Asymco:
The iPhone is the best selling product ever, making Apple perhaps the best business ever. Because of the iPhone, Apple has managed to survive to a relatively old age. Not only did it build a device base well over 1 billion it engendered loyalty and satisfaction described only by superlatives.
The changes ushered by the iPhone have been as momentous as those of the Ford Model T. Or those of electricity, telegraph, radio or TV.
I don’t think it’s hyperbole to call the iPhone the most influential product of the 21st century so far. Something may come along in the next eighty years to supplant it but right now, its importance can’t be overstated.
Yes, that’s fair. So far. I suspect by the time we’re out of the century, it’ll be something to do with power generation or a transport change. But right now it probably is iPhone.
it’s a nice thought but it’s FAR too early to talk about anything being the product of the century. Think about it like this… in 1917 the first world war was drawing to an end. In the future?
Jets
Rockets
Satellites
The entire computing revolution. Combine that and satellite and … GPS.
Radio and TV
Various medical advances that have taken the life expectancy from around 50 a century ago to around 80 now (in the US).
Finally, as much as I respect Apple and think the iPhone did in fact change our world…. it was inevitable. One way to look at computing is that it has moved toward atomization from the start. From large, central mainframes that an entire company might run on to smaller minicomputers that each corporate division might have, to microcomputers that each person in the company has to laptops that freed people from being in a fixed place to a form factor that makes the computer almost invisible, the phone.
Don’t get me wrong – the iPhone is amazing. But portable computing in a phone-like form factor was going to come. We already see the next phase – wearables to spread computing to different devices that are specialized and IoT to distribute computing to it’s everywhere.
The great thing about the iPhone isn’t just its importance, but that it has been a fundamentally positive change agent and has greatly reduced many of the frictions of daily life. The drawbacks to its success are relatively minor.
By contrast, the other two “most influential” innovations of recent history, Facebook and Amazon, may be far less benevolent. Facebook seems to function primarily as a means of separating people into ideological silos; and Amazon appears to have the desire, and may have the potential, to monopolize commerce on an unprecedented scale.
I just watched the iPhone intro again and…. I think I overstated things above. Something like a pocket computer in a phone-like form factor was, I think, inevitable. But the sheer number of basic innovations in the iPhone really was and is staggering. Things like Visual Voicemail which look obvious from our perspective now were a huge step ahead (yes, kids, we used to have to move through voicemail from last in back…)
Agreed. As an inveterate environmentalist and unwavering optimist it is my sincere belief that there is no greater cause to advance worldwide social change and peace through prosperity than cheap clean safe abundant energy and water, that only Molten Salt Reactors can achieve and yet they were designed and run in the 1960s, but their deployment would qualify them for this century.
Of course it was inevitable, just like everything else you mentioned. Jets were being developed on many fronts from Italy, Japan, France, UK and Germany. Rocketry was going on in the US and Germany built on Goddard’s work, etc.
It’s also too early to consider the whole century obviously and everyone is qualifying it as such, as in ‘so far’. However the Model T and other inventions enumerated were early in their century yet are arguably in contention are and argued for the title as well. But as you’ve just reiterated, the “sheer number of basic innovations in the iPhone really was and is staggering”. That’s what I think contributes to its legendary status.
I guess the ‘so far’ qualification feels… weak to me. 17 years in it’s just flat out silly to talk about any X of the century stuff. As I outlined a LOT can and will happen providing we don’t nuke ourselves first and while the iPhone might feel like the Model T in terms of being the forerunner of an important class of things, I’d like the hype to ratchet back a notch or three.
Agreed. Now beam me up Mr. Fisher!
Well, 17 years is about 1/6th. Sure, there’s more of this century to go, but it’s not like we’re just 2 or 3 years in. 🙂
See my first comment. 1/6th of the way in to the 20th and almost nothing we think of as important had happened yet.
Dediu is great for providing understandable analysis on not just the tech of the past few decades, but also on everything made possible by the Industrial Revolution. His context-fu is strong.
So what you’re telling me is that you’re a glass half full kind of person. 😉
His context-fu is very powerful!
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