This summer of 2007 will no doubt be known as the summer of Harry Potter and the iPhone.

Not only because the two will draw the biggest lines, or because together the two spell Hi.

Harry Potter is all about magic.  And iPhones are about magic come true.

If Harry Potter had been written even a few decades ago, and he and his wizards and witches had had iPhones, they would have fit right in.  Today such devices are no longer prisoners of our wondrous fiction.  You don’t need magical powers to have pictures, images, and words, written and spoken, from live people or recordings, available to you at any time you want them. 

But maybe because our first long distance communication was through wires, or maybe because wireless seems like some species of mental telepathy, anything wireless in process and rich and shimmering in content still seems magical, even today.

It was Arthur C. Clarke, the great science fiction author and predictor of satellite telecom in 1945, who wrote back in 1961 that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” (Profiles of the Future).  That’s because advanced technologies and magic both satisfy our deepest yearnings, and seem to do impossible things, and do them swiftly.

But advanced technologies like iPhones have one big advantage over magic:  it can’t be denied that any muggle can have one.