The iPad is coming in just over a week, and I realize everyone’s excited, and you’re all going to write some very intelligent things about the little unexpected shortcomings and grand bits of cleverness and how it’s not really a replacement for a “real computer” but maybe it’ll get there someday and dear god I hope this isn’t the future of computing because where’s the filesystem and the App Store is terrible and why isn’t there a camera and holy shit have you seen Koi Pond on this thing.

Not that I don’t look forward to it all. But first, some perspective.

In 2005, I had a Motorola RAZR. I used it to check my email from a car once. It was amazing. That was five years ago.

The image above is from 2010, but it was the same in 2008. It’s the settings page that lets me decide whether my phone should use the American or the European standard for resolution and frame rate to transcode video from digital to analog before sending it to my TV.

Think about that. Just fucking think about it.