Apple stuff so much, and I always tell them the truth: The community.” Josh, this geek agrees.
