The Smartphone

2007 CE — North America, Global

Today: Worldwide (announced in San Francisco)

Apple's iPhone merged the phone, the camera, the map, the music player, and the Web into one glass rectangle, and within fifteen years most adults on earth carried one. It put more computing power in a pocket than the Apollo program commanded, connected billions of people who had never had a landline, and rebuilt how humans meet, work, argue, and pay. It also made attention the product: the same device that put the world's knowledge in every hand made every hand trackable, and made a small number of companies the arbiters of what billions of people see.

Worth knowing: More people on earth now own a mobile phone than have access to a flush toilet — for hundreds of millions, the first computer they ever used, the first bank account they ever held, and the first map they ever consulted were all the same device.

Pattern: Information-medium revolution — A new way to record or transmit information lowers the cost of copying ideas and reorders who holds knowledge and power.

Entry 237 of 240 in Precedent, a walk through the whole human story in order.