Randomly Noted

Actually, that’s not me. I’m an admirer of the Apple-Jobs phenomenon – from afar. The last Apple I owned was a Mac II in the late 1980s; it did what I needed it to do as I typed up grad school research papers. Today, I own an MP3 player, but not an iPod. Mine is a Zen, by Creative Arts; I bought it when we lived in Singapore. It works fine – I listen to music and watch old episodes of “Weeds” and “Dexter” during the daily train commute. (My husband downloads this stuff for me – a sign of how un-tech-savvy I am.) I have a Blackberry – that is, it has me in its Crackberry grip. It’s my phone, my email, my address book, my “to do” list – and my route to online newspapers and magazines. Small as the Blackberry is, I manage to read it for an average of three hours a day. You may be like me – intrigued by all things Apple but not obsessed enough to really care what the new tablet’s called (iPad) or to road-test it when it hits stores. All that said, if the new Apple tablet is totally and utterly convenient for all the functions described above, I may buy it. (The price, around $500-800, looks reasonable.) Moreover, if fairly neutral, even apathetic, people like me succumb, the sky’s the limit for Steve Jobs’ company. You see, Jobs already owns the die-hard Apple freaks, and  he’ll never seduce the anti-Apple clique. But middle-ground people like me – fly-over country, so to speak – who use cell phones, MP3 players and Blackberries, but find one or all of them not quite right for our multi-media purposes – we just might be lured to Apple country with the right new product.