2007

Smart Phone

Steve Jobs (1955–2011)

The smart phone is something that we can pin down to an exact day of birth. Because, although there had been predecessors that had many of the attributes of smart phones, the smart phone came into widespread public consciousness on the day Steve Jobs announced the iPhone: January 9, 2007. This phone was the true beginning of the smart phone era in the same way that the Model T marked the start of the automotive era.

The iPhone is an engineering masterpiece, developed by many people at Apple. Think of the many things crammed into its tiny case—all of them the product of decades of engineering advancement. There is the low-power, tiny CPU with RAM—something that a decade earlier would have filled a breadbox and a decade before that would have filled a room. There is the flash memory system able to hold thousands of songs. Such a thing simply did not exist two decades earlier and this system is tiny compared to the hard disk it replaced. There is the cell phone radio system, digitized and shrunk down to tiny proportions, along with an antenna that uses the case itself to improve reception. The capacitive touch screen is light, thin, bright, and responsive to touch in ways never seen before. It even had a two-megapixel camera, along with an accelerometer and a proximity detector to keep your face from tapping the screen. And then there is the thin, light battery that provides enough electricity for a day of operation.

Thousands of engineers worked over the course of several generations to make the iPhone possible. Apple brought all of that hardware and technology together and their packaging and manufacturing engineers compressed it into an amazing, compact, lightweight product.

And then Apple added one more thing—software engineers wrote code that made this whole complex package so simple that just about anyone could use it intuitively.

The marketplace exploded with delight—millions of people had been waiting for someone to crack the code, and Apple engineers had done it.

SEE ALSO ENIAC—The First Digital Computer (1946), Dynamic RAM (1966), Flash Memory (1980), Mobile Phone (1983), Lithium Ion Battery (1991), Digital Camera (1994).

Apple CEO Steve Jobs holds up an iPhone at the MacWorld Conference in San Francisco, January 9, 2007.