There’s another article fawning over the iPhone as a world-changing device. The iPhone was an evolutionary step, not revolutionary. The iPhone hasn’t changed the world.
We need to be careful about the pedestals we construct for incremental technologies. The iPhone, Facebook, Twitter, and every favored technology we’ll forget about in a decade are footnotes, ultimately irrelevant in the long view. What matters is what people do with these technologies.
All contemporary mass market products, including the iPhone, will be a blurb in the history of mass communication. The smartphone’s spot on the timeline of communication history will follow the telephone, which followed the telegraph. There won’t be any room for the hundreds of manufacturers and companies involved in the current marketplace.
History will remember what we did with those technologies, not who was winning at the current form of mass communication at some arbitrary point in a timeline. I’m sure the tech writers of the time declared one telegraph manufacturer or another the “winner” and all others the loser.
No one aside from historians remember that. We remember the first transcontinental telegraph transmission. We remember President Lincoln using the telegraph to communicate with his military during the American Civil War.
We’ll remember social media and blogging’s role in the revolution of news and journalism, but the current players will be forgotten in favor of those responsible for the next step. We’ll even still use smartphones and tablets as the primary medium.
The iPhone is important at the point we occupy on the timeline. It brought together disparate elements of technology into a unified whole, and Apple does deserve credit for that. Smartphones are what they are today because of Apple. Then Android blew the lid off the market and made it a truly mass market technology. And Microsoft has what I think is a credible evolution in mobile user experience with Metro.
We are in a period of massive transition, and the three major players do matter. They’re doing important things.
But remember that the iPhone is only five years old, while the iPad is only 2 years old. It was only ten years ago that people still talked about AOL’s walled garden and Microsoft’s unshakable monopoly. What will we talk about ten years from now?
Probably not the iPhone.
I disagree that some of these technologies are not revolutionary. They are revolutionary in the proper scope. For example the iPhone played a key role in the start of the post PC era. It shook up the tech world and sculpted direction of the modern computer. In that regard it played a revolutionary role. In the bigger picture is that revolutionary? No. I wasn’t a cure for cancer or AIDS. It didn’t stop a war or bring freedom to those without it. It’s a damn phone. Perspective is important but you need to keep the perspective proportional to scope of the topic. The same can be said for Twitter and Facebook. I hate Facebook, but it was revolutionary. It was the first wide scale adoption of social media. Combined with Twitter these sites have spread the ability to share news instantaneously. They have been used to save lives, organize protests and spread freedom (Iran, Egypt etc…) That is pretty revolutionary. Saying it isn’t the technology that dives this is false. You can’t say “What matters is what people do with these technologies.” because that understates the fact that they needed to exist in order for people to use them, and for that step to exist. Will there be something else? Hell yes, but that shouldn’t understate the importance of what we use today. George Washington is dead. His death didn’t diminish the role he played. Does it really matter what George Washington’s name was? No, he was a revolutionary person (pun intended) that filled an important role when it was needed. His name could have been “Zeppo Nosecrud” it wouldn’t have mattered.
I agree that the iPhone was an evolutionary device, but I’m of the opinion that it was *also* a revolutionary device.
Up until the iPhone, the main role of the device we carried in our pockets was making phone calls. Sure, some cell phones could perform other functions, such as calendaring and internet browsing. But these features were bare-bones, stripped down versions of their desktop/laptop counterparts. They were complimentary features to a cell phone’s main purpose: phone calls.
The iPhone was the next evolutionary step in cell phone, but also revolutionized the way that people interacted with that device in their pocket. The “phone” part was now just one of many apps. Cell phones became Internet browsing, Facebook-ing, texting, and tweeting machines, which occasionally make phone calls.
Google’s Android did bring this technology to the masses with a licensed OS, but the iPhone revolutionized the way people interacted with their pocket devices. Just look at Google’s pre-iPhone plans for Android, the ones that were made public during the Google/Oracle trial. It looked more like a glorified BlackBerry. It was the iPhone that changed these plans.
The iPhone has shaken the entire computing industry. There’s no telling what the technological landscape will look like in another five years, but I’d argue that the iPhone that caused a global consciousness, which is what I’d call the device both evolutionary and revolutionary.