Love Jewelery

I recently staged a mildly satisfying act of personal revolt.

My contract with Orange having lapsed, it proposed to upgrade my mobile, gratis, to either a BlackBerry or an iPhone. The choice was a no-brainer. The BlackBerry is far less pricey and about a squillion times less adaptable than the iPhone. Its cramped keypad, forcing one's thumbs to tiptoe across its tiny, buttony keys (to start with, at least, one feels rather like a blind man confronted with Braille), proves absolutely no match for the iPhone's sleek touch-sensitive screen over which all one has to do is wave one's index finger like a conjuror's wand. Added to which, I had been an Apple Mac enthusiast for virtually a quarter of a century, ever since I swapped my very first computer, an Amstrad, for what I thought of as the Amstradivarius of the sexy little Mac SE30, and had repeatedly lauded its original interface, to any-one prepared to listen to me, as one of the great designs of the 20th century.

Yet in the end I chose the BlackBerry.
Why so? One motivation, I cannot tell a lie, was sheer contrariness. When, back in the Eighties, I bought the exorbitantly expensive SE30, my acquaintances regarded it as a reckless, even foolhardy, purchase to have made. Pure and pristine its interface might be, I had paid more for less. I would have endless compatibility issues with PCs – which, in truth, I did have in the early years, but the problem was, after all, one shared by my correspondents. Few email servers were equipped to handle Apple products – also true, but I found one that was, and have been its customer ever since. And games manufacturers, I was warned, barely bothered targeting Mac users, a fact about which, as a writer, someone for whom a computer was primarily a professional tool (hard now to recall that it was once also quaintly called a word processor), I couldn't have cared less.

On the contrary, I positively relished the ostracism. To me it felt as though I'd been inducted into a Masonry, a secret society, an occult fraternity of embattled, like-minded initiates.

Well, that cryptic complicity, that period when Apple was kept alive, and then only by the skin of its teeth, because the Microsoft monolith needed competition, however feeble, to deflect charges of monopoly, has long since gone. And although I'm neither a crank nor a churl, I can't believe I'm alone in regretting its passing. There exist few states of mind as gratifying as knowing something that scarcely anyone else knows.

Opting for a BlackBerry, though, wasn't just a matter of resentment at no longer being able to feel smugly out of step with the benighted majority. It wasn't just that I had become increasingly irritated by the reverence and hype which now accompany all new Apple products, or new versions of old products. Not just that I flinch from photographs of Steve Jobs, like Moses bearing aloft his iTablet of Commandments, brandishing some supposedly groundbreaking new doodad. (And not even Moses had to be reminded by God that, if His message was to be satisfactorily communicated, the tablet would have to be grasped in one and only one specific way.) Not just that my teeth are regularly set on edge by similar coverage of Mac groupies salivating over their iPods or iPads. In short, if I rejected the iPhone, it wasn't just because of my suspicion that the whole Apple phenomenon was a gigantic iCon trick.

In reality, I had over the years grown more and more disillusioned with what had once been the company's core product, its computers. Apple, like nature, abhors a vacuum; and, in thrall to the fundamental imperative of the capitalistic system that even perfection be shown to be capable of improvement (otherwise, how will potential customers be inveigled into upgrading something which still, dammit, works?), it gradually transformed its interface, that flawless wedding of function, form and aesthetic felicity, into a fidgety hybrid of words and images. It was, moreover, the images, the cutesy marginalia on which most of its designers' ingenuity had been expended, that definitively gained the upper hand.

Now, it's true, I'm a writer – and I acknowledge that a writer's needs will inevitably strike the non-writer as irrelevantly specialised. I belong to another epoch. I don't play video games. I don't download music. I don't have a Facebook account. I am not a member of the twitterati or tweetering classes (though I might be tempted to subscribe if there arose a chance of reading the tweeted minute-by-minute impressions of an American convict as he's strapped into the electric chair). I also have a loathing of the insidious Tesco-isation of literature represented by Kindles and iBooks. And just as I never took the slightest interest in the opinions of Joe Bloggs, the man on the Clapham omnibus, so today I can live perfectly happily without those of Joe Blogs, the man on the Clapham website.

drive from www.independent.co.uk