Tomorrow’s technology today

Someone in their development department has decreed that cables, however small and innocuous, are old-fashioned and unnecessary, so they are making it impossible for Apple fans to use them and obliging them to buy wireless ones instead.

Keeping up with technology is an issue that we all face both as individuals and as countries. It seems that no sooner have we come to terms with some innovation than it has moved on and is no longer either desirable or necessary.

My sons have never forgotten the time their Grandma informed them that she had a mobile phone.

What she had, in fact, was a cordless phone, so it was mobile to the extent that she could walk around the house with it, but no further.

Technology caught up with her a little while later when she became frail and the family decided that for her own safety she should have an actual mobile. Then came the slow, frustrating process of teaching her how to use it. I don’t think she ever mastered anything more than pressing the green button to answer a call.

She wasn’t stupid – far from it, in fact. But technology favours the young, those who have grown up with it, and anyway, innovations often come in a paradoxically primitive form before the boffins have grasped that what they came up with is unnecessarily complicated.

As a bit of a luddite myself, I was several years behind the herd in getting a smart phone, so I was still labouring with the little keypad where you had to press one key once for a certain letter, twice for the next and three times for another.

And then there’s the cost to consider; that kept me in the dark ages for a while before fortuitously I was covering an event in Tobago where I noticed at the last minute a “business card draw” – you put your card into a bowl and if it is the one picked at random you win. Out came my card and into my possession came a state-of-the-art Samsung Galaxy phone.

Grandma would have found that much easier to use.

The first time I became aware of the relentless march of technology was in the 1990s when I needed to give a colleague an audio recording of something and she informed me that her geeky husband had decreed there should be no cassette players in their house. This was obviously important to him because, with CDs then in the ascendancy, he couldn’t look his techie mates in the eye if he had such a primitive device on the premises.

Cassettes had always been a bit Mickey Mouse, I had to admit, and I couldn’t understand why anyone would buy recorded music on them when they could have the full splendour of a 12-inch album from which they could transfer the music via a simple operation on what was known rather grandly as a music centre.

At that time the CD had all but kicked the LP out of the door, but many of us hung onto our half a ton of vinyl because albums were things of beauty, with big pictures to look at and room for all the information about the songs and the musicians at a legible size.

Then computers started to come with built-in DVD drives, using a technology that had been packaged to look exactly like the CD.

Cue hilarity on Christmas Day when Dad wonders why his new CD isn’t working in the CD player.

“Because it’s a DVD,” the youngsters announce with despairing shakes of the head. Isn’t it odd that “wireless technology” should have come to us so long after the birth and demise of the device known as the wireless? The world got more sophisticated, the units got smaller and the term became “radio”.

If the no-socket-for-headphones idea spreads to the next phone I buy (eventually, once my lucky free one has passed away) there will be a sales person telling me how to set it up with the headphones, but I won’t be concentrating and when I get home I won’t be able to do it.

And now the bad news for the guy who sells it to me: his time will come. He will lose touch, certain things will pass him by and people younger than he will raise their eyebrows in despair as he looks b l a n k l y at them.

And they will be a s k i n g him questions he d o e s n’ t u n d e r - s t a n d , let alone know the answer to.