I often find myself amazed at what the iPhone can do. For example, just the other day my wife and I heard a somewhat familiar song that we couldn’t identify during the closing credits of HBO’s Big Love. My wife suggested that we hold an iPhone up to the speaker on our TV and use the free Shazam app, just like it shows you in that iPhone commercial. I did so, and sure enough, in just a few seconds, it identified the song as “Forever Young” by Alphaville. Then I fired up the free Wikipanion app and typed in “Forever Young” and I leaned that this song was released in 1984 (so my wife and I must have remembered the song from when we were in high school), that it is now considered a staple of the 1980s pop music scene, and that it has been used in a ton of TV shows and movies. The article even lists the uses of the song, including in the very TV show that we were watching. Knowing the answer to our trivia question was neat, but having the ability to get that answer on the iPhone in less than a minute was amazing.
Arthur C. Clarke famously said in 1973 that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” That accurately describes how I often feel about my iPhone. What other word but “magic” can describe the iPhone taking just a few seconds to give me tons of details about the song I am listening to? Well, one other word is “brain” — I often find myself thinking of my iPhone an extra brain that I carry around with me.
So is it “magic” or a “brain”? How do we settle the debate? Simple: we take a look inside of the iPhone. Thanks to iPhone Alley for providing a link to Radiology Art, a site that shows you what different objects look like in a CT scan. The doll and the TV dinner scans are interesting. One of the objects that they scanned is an iPhone. Click here to go to that website and see a larger picture of the scan, but here is a preview of what the CT scan shows us:
Does anyone see a brain in there? No? Well that settles it once and for all. It must be magic.