Defining the 21st Century

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.

To summarize I can offer two numbers:

1,162,796,000 iPhones sold (to end of March 2017).

$742,912,000,000 in revenues. $1 trillion will be reached in less than 18 months.

But more important than any of these quantifiable measures of success are the unquantified accomplishments. These are the changes we note only when flipping an A/B switch on a decade. 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.

These are epoch-making technologies. They shape the fiber of society and the definition of quality of life. They obsolete entire economies and change the balance of political power. They shift the center of gravity of society.

To glimpse the change you only need to observe how we shifted how we spend our time. The fact that 2 billion people are using Facebook every day. That the device is looked at for 2 hours a day. That it’s unlocked 80 times a day. That it holds almost all our memories and our conversations and all our secrets. That it created new modes of communication and destroyed others, ancient and respected.

That it substituted communications, entertainment, and interaction. That swiping became the most used human gesture. That we communicate with photos and not with words. That, like the voice call, transportation now comes to us rather than we to it. That it can answer to our voice. That we can never be lost again. That it makes us all publishers.

That all this happened while the product itself was always perceived as fragile, vulnerable, copyable, doomed to early demise. That imitators outnumber it 10 to 1. That it somehow found ways to become better even though we exhaust what we can ask of it.

For all these reasons I believe that future historians will point to the iPhone as the technological product that defined the 21st century. Much will follow from it and it may become something altogether different but it set humanity on a new course.


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