The iPhone recently turned ten years old, and while there has been a fair amount of media converage on the subject, I think John Gruber at Daring Fireball best encapsulates my views on just how much of a game-changer it was.
The Apple I, the Apple II, the Macintosh, the iPod — yes, these were all industry-changing products. The iPhone never would have happened without each of them. But the iPhone wasn’t merely industry-changing. It wasn’t merely multi-industry-changing. It wasn’t merely many-industry-changing.
The iPhone changed the world.
There is no way to overstate it. The iPhone was the inflection point where “personal computing” truly became personal. Apple had amazing product introductions before the iPhone, and it’s had a few good ones after. But the iPhone was the only product introduction I’ve ever experienced that felt impossible. Apple couldn’t have shrunk Mac OS X — a Unix-based workstation OS, including the Cocoa frameworks — to a point where it could run on a cell phone. Scrolling couldn’t be that smooth and fluid. A touchscreen — especially one in a phone — couldn’t be so responsive. Apple couldn’t possibly have gotten a major carrier to cede them control over every aspect of the device, both hardware and software…
For nearly six interminable months we waited. And then even once I had my own iPhone in my hands on the evening of Friday, 29 June 2007, I kept thinking, I can’t believe this.
The iPhone’s potential was obviously deep, but it was so deep as to be unfathomable at the time. The original iPhone didn’t even shoot video; today the iPhone and iPhone-like Android phones have largely killed the point-and-shoot camera industry. It has obviated portable music players, audio recorders, paper maps, GPS devices, flashlights, walkie-talkies, music radio (with streaming music), talk radio (with podcasts), and more. Ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft wouldn’t even make sense pre-iPhone. Social media is mobile-first, and in some cases mobile-only. More people read Daring Fireball on iPhones than on desktop computers.
In just a handful of years, Nokia and BlackBerry, both seemingly impregnable in 2006, were utterly obliterated. The makers of ever-more-computer-like gadgets were simply unable to compete with ever-more-gadget-like computers.
Ten years in and the full potential of the iPhone still hasn’t been fully tapped. No product in the computing age compares to the iPhone in terms of societal or financial impact. Few products in the history of the world compare. We may never see anything like it again — from Apple or from anyone else.
The first iPhone I had was the second generation iPhone 3G. I remember when Kelley and I went to get it, and the look she gave me when I asked her if she wanted one, too. I think it was the first time I had ever seen her want a piece of technology (a device she called something from “Star Trek”).
When I consider what I am doing now with my iPhone 6s, it’s amazing. The growth in power and functionality has been phenomenal; whereas before I was happy to be able to get phone calls, use visual voicemail, check email and browse the web, I am now doing things like running a paperless home, taking high quality photos and managing a 31,000 image photo library, managing my schedule, making video calls, playing console quality games, and, yes, even talking to it from time to time. I sometimes have to take a moment to regain perspective because, unlike young people these days, I remember what it was like to not be connected.
Access to mobile technology does have it drawbacks, but those are failures on our part. For me, they do not detract from the historical significance of the iPhone, and that’s what I am highlighting here.