The Wiki Man | 30 January 2010

I’m not frightened of flying. Or spiders. Nor, like one friend of mine, do I have a crippling fear of tomatoes. But I do suffer from mild koumpounophobia — the fear of buttons.

I should add that, in my case, it is more a mild distaste than a full-blown phobia. While I wouldn’t care to be ravished by a pearly queen, I am really only bothered by loose buttons, not those attached to clothing — so I can wear shirts happily enough.

Recently, though, on the ‘takes one to know one’ principle, I have begun to wonder whether Apple’s Steve Jobs might suffer from a more extreme form of this condition. Photos of Jobs suggest he has a remarkable distaste for visible fastenings, seams or other attachments on his clothing. Moreover my search on Google Images for ‘Steve Jobs + pearly king’ created a conceptual tear in the cyberspace continuum, linking me for no reason at all to a Swansea City fan site.

If my theory is right (and a 1997 article suggests that it is) then it seems possible his condition will have a momentous effect on the course of technological history: the consumer-electronics equivalent of Henry VIII’s syphilis, Hitler’s IBS or Eden’s botched gall-bladder operation.

Already his peculiar horror of seams, hinges and fastenings has caused the iPhone and iPod to have non-replaceable batteries — leading some people to criticise them on environmental grounds. It has also led to the irritating omission of a folding stand from both the iPod and, I assume, from his forthcoming iPad/iSlate thing. If the intention is that we watch video on these devices, it would be pleasant not to have to cradle the screen in one’s lap for the duration of a two-hour film.