The point I tried to make is that Steve Jobs touched people lives in a way no other can, sometimes at a very personal level and his only instrument was technology. Previously, this privilege used to belong to writers, poets, politicians.
By generating such a comparison, you've distracted your audience from the content of your post which, by the way, I enjoyed and related to. Why poison an otherwise positive post by inviting flame wars?
Can we please stop the Steve Jobs and Apple suck-up here on HN please? This is getting as embarrassing to read as it is getting sickening.
I realize the Sanfran wannebe hipster-crowd here like their shiny iGadgets and want to reaffirm their own worth by appraising the company which they have attached their identity to, but this is getting a little bit out of hand and quite frankly, rather silly.
Granted, I had a bit of tone as well, but still.
I'll take your advice and just leave it at that. That and refrain from commenting on any Apple-related threads in the future. There's obviously no point trying to bring the real world into HN Apple threads.
You, and others here, who dislike the sentiment that something like the iPad could profoundly change someone's life, seem like you want to keep the magic of computation to yourselves. You denigrate design for humans as "marketing" and you demand to categorize the iPad as just another in a long line of Von Neumann machines.
It's not. And the Mission hipsters taking photos of their MacBooks with digital SLRs make me want to vomit. This is not about them.
It's about an old man who was cut off from computation--something I think is immensely valuable--and now has access to it.
Computation is important. Access to computation is important. You're right that talking about some new bullshit gadget as a religious miracle is embarrassing. I get that.
But you know what? Turing completeness is a miracle. Interactive computing is a religious miracle. The mouse is a religious miracle.
And this guy's dad being able to use a computer for the first time, after decades of being unable? Kind of a miracle in my book.
I'm sorry if that embarrasses you.
You have to read a lot into the post to come up with that interpretation.
If the father had been nearsighted but refused to wear glasses for many years, then saw his brother wearing a new style of frames and decided to finally get some himself, would we idolize the frame designer in this way?