The Future. . .Again!

My kids love cool. Just like all kids do. But, they don’t generally pay close enough attention when the herald of the new cool thing is their dad. Sometimes they do, but not always.

Today, my red head came into me as I was moving the morning podcasts to my iPod and said, kind of excited and out of breath, “Dad, do you know the band Family Force 5?”

I stared back amazed and baffled for a second. Searching my brain for the missing part of what he was talking about, because his question couldn’t be that simple. I replied.

“Um, yeah----we’ve been listening to them in the car for the last 6 months taking you to school”

“Oh, yeah, right----but did you know that they were cool?”

“I’ve been telling you they were cool for the last 6 months.”

“Yeah, but no---now they’re really cool. Dustin (his best friend’s brother who is in High School) listens to them. He has all their albums.”

Sigh. I can even prove that I was into them for ages-----I posted their video off Youtube on my blog!

“All their album. They only have one. They’ve only been out since middle of last year. Their currently touring with TobyMac---we’ll be seeing them at the Fine Arts Festival (a youth event) we’re going to before the end of the school year.”

“Really? Awesome!”, and off he trundles to go tell the other guys in the living room the good news. We’re going to be seeing them in concert!

So many things go about the same way. I can’t just name drop. I have to really be surreptitiously aggressive with introducing my kids to things that are cool that they’ll totally love. Pulling up the movie trailer nonchalantly, leaving magazines open to ads and articles about events coming up, burning them CDs that I deliver to their rooms with little or no ceremony or sneaking songs onto their iPod when they aren’t looking. But mostly I bring things up and then wait for conversations like the above to point them back to the starting point of where I originally recognized that this was something that was going to be big.

I picked up on indi bands like Relient K, Switchfoot, Flyleaf, TFK, and the like before the cool kids did. I pointed out sites like Myspace, Youtube and Secondlife. I brought them the HomestarRunner Internet cartoon and Ask a Ninja. I showed them trailers for Napoleon Dynamite, for goodness sake. All these things went uber cool with their friends—or their friends older siblings, and I just want to say, "Listen to meeeee---I was there first!" I don't mean to sound whiney. I've just never been in this position before, and lately I've begun to feel like a 21 century version of the myth of Cassandra.

I'm the first to admit that I can’t predict the future and don’t claim to have my finger on the pulse of youth or cool culture. I just like the things I like and want someone to like them with me. And lately, these things have been catching on. It’s rather odd really, and frankly throws me a little off guard.

And Apple. Yes, even Apple after all these years. I was there at the beginning, man. From the moment the Apple IIe came in to the Jr. High math club room and I had to get one of my brainy friends who was smart enough to be in the math club sneak me in to see what all the excitement was about, I was in love. But for years after that I had to endure the scorn of not only the cool people, but even the geeks and nerds (they had all since de-evolved into a Microsoft world), for my Apple love.

Now as High School friends my kids know begin to graduate and get loaded up for college, they’re buying Macbooks. And my kids can say with a glint, “Yeah, we’ve had a Mac for ages.” And even better, they get to drop the fact that their Dad could probably answer any questions about the new laptop. He’s a Mac Guru, you know, they’ll say. I’m still a geek, but at least now I’m becoming useful. And it’s only getting better.

Did you hear about the latest shot hear round the world?

Of course you did. How could you not. It's every where. Even my Mom called me up Tues. evening to talk about it. It's all people are talking about, and with good reason.

Amazingly, this last Tuesday Apple single-handedly eclipsed the entire International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Seems like Apple was the only one not in Vegas---and turns out the didn't have to be. All the headlines from all the other new product announcements were swept away by the one being made miles to the west in California. And, of course, this is only appropriate, because Apple was not just announcing really cool new gadgets----it was throwing the switch on change to global first world culture.

I won’t go into details on the new iPhone or AppleTV---you’ve probably seen and heard about them to death already. If you haven’t, go to the Apple demo pages, or listen to the Keynote. These things are gorgeous. And the iPhone is going to change everything we thought we knew about communicating. Pundits are already saying that this thing took the stage and all the other phones and smartphones in the world got embarrassed.

But it’s just a phone, right? And we’ve seen touch screens before, and Internet phones. What’s the big deal. And to those questions I say, wait. . .this is Apple.

Do you remember back a little over 5 years now in October of 2001? A little white box that plays music stood on the stage with Steve Jobs. With his usual flourish and hyperbole, he knew. Like a combination of Edison, P.T. Barnum and the Beetles, he seemed to sense the importance of what was happening. Many, though, did not.

So many people said, “An MP3 player? Is that all? We’ve all ready got MP3 players. And that price---you’ve got to be kidding?”. At nearly a 100 million units later this little white box and it’s various incarnations has not only "changed the way we listen to music", not only the way we think about music, but it has forced changes into "the music industry itself ,” to quote Mr. Jobs from his keynote---and he’s right. But he stopped short. It also changed the way we think about T.V. and continues to change how the television industry thinks about itself, as well as radio broadcasting. It is currently changing movies and games in the same way, though most might not be able to see that quite yet.

Now Apple has gotten it’s hooks into the communications world. That’s significant. The cell phone world will never be the same. This change will hit deeper than anything Apple has ever done. They compared the level of sales of computers and MP3 Players to cell phones, and and cell phone use dwarfs anything else in it's path.

Watch the change. It’ll be gradual. But in 5 years or so, you’ll look at your current cell phone or PDA like an 8 track tape. I already do. Not to mention with the Apple TV, your living room will begin to become yours again---not subject to the dictates of the cable company, broadcast stations and movie rental companies. You won’t have to hide in the den to get to your digital stuff. It’ll come to where you are.

And the most underplayed announcement of yesterday. That Apple Computer changed their name and will now go by simply Apple, Inc. I don’t have any fear that they will abandon the computer part of the business, at least not as long as Jobs is there. That’s his baby. But now they have unfettered themselves from being limited to only being a computer hardware company. Forget competing with Dell and Microsoft. Now, if they can dream it and do it better, they’ll do it. And you know they will.

So I came home Tuesday evening and called through the house for the kids to come into the living room. I gathered them around the laptop and showed them. We went through all the Quicktime demos. I didn’t want them to miss this (even if I was competing with America's Funniest Home Videos over my shoulder). I wanted them to remember the night in January of 2007 when their dad came home and showed them what tomorrow was going to look like. To my mind, what we saw Tuesday is like the moon landing----only better. It won’t take over 40 years to think about going the next step.

It’ll be here before you know it.