I bought my wife an iPhone. After her first day, Laura was changing the ringtone.

The magnitude of this? Well, Laura is not a settings-changer. There are folks out there – options hounds like, well, me – who when they first install new software beeline for Apple-comma or Tools > Options, just to prowl around and see what we can mess up.

In Laura’s world, settings interfere with getting the job done – or so I thought.

“I turned off the clicking sound,” she said. “You know, the clicks when you use the keyboard.”

I dropped my carrot.

“I didn’t want my texting to disturb anybody at work.”

Then there was the first Voicemail Moment. The messages were there onscreen, listed, like emails. She clicked one. It played.

“Did you hear that?” Laura said. “You have got to listen to this.”

She pressed a message, and I held the phone up to my ear.

There was no asking for my PIN, no wading through three old messages to get to the new one. No computer voice at all. Wow.

So I have no idea if Apple will sell a zillion of these things. I do know that I’ve been in a conference room with six people awed by the onscreen album covers flowing beneath their fingers. And that Laura, a non-techie, tweaks settings.

I just feel a little sadder waiting for Slashdot to load on my poor Blackberry. Oh the ugliness.