In 1972, while rushing what was to become my college fraternity (a.k.a. a place to live for the next two years in a college town short on student housing), I got picked up by a fraternity brother who drove a Chevy Impala that looked, even by standards of the day, like a boat on wheels. This guy, named Steven Kantrowitz, was, like most people at Cornell, a smart guy, but also brash and unorthodox to the extreme with frizzy long hair and a snarky way of talking like a hipster. When we piled into the front bench seat (a thing of the distant past) there was attached on the floor in the middle, a beige wall phone. When we asked what it was, he said it was a cellular phone, which was a new term for most of us. Since nothing happened when we picked it up, he was forced to admit that it was a phony, but also wiggled his eyebrows and said that “the chicks go crazy over it.” Kantrowitz was not much of a chick magnet, so we laughed it all off and remembered it as a quirky thing in the history of cell phones.
In 1973, a Motorola engineer named Martin Cooper made the first handheld cellular phone, but it wasn’t until 1983 that the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X became the first commercial handheld phone. It was priced at about $4,000 and the early networks were analog (1G) and few and far between. By 1988 I got my first cellular phone installed in a new Jeep Grand Wagoneer. It was a unit that was amazingly similar to Kantrowitz’s phony phone and it was about the size of a wall phone and sat on a floor mount in the middle of the front seat (there was a bigger brick of a unit in the back of the SUV to support it and an antenna on the roof for reception). I recall meeting a guy in 1992 who had shed his car phone, which were being installed in almost all new cars at the time, in favor of a handheld unit. He said it was the way of the future and I thought he was crazy. Then, in the same year, digital 2G networks launched, and the first text message was sent changing our world. By 1994, the IBM Simon, often called the first smartphone, combined a phone with a touchscreen and apps…way ahead of its time since the internet was just getting going. By the late 1990s-2000s, flip phones like the StarTAC and Razr were the rage and the Scandinavians like Nokia and Ericsson were dominant. Then the Canadians stepped in with the BlackBerry with its push email that was an ideal business tool that made phones go mainstream. Meanwhile, every entrepreneur was investing in cellular networks across the country and around the world and 3G arrived in 2001.
The iPhone era began in 2007 with the original iPhone launched by Steve Jobs with a multi-touch screen and a full web browser, but no App Store yet. In 2008 the App Store opened, the iPhone 3G launched, and the first Android phone appeared (thank you, Google). In the Early days (1990s-2006), smartphones were a niche business product, like BlackBerry and Palm devices (let’s not forget the invention and then intersection of PDA technology). Even in 2007, they were only a few percent of the global mobile market. The takeoff took place in 2007-2012 with the iPhone and then Android driving rapid growth. In the U.S., about a third of adults owned one in 2011. Globally, the first billion smartphone users came around 2012. The real tipping point came in 2013 when smartphones overtook feature phones in global sales for the first time. Mass adoption took place from 2014-2020. The global user base passed 2 billion around 2014-15, then roughly 3.5 billion by 2018. U.S. adult ownership reached about 77% by 2016 and around 85% by 2021. Cheap Android phones, and in India cheap 4G data after 2016, brought hundreds of millions of first-time users online, often with the phone as their only internet device. Today, roughly 90% of U.S. adults own one, and worldwide about two-thirds to 70% of all people do…which is quite amazing. Growth has slowed as the market saturates, so sales now depend largely on upgrades (more to come on that). Android holds about 70% of the global market, while iPhone leads in the U.S. and some wealthy markets.
So now let’s talk features… In 2010-11, the iPhone 4 added the Retina display and FaceTime, and the 4S brought Siri. Steve Jobs died in October 2011, but the juggernaut was already on a roll. In 2013-14, Touch ID arrived with the 5s, and the iPhone 6 moved Apple to larger screens. In 2017, the iPhone X dropped the home button and introduced Face ID and in 2020 the iPhone 12 brought us 5G. 2022-23 brought us the Dynamic Island. The Dynamic Island is the interactive area at the top of the iPhone screen that wraps around the front camera and Face ID sensors. Apple introduced it with the iPhone 14 Pro, replacing the static notch. Instead of hiding the cutout, software turns it into a pill-shaped space that expands and shrinks to show live activity like ongoing tasks, music playback, timers, navigation, calls, and sports scores. It shows Face ID and AirDrop animations too. It’s all about multitasking so that two activities can share the space, such as a timer and music. Then in 2024-25 Apple Intelligence arrived with the iPhone 16, followed by the iPhone 17 lineup…which is where I sit now with my iPhone 17 Pro Max.
Somewhere along the way about ten years ago, Apple introduced Memories in iOS 10. What it is is that Apple Photos automatically curates collections of past photos and videos, often set to music, based on events, people, places, or trips. You’ll find them in the For You tab (or the Memories section in newer versions of iOS). The related “Featured Photos” and the Photos widget can also resurface older pictures on your Home Screen, sometimes as an “On This Day” style throwback. I see I have 10,837 photos on my iPhone (plus only 317 videos). I’m only using about half of my 256GB storage capacity and only a small fraction of that is dedicated to photos. Claude tells me that the average iPhone user has 1,000 – 3,000 photos, so I am well above average, apparently. I will also note that I have a special photos file on Dropbox for all the memory box photos I had scanned digitally, but those do not reside in my iPhone Photos file and therefore are not “operated on” by Apple in the same way. My Photos files go back to 2000, but those must be old photos that have on old date tag. The files really start at about 2012 and the bulk of those 10,000+ photos have accumulated over the past 14 years, which, coincidentally, is the time that I have owned this hilltop.
Every day I get fed some photo from those past 14 years to jostle my memories. There are nice memories of old trips and the grandkids when they were young, but there are also stark reminders of loss. I have recently noticed more frequent pictures of people who were in my life, but are now lost to the cosmos. There is nothing wrong with remembrances and fond memories, but noticing the frequency of lost ones is a reminder that time is passing and life is fleeting. I haven’t yet decided if I like being thus reminded, but since I don’t know how to turn it off, I am living under the tyranny of Apple Memories.