The only constant is snark

On April 3, 1973, a Motorola engineer made the world’s first cell phone call. On April 3, 2010, Apple’s original iPad was released. What do these dates have in common? Snark! Slate discusses early reactions to the cell phone, which included this optimistic appraisal from 1973: “Carry it to the beach, the supermarket, the yacht, the fox hunt, the golf course, the hideaway where you went to get away from it all.” In 1983, Globe and Mail reported that cellular technology could eventually replace regular phones. “Indeed,” they stated, “one of the offshoots may be that eventually each person will have a “personal telephone number,” which could remain the same for life.” (They failed, I guess, to anticipate a world in which nobody actually knows anybody else’s phone number.) Some were skeptical, though, including the engineer who made the first cell phone call, who said that “Even if you project it beyond our lifetimes, it won’t be cheap enough.”

Regarding the iPad, there were also doubters, some of which are cataloged here. My favorite of these was, “Apple iPad – failure, joke or fiasco? Pick one” Linen DeFiller, MillionFace.com, 27 January 2010. Of course, since 1973, cell phones have become ubiquitous and since 2010 Apple has sold more than 100 million iPads.