Kurtis Bell

I don’t know if any of you remember where you were on the evening of January 27 2010, but I certainly do.

My dad and I were at home while everyone else was out, following along with the live updates from Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino as Steve Jobs showed off the iPad to the world for the first time. I think even then that I knew the product was going to be fantastic, coming just three years after the iPhone launched, but I don’t think I would have guessed just how essential it has become in 2020 and into this new year.

Thinking back to that first-generation device, it’s incredible that it didn’t even have a camera on it: that wouldn’t be added until the second generation a year later.

The iPhone gained a front facing camera and the accompanying FaceTime service in June of 2010, with the ability for group calls only showing up in 2018. The recent generations of smartphone and tablet devices have often been derided as just the same as the previous version with only small improvements, but in the early years there were significant changes at every release as these fledgling technologies tried to become indispensable to their users.

The iPhone started as a phone, an internet communicator, and a touch screen iPod. Now it’s the primary computer for a lot of users out there. I’m using my iPad Pro with a keyboard case as my tool for writing articles like this as a change from my desktop.

A few times throughout this pandemic, I’ve wondered how we would have coped or operated if Covid-19 had come along in late 2009 instead of 2019 (Covid-09?) using the technology available then.

My final year project has involved creating a relatively simple program in Matlab with probably a few hundred lines of code on a machine that would run laps around the Dell laptop I had a decade ago.

Video calls would probably bring most home networks to their knees, all to see a grainy picture of something that looks like your lecturer trying to explain thermodynamics.

Go back just one more decade and a hypothetical Covid-99 (sounds like a generic painkiller brand) would have really tested the abilities of the computers and what passed for internet connections and websites at the time. Although, I will say the multiple colour options of the contemporary iMac G3 would have made for great company while working at home, with more personality than today’s computers. The adverts for it had to guide people through the ‘three easy steps’. And now, we really can’t do anything without the internet.

Then there’s that small matter of our internet connections. I’m very fortunate and privileged to have a fast and consistent broadband connection, but if the past year has shown us anything, it’s that a) a lot of the country – especially Northern Ireland - is still woefully underserved when it comes to the internet speed they can receive, and b) an internet connection should really be considered a public utility, and there have been calls in the United States for it to be regulated as such.

Access to the devices themselves is also a matter of privilege and this pandemic has only served to highlight the gap that exists between people who can afford new devices, or families that must share one computer between multiple members for work or school.

This has certainly been a year that most of us would have preferred if it had been a 'normal' year, where we didn’t have to worry about the R-number, social distancing or wearing face masks in public. That said, I think we’re very lucky that our devices have allowed us to stay connected with other students, family, and friends as well as we have, despite its limitations. Hopefully when we can meet up like we used to be able to, we’ll appreciate it even more than we did before.

Kurtis Bell is an Aerospace Engineering student at Queen’s

TECH – Why the Pandemic Made me Appreciate Technology Even More