Art & Creativity Quote by Kevin Rollins

The line is a snapshot of mid-2000s corporate enchantment: a businessman pointing to the shiny objects that make consumers (and investors) lean forward. Rollins isn’t describing technology so much as describing attention. “Everyone wants to talk about it” frames gadgets as social currency, not merely products. The pitch is implicit: relevance is measured by buzz, and buzz is engineered by surfaces that photograph well, demo well, and trigger instant desire.

The list is telling. Music comes first because it’s portable identity; then flat-panel TVs, the era’s living-room status upgrade; then “a whole host of new handheld devices,” a deliberately vague bucket that lets the future stay flexible while still sounding inevitable. He’s speaking in the language of the showroom and the keynote: “fun,” “exciting,” “look at.” Those are sensory verbs, not technical ones. The subtext is that the winning companies won’t be the ones with the most elegant internals, but the ones that can turn consumer electronics into spectacle and conversation.

Context matters: this was the period when Apple’s iPod halo was reshaping expectations, HDTVs were becoming aspirational mainstream purchases, and “handheld” was sliding from niche to daily necessity. For a corporate leader, this kind of sentence is also defensive. It reassures stakeholders that the company is oriented toward the growth categories that captivate the public, even if the underlying strategy is still forming.

It works because it’s a thesis about modern desire disguised as small talk: we buy devices, but we also buy the chance to be part of what people are talking about.