The Stable Boy and the iPad

It’s easy to be a knee-jerk cynic about Steve Jobs. After all, this is a man who seemingly can’t describe a product made by Apple without using the words “revolutionary” and/or “magical.” Even techno-crud like the MacBook Air and Apple TV.

But there are moments when you simply can’t deny the man’s genius. Two weeks ago, I was staying at a working dairy farm 60 kilometers north of Bogotá, Colombia. I was fiddling around with my iPad (OK, OK, I was reading a crappy science fiction novel) when one of the kids that worked in the stables came up to me and started staring at it. He couldn’t have been more than 6 years old, and I’d bet dollars to donuts that he had never used a computer or even a cellular telephone before (Colombia has many attractions. The vast pool of illiterate poor is not one of them.)