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The Moment That Changed Everything
This week marks the 12th anniversary of the introduction of the iPhone (it wasn’t actually released until June of 2007). Is the iPhone the most important invention ever made? It’s definitely the most successful, catapulting Apple from a niche electronics maker to the most valuable company in the world (at least temporarily).
The iPhone is responsible for creating thousands of ancillary businesses (arguably, including this one) and an untold number of jobs. The iPhone changed politics (could Trump have been elected without Twitter?), dating, family dynamics (“son, no texting at the table!”), and made free communication over any distance ubiquitous.
That said, the iPhone has also killed attention spans, made movies and the theater less pleasant, and harmed countless other activities.
So, are we better off or worse due the late Mr. Jobs’ invention? Discuss.
Published in General
Logically, if I wanted to talk to somebody, then I would be calling them. :P
Sure. But I’d control the time and place, and call when I had access to a land line.
Exactly.
The rate of labor productivity growth fell starting in the mid-70s, rose again in the 90s then started to fall again in the mid-to-late 2000s. Here’s a graph:
The blue line is output per hour on a quarterly basis, the orange line is the final value at year’s end.
You can see a nice bump in productivity starting in the 90s and declining in the 2000s, ending in today’s presently low rate.
So the tens of millions of people who literally live in fear–every single day–of what the economy is going to do to them and their children should be grateful to capitalism for giving them smartphones and IoT devices?
You must be laboring under the idea that the iPhone was specifically made as a business tool. If so, then the chart above is totally irrelevant and useless…because the iPhone’s attributes extend well beyond whether it’s a useful business tool that enhances productivity…it was a game changer in how people behaved throughout their entire day and what they did with their phones given constantly enhanced features and apps. I think it can be argued quite convincingly that many of those changes in behavior were generally beneficial and in some cases a boon to the economy and a vast improvement to the standard of living; even as other negative behaviors – texting while driving, lack of interaction with others in the same room – became evident…but thanks for playing the game.
If you’re ungrateful for advances in technology that help to improve your way of life and lives of millions of others on the planet then you’re either harboring some serious resentment about life in general or resentment about those who want to improve it for others – either way you have some serious issues you may want to deal or get help with. There appears more at play here than simply disdain for Apple products.
Like I said. A toy :) Toys for adults are often very useful things; how many guys own lots of neat woodworking equipment and make their own furniture, despite the fact that the same piece of furniture made out of the same materials will often cost more if you make it yourself then if you bought it new?
Think about the state of tech in the late 90s, or early 2000s. What it be that bad to live in that world again? We had desktop computers, laptops, DVDs, “personal digital assistants” (Palm), cell phones, inkjet printers, video games, the internet, etc.
In the ten years before 2007 the American market got DVDs, BluRay, MP3 players, PDAs, home automation (e.g. X10), flatscreen TVs and internet access became universal. In the ten years after we got. . . smartphones. And tablets. That’s pretty much it, right?