“刘姥姥”误入苹果世界（English）

Today is a special day for me. For the first time, I now own an Apple product. I bought an iPhone 4 this afternoon at an AT&T store. That is right. I never owned an iMac, iPod, iPhone, or iPad before. Yes, the date is July 2, 2011.

Color me old fashioned! Call me a cave man!

Wait a minute. If my memory serves me right, I think I owned a used Apple II computer some 25 years ago, for a short while anyway. Technically, I have OWNED many Apple products since the beginning flood of iPods because all my kids have been using them. Since I paid for them, LEGALLY I owned these devices. But I don't want to argue with the kids if you know what I mean. I know what they would say. "Uh, right, only up to the point when you passed them to us."

Finally and surely I can't resist the appeal of Apple products any more.

I have used my Palm-based Centro cell phone for... probably way too long... maybe, 3 or 4 years. I wanted to switch to a real smart phone. I tried the Samsung Android-based Moment for more than one year, but it didn't convince me enough to switch so I kept both phones for this long. All my family members switched to iPhones during this time. They have marched onto the Apple Highway from iPods, iTouch, MacBook, iPhone 3, iPad, all the way to now iPad 2s. I have been happily left behind for a few good reasons.

First of all, I have been living and dying on Microsoft products for ages. Uncle Bill's products have been a great winner for me. The rivalry between MS and Big A has kept me away from trying or even thinking about the A products. That would feel somewhat like a betrayl of a long-time friend. Secondly, on a more personal note, I am fasionably sticky to existing products that work as far as personal items are concerned (I know, you may say "notoriously slow in adapting to new technology"). I simply have the tendancy to refuse spending too much time to learn new things for the sake of learning new things.

However, one event earlier this week at Providence, Rhode Island, changed me.

While driving around town after arriving at the RISD campus late at night dropping my daughter for her summer school, my portable GPS broke! Man, that was almost the end of the world, right there! I panicked. I didn't know what to do, where to go. To my amazement, my daughter calmly pulled her iPhone 4 out and started using the map function. Although we still had some trouble finding the 24/7 Walmart for her blanket and other bedding stuff for the dorm, that map function was SOOOOO impressive to me at that moment. It was like a steaming bowl of rice with 辣椒炒肉 on the top to a desparately hungery man from Hunan. I decided to get an iPhone for no other reason than a backup to my GPS.

Before I knew it, my son was teaching me how to use the new iPhone this afternoon. The first task I did was to learn how to launch the map function. I looked up the map of Seattle area for the trip tomorrow. He quickly taught me how to enlarge and shrink the map. That was cool. I kept wowing for the resolution, the ease of use, the clearness of the screen, and the accessibility of the functions. I am looking forward to having more fun with it in the next several days.

Now, color me "impressed." Call me "quantum leaped." 

I do want to thank Uncle Steve and wish him well. Just don't tell Uncle Bill this story, yet (as if he didn't know already). If you did tell him, I was just "checking out" or "kicking some tires." I am sure he is too busy coding on Winows 8, which, after today's experience, I really, really, really cannot wait.