Today I’m going to be writing about a piece of technology that has basically transformed our society as we know it in the last decade—the iPhone. It’s virtually impossible to walk into a room today without seeing someone looking down at their smartphone. While there are many different brands of smartphones out there, the iPhone is most widespread in our culture, so I figured I’d discuss this particular phone, its origins, and how it has effected our generation.
The iPhone was introduced at the Macworld convention in San Francisco in January of 2007 by the CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs. He announced the revolutionary product—a phone that could not only make calls, but take pictures, access music, and surf the web. Jobs said the iPhone was, a “revolutionary and magical product that [was] literally five years ahead of any other mobile phone.”
Over the years, the iPhone has taken the world by storm. Time magazine awarded the iPhone its invention of the year in 2007. 1.4 million devices had been sold by November of that year. The App Store was created in 2008, allowing users to download games on their phones, and in 2012, over 200 million iPhones had been sold. The iPhone has undergone several updates and upgrades since its creation, along with many improvements to its iOS system.
Our developing years as people have basically paralleled the developing years of the iPhone. As we’ve grown from kids to teens to adults, the iPhone has simultaneously gotten increasingly high-tech and ingrained in our society. Just a little over a decade ago, we were all young kids and not many people had these devices. Communication was largely done over phone calls or texting through simple mobile phones. We couldn’t Snapchat our friends or post photos to Instagram.
However, as we grew, we started to communicate differently—through text messages on touch screens, Facetime calls, and Snapchat pictures, among several other forms. Our world became bigger, in a sense; we could contact anyone at virtually anytime. We did not experience our teen years without these devices. They were naturally a part of it, and that’s just the way it was. Generations before did not have access to them as they grew up, while generations after won’t know a world without them. We certainly grew up in a pivotal time in the technological scheme of things.
The effect that the iPhone has had on our development won’t be known for years, and we similarly won’t know how the device has altered the course of history as a whole until we have lived through this moment and have a historical view from which to look back on. As for now, I think there are certainly pros and cons to the product. One pro is how it makes communication much simpler. It’s definitely nice to be able to call people from home so easily when away at college. It’s also nice to have access to various apps. I particularly like listening to podcasts, so it’s nice to have an app for that, as well having easy access to music through apps like Spotify. However, at the same time, especially for younger people, I think the iPhone could have some negative effects on communication, making people less inclined to strike up conversation in person and just retreat to the safety of the iPhone.