How Apple started a new era of tech

TEN years ago, a curious new electronic device went on sale in the US. It was a handheld gadget that combined a music player, touchscreen computer, internet browser and mobile phone.

It was called the iphone and it did none of these jobs particularly well, prompting sceptics to write it off as an over-hyped flash in the pan. The biggest cynics were the bosses of mobile phone giants Nokia and Blackberry. Today those companies are shadows of their former selves and the iphone is arguably the most profitable mass market device in history.

It turns out Apple co-founder Steve Jobs wasn’t exaggerating when he described it six months earlier at its launch as a “revolutionary product… that changes everything”. I doubt even he realised at the time just how huge its impact would be.

Smartphone photography, selfies, streaming music, mobile banking, video consumption on the go, satellite navigation, mobile gaming, the Arab Spring, and host of other phenomena would never have existed, or be nowhere near as pervasive as they are today, without the smartphone revolution of the past decade, a revolution sparked by the iphone.

Yes, there were smartphones, even touchscreen phones, before the iphone, but most were clunky, hard to use, ugly and targeted at business users. Job’s genius was to envisage a simple, yet elegant device that appealed to the mass market.

Not everyone was able to afford an iphone, but everyone wanted one.

While the likes of Nokia and Blackberry were slow to recognise the iphone’s appeal, others cottoned on instantly and it wasn’t long before these agile, largely Asia-based manufacturers were churning out copycat iphones in their millions, most of them running Google’s Android operating system.

The early iphone competitors were little more than thinly disguised clones of the Apple device, but it wasn’t long before companies like South Korea’s Samsung were introducing genuine innovations into their handsets, forcing Apple to play catch-up.

The smartphone race was on. To get an idea of just how far these devices have come since that first iphone went on sale at the end of June 2007, let’s compare it to today’s top-of-the-range iphone 7 Plus.

The original iphone had a “really big” 3.5-inch screen. The iphone 7 Plus has a 5.5-inch screen and many competitors have screens of 5.7 inches and bigger.

The first iphone had 16GB of onboard storage. The 7 Plus has a 256GB option. While the original iphone had a miserly 128MB of RAM, the 7 plus has 3GB, and competitors have launched phones with 6GB and even 8GB – more RAM than many laptops and desktop PCS.

The phone that set off the selfie revolution had a single, rear-mounted two-megapixel camera. The 7 Plus packs a 12-megapixel rear camera and seven-megapixel front-facing camera.

While the slightest exposure to moisture was often enough to turn the original iphone into an expensive paperweight, today’s models are designed to survive being immersed in one metre of water for up to 30 minutes.

Many of these advances were prompted by competition, initially from the likes of Samsung, HTC, Sony and LG, and more recently by a new breed of phone makers led by Huawei, Xiaomi and ZTE.

This fierce battle for smartphone supremacy has driven the prices of mid-range and lowend devices down to such an extent that almost anyone can now afford one. In South Africa, several models are now available for under R1 000, each much better in every respect than the original iphone.

Local consumers now buy more new smartphones than old fashioned feature phones, pushing South African smartphone penetration past the one-third mark and rapidly towards 50%. The smartphone is now the most popular personal computer in South Africa and around the world.

A relatively small percentage of these are iphones. But, were it not for the device that hit the market 10 years ago, would most of us today be walking around with a Pc-cum-entertainment and communications gadget in our pockets or handbags? Maybe, but I bet it wouldn’t be anywhere near as powerful, pretty and addictive.

That latter quality isn’t always a good thing. Brian Merchant, author of a new book, The One Device: The Secret History of the iphone, describes how even the engineers intimately involved in the creation of that first iphone are today in two minds about its impact on society.

“Without exception they were ambivalent,” Merchant said in a recent edition of the podcast, Triangulation. “They’d say, yes, it’s done all these great things, but then we’ll walk into a restaurant and see a family… pull out their devices and they’re not talking to each other… people walking through a park with their face buried in a phone… They all wonder if it’s done more harm than good.”

There’s an even uglier side to the smartphone revolution: The giant, almost city-sized factories that have sprung up in parts of China and Vietnam to churn them out in conditions so dehumanising that they drive many workers to suicide. Even more disturbing is the appalling conditions under which miners – some as young as six – labour to extract the minerals that go into these devices. Then there’s the environmental threat posed by the disposal of the millions of smartphones that die each year.

Manufacturers, led by Apple, say they are working hard to clean up the murky smartphone supply chain. Critics say it’s not happening fast enough. Certainly, making phones that could more easily be disassembled for repair or recycling would help offset some of the environmental impact.

Perhaps it’s time that we as consumers started asking more questions about the origins and final destination of the handheld gadgets that have become so much a part of our lives over the past decade. ●Follow Alan Cooper on Twitter @alanqcooper.