Steve Jobs at Macworld 2007

As my friends can attest, I'm not generally one to covet new technological gadgets and gizmos. Nonetheless, I can at least appreciate them on at least a "I would love to play with this for 15 minutes" level. And it seems that every time Steve Jobs' gives his Macworld keynote address, he presents something that makes me ooh and ahh just a little bit. Last year it was the new Macbooks. I just finished watching (most of) the speech he gave yesterday at Macworld 2007, and the thing everybody was predicting came true. This year, Apple is coming out with the iPhone.


Now, as an ardent phone-hater (as a general rule), it's a really hard sell for me. And I'll be totally honest in saying that I have no intention of getting one; frankly, I think I need to be less plugged-in rather than more. So I also don't care about the $499US pricetag. But as an ardent Apple fan, I have to admit this thing looks cool. You can watch the whole keynote address here, complete with iPhone demo, if you've got some time on your hands. (John Mayer plays a couple of songs at the end, too.) It's fun to watch, and includes such bits of hilarity as when Steve Jobs calls a local Starbucks to order 4000 lattes to go, ending with "Sorry, wrong number." But I won't bother going into all the nifty little bells and whistles on this thing since they'll be milked to death on every other website on the planet. (Although my personal favorite is how it has a proximity sensor in the earpiece, which disables the touchscreen so you don't accidentally select things with your face. Oh, and the fact that it has a touchscreen. I could probably make a killing selling "iClean" screen cleaner kits. But I digress.) Anyway, this is one slick little gadget. I don't think I want one, because it's a phone. But it does make me wish I liked phones more.