It Is A Ten Year Anniversary

It changed your life forever and now it is 10 years old. No, not your child but your IPhone. Now we can’t even imagine life without our phones. Ok, we can’t imagine life without our 10 year old child either. We rely on our portable phones now that many people do not have land lines anymore because that is just another phone and just another bill. Young people take their phones for granted as just a part of their lives. Older people should still remember the void we had without them. Yes without our kids it would be a void in our lives too.

The world hasn’t been the same since 10 years ago. Now with the small devices we are on the internet all the time. Just look at an old Radio Shack advertisement and you will see things that we all have now in the palm of our hands. Before 10 years ago we had to buy shopping carts full of stuff that we now have in our phones. We had to buy a calculator, an alarm clock, a boom box, a tape recorder, we had to buy maps, cameras, watches, weather radios, and televisions. No wonder we have become a nation full of distracted walkers and drivers. We have all this stuff in the palm of our hands literally at our fingertips. Until the IPhone cell phones were large Walkie Talkie looking devices with a radio antenna attached.

Steve Jobs worked in secrecy till 2007 on the new cell phone. Now we couldn’t even tolerate the first IPhones. The ones presented to the world in 2007 did not have a front camera, flash for pictures, didn’t have cut and paste. It couldn’t record video. Now most of things caught on camera comes from our IPhones. We couldn’t then send a picture as a text message. The most radical was that it was all touch screen on a piece of glass. This sounds like a futuristic novel but we just take all these advancements in just 10 years for granted.

The most innovation was how in 2005 they figured how to navigate   a computer without a keyboard, mouse or stylus. The entire swipe feature was a big innovation. Now a billion people are using Apple’s idea. No one on Steve Job’s team had any idea how big their gizmo would become. A year after the IPhone came out Apple introduced another can of worms called the App Store. It is of course a catalog of programs made by people   all over the world. Then IPhone sales went through the roof. Apps have launched entire industries. UBER the ride sharing App is worth $68 billion dollars now. Instagram that Facebook bought in 2012 for a billion dollars also changed the world in how we communicate without even calling anyone.

Of course the IPhone isn’t the only game in town. In 2008 Google created a look alike design called android which it gives away to phone makers.  Today android phones outsell the IPhone. I bet if Steve was still alive he would be working on something else to be back on top of the new world of communication. He died six years ago. How often can anyone discover something that changes the world? So on its 10^th Anniversary where does the device fall in the scope of the world’s greatest inventions? Is it up there with television, the car or electricity? Whatever you think is the answer, there is no doubt that it changed the world. Our phones have united millions of people especially when someone announces a rally, protest or mob dance. We are all there in mind body or spirit. It is good to be alive in this era of innovation.