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January 2007. The world's biggest tech companies were off to a massive convention in Las Vegas to schmooze and drink and show off stuff they wanted to sell. But one giant company was not at the Consumer Electronics Show. Apple. Apple's absence at CES wasn't unusual. What was unusual was that Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO, was holding his own show at the same time 400 miles away. He set an unspecified date
special event at one of the convention centers in San Francisco. Walt Mossberg was the Wall Street Journal's tech reviewer, and he had more influence on tech than any other journalist. If you had a new computer or gadget or software you wanted the world to know about, you brought it to Mossberg first, and you prayed he liked it. Steve Jobs had cultivated a relationship with Mossberg for years. He called him up routinely, off the record, to shoot the shit. Now Jobs wanted Mossberg at his event. ♪
And like others, I was invited. And I said to Katie Cotton, his head PR woman who called to invite me, what's it about? She said, I can't tell you, but it's big. Mossberg said no. He was going to CES instead. Then he got another call. This time it was jobs on the line. And he says to me, be there.
I said, I don't have to be there. I mean, I have all these other appointments. There are other companies other than Apple. And, you know, and he said, I understand that. But you will kill yourself if you're not at this. And I said, well, what is the product? He said, I can't tell you. But he said, I'm telling you, I'm giving you my personal word that it's the most important product since the Mac and that you will be extremely unhappy with yourself if you don't come.
That was a hard sell from one of the world's best salesmen, and it worked. Mossberg got on a plane to go see the Steve Jobs show. Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. Jobs was on stage in his standard uniform. Jeans, New Balance, black turtleneck. He told the crowd he'd be introducing three revolutionary new products. The first one is a widescreen iPod with touch controls. The second...
is a revolutionary mobile phone. And the third is a breakthrough internet communications device. People who paid attention to Apple knew that Apple was going to make a phone someday, so there were huge expectations it would be groundbreaking. But the phone itself? That was a total mystery. An iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator. An iPod, a phone,
The way that he started kind of teasing you into thinking it might be multiple devices. Are you getting it? This is one device and we are calling it iPhone. I thought it would change phones forever. It was incredible. I thought it was going to be an enormous hit. And it was. The iPhone changed phones forever.
But it also changed personal computing. It changed business. It changed Apple. And it changed us. Welcome to Land of the Giants, the Apple revolution. I'm Peter Kafka. I cover technology for Vox and Recode. We spent a lot of time in previous seasons talking about powerful tech companies, Google, Amazon, and Netflix. But this is the first time we're talking about a powerful tech company that makes tech products for a living. Products you touch, products you hold in your hand or wear on your body.
Apple started out as an innovative but niche personal computer company. Now it's the world's most important consumer electronics company. Even if you don't use its products, you live in a world Apple has completely reshaped. It's created entirely new industries, wiped out giant competitors, and it's changed the way all of us live. And all of that's because of a single product, the iPhone. Okay, quick survey. What kind of phone do you have? If you're in America and you're listening to this podcast, you've got an iPhone.
What's that? You got something else? You got an Android? Okay, it's possible. In truth, and because my editors want me to spell this out, iPhones only account for about half the smartphone market in the U.S. But even so, that still means you're using a phone that looks and behaves just like an iPhone. Because after the iPhone came out, there was no going back. It became the template. Next question. Do you remember what phone you had before you got an iPhone? And more important, do you remember what life was like before the iPhone?
You probably don't. It was a while ago and a lot has changed. So we asked some tech journalists, the Verge's Nilay Patel and the Wall Street Journal's Joanna Stern, to help us remember the before times. In late 2006, you would buy a phone based almost entirely upon what it looked like.
Because all it could really do was make phone calls. You either used a regular cell phone, which was a flip phone type thing, which you would really just use to make calls and you could do like light texting on it. But the thing most people cared about was what does it look like?
And that's where you got a phone like the Motorola Razr. Hello, Moto. Everyone wanted the Razr phone. That was around that time. And that was like a status symbol. And then you had like another class of devices, which are really the BlackBerry or Pocket PC, which were like get. I can't curse on this podcast, right? Yeah, go for it. Yeah, it was get shit done phones. Connect to everything you love in life with BlackBerry.
Type on this keyboard, send email. You could also text. You could also do phone calls. So phones were something you used to make phone calls, maybe text people. If you worked on Wall Street or you wanted to seem important, maybe you used it for email too. And if you wanted to take decent digital photos or listen to music, then you needed a few other devices. I think about the stack of things I carried around my pockets in 2006. You had your wallet, your keys, you had your cell phone, and then you almost always also had an iPod.
And the iPod was a far superior device to any cell phone. People preferred using them to their phones. And it just seemed obvious, I think, to everyone at every layer, whether you were a titan of industry or whether you're just a person carrying on two devices, that these two things should be the same thing. Steve Jobs was one of the people that realized that the iPod and the phone were going to merge. So Apple needed to be the one that figured out how to merge them before someone else did.
One big problem for Apple, it had never made a phone before. It had been making computers since 1976 and iPods for the last few years, but cell phones were a whole different beast. But one big advantage for Apple, it had never made a phone before, which means it didn't have ideas set in stone about what phones should be. The company wasn't trying to make small updates to existing phones that sucked, and it wasn't trying to jam its own PC software into phones. Former Apple executive Tony Fadell helped build the iPod and then the iPhone.
Why is it Apple that built the iPhone, not Microsoft, not Sony, not BlackBerry for that matter? These large companies try to take their properties like Windows. They all try to take their property that they know and move their customers and this big operating system down
to this smaller device and say, it's like that, but in your pocket. You have all the capabilities, but it's in your pocket. And they want to keep all the same anachronisms. Do you use a stylus instead of a mouse now, instead of using your finger? So you think this is an ideological thing, not a capability thing? That's what I've seen as the fundamental failure with most of these companies who try to get into new spaces is they try to use old techniques to get into new spaces where they can't do that. They have to rethink it from the bottom up.
So Apple knew it wanted to build a phone and that it would be starting from scratch. It rounds up a team to build something new. And Apple, which is famously secretive at all times, got even more clamped down this time around. Nitin Ganatra was on the original iPhone engineering team, and part of his job was to recruit other Apple employees under the project.
Mark Hamblin worked on the original iPhone product team, focused on the touchscreen.
They put all of us working on the touchscreen stuff in one office area, which was quite new. And I got a nice window office overlooking the interior courtyard of the Infinite Loop campus. And then like three days later, they come in and they frost my windows. And so my nice view out in the courtyard was then blocked and so no one could see into my office.
The extra dose of secrecy was a sign that the iPhone was a very big deal to Apple. Another sign, Steve Jobs was very, very hands-on. Francisco Tomolsky was hired to work on the iPhone software, but not right away. When I first joined, it happened to be that, you know, Steve was on vacation.
And he needs to like personally approve everyone like the day they started. So they were just like, well, Steve's on vacation. So you're on vacation. And once Jobs signed off on you, the scope and ambition of the project became pretty clear. There was a lot of discussion about, you know, this is the most important product that Apple is going to ship. It was on his mind that this was a very important product to get right. And so the pressure was ratcheted up because of that.
Jobs had been a famously harsh critic of his employees' work in his early days, and 30 years after starting Apple, he remained intense.
Francisco Tomolsky remembers that Steve Jobs would check in on the team's progress every couple of weeks. I guess it was quickly discovered that the interactions were fairly demoralizing for the engineers. And so they instituted kind of like a protection layer where there was one person who was designated to go take the quote unquote feedback and abuse or whatever, and then like massage that into like, well, Steve didn't like this and he thinks we should do this differently.
The iPhone became a two-year sprint to build something Apple had never made and that no one else had either. A sprint that ended with Steve Jobs on stage promising three devices. A widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communications device. For the team that built it, that onstage demo was more stressful than any other moment.
I mean, it was just, I've never been so nervous. You know, not even on my wedding day was I as nervous as that. If safari crashes, we're in deep shit sort of thing. A buddy had a flask that he was passing around. It seems like it would be a pleasant memory, but it's not. It's a high anxiety memory. Everyone else who gathered to watch the unveiling, they had a different experience. The iPhone blew them away.
Media treated it like a major international news event. Got a front page write-up in the New York Times. And it really was amazing. People had imagined combining a music player with a phone for years, but this was so much more. A computer merged with a phone, a music player and a camera, and a display you could manipulate with your fingers. A display that lets you call up just about anything on the internet. A triumph.
But... Just because you have the best technology in the world doesn't mean that it's going to be widely adopted. There are so many other aspects to shipping something that's commercially successful.
Apple diehards lined up, they literally lined up overnight to buy the iPhone when it went on sale months later. A certain kind of tech dude loved it. If you had one, you could show it off at a party. But for regular people, the iPhone wasn't a must-have in the summer of 2007. It was expensive. The starting price was $500. This was back when most people had phones subsidized by the phone carriers.
Speaking of carriers, the iPhone only ran on AT&T's network because AT&T was the only network willing to let Steve Jobs do whatever he wanted. But AT&T's network couldn't handle the iPhone. Calls dropped all the time. The iPhone didn't feel essential. That first iPhone was like a wow factor. Joanna Stern again. Like it did a lot of things that you were like, holy crap, it's going to do that? But we weren't quite sure what it was going to do for us yet.
So it took the iPhone a while before it became the iPhone. But eventually, by the fourth generation in 2010, everything had come together.
The internet speeds got much faster and you could get the iPhone on other networks. The camera got better. It added a front-facing camera. Enter the selfie era. Batteries and chips improved and the phone got sleeker. So it's a confluence of those technologies and certainly Apple being the one that put them together in that package to kick off what was the smartphone revolution. But the biggest change to the iPhone was something no one gave much thought to in 2007 because no one really knew it was missing.
An app store, the thing that truly transformed the iPhone because it opened up the phone to the world's developers who made apps that changed what the iPhone could do for you. It's what let the iPhone make good on the promise Steve Jobs laid out when he first showed it off. Here's The Verge's Nilay Patel. Chicken and egg, but what is more important, the iPhone or the apps that the iPhone enables? The apps.
Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone as a phone, an iPod, a breakthrough internet communicator. It's the breakthrough internet communicator that has changed the landscape of the entire world. If you don't have the application ecosystem to support the actual breakthrough, you just have a widescreen iPod with touch controls. When we come back, the App Store revolution begins.
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On September 28th, the Global Citizen Festival will gather thousands of people who took action to end extreme poverty. Watch Post Malone, Doja Cat, Lisa, Jelly Roll, and Raul Alejandro as they take the stage with world leaders and activists to defeat poverty, defend the planet, and demand equity. Download the Global Citizen app to watch live. Learn more at globalcitizen.org.
The iPhone debuted in 2007 without an app store. A year later, Steve Jobs added one, reluctantly.
At first, the App Store was flooded with novelties. Digital versions of Pet Rocks. There were apps that let your iPhones make gun noises or act like a virtual Zippo lighter. Here's an actual headline from Wired that year: "iPhone fart app rakes in $10,000 a day." I remember one of the top apps, most popular apps, was Flashlight. And at the time, you know, just the concept that it would be an app that turns your phone into a flashlight seemed very novel and useful.
For Chris Barton, though, the App Store wasn't a way to make a quick buck. It was a way to jumpstart a real business that actually solved a problem. Barton co-founded Shazam. This is an app that was like having a personal music nerd in your pocket. Let's say you walk into Target, you love the song that's being piped in while you're buying your 12-pack of socks. You hold your phone up, and like magic, Shazam tells you what's playing.
Shazam existed before the iPhone and the App Store, but it was a pain in the ass to use. You had to call a number and hold up your phone, and then Shazam would record a bit of the song and analyze it, and then a little later it would text you the name of the song. Then came the App Store, which instantly let Shazam do two things. It let Barton and his company build an app that could access the iPhone's powerful software and sensors so it could do all that looking up and analyzing right away. And just as important, it let anyone with an iPhone find and download Shazam easily with a couple clicks.
Before that, we had been looking at sort of very small numbers of users, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of users. And then with the hockey stick growth curve of smartphones and the app stores, we quickly went into the next years of seeing millions of users and tens of millions of users.
This was a radical change in the way that software worked on phones. Before the App Store, phones came with a smattering of crappy apps. They were pre-installed on the home screen. They called it the Deck. And you got what you got. You didn't get a say in the matter. The phone companies and the phone carriers did deals behind the scenes. And so you'd buy a phone preloaded with apps you didn't choose and would never use. And it was really hard to get any new software onto your phone. The App Store made this super easy and Shazam found a huge audience via the iPhone.
It eventually stalled out and sold to Apple for less than its investors had hoped. But Shazam still got a shot. And eventually developers caught up to the possibilities that the iPhone in combination with the App Store could open up. And they made apps that changed the way we interact with each other and changed the world. Apps that built new industries.
What the App Store solved for so many companies is that it largely changed users' behavior. It basically said, "Hey everyone, you have these phones and now in just a couple clicks you can start doing a whole bunch of other things." And so it was game changing.
Before apps, if you wanted to get a ride somewhere, you had to call a cab company. And you didn't really know when that cab would arrive and who would be driving you or what it was going to cost. Uber changed all that. And the person driving the car would use their phone to find you. You hired them temporarily with Uber and Apple acting as middlemen. That equation turned Uber into a $76 billion company that remade transportation and, for better or worse, kicked off the gig economy. None of that happens in a world where the iPhone doesn't exist.
Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, they're all designed to let users make and share and consume photos and videos directly from our phones, anytime, from any place. And now they're multi-billion dollar businesses that have changed the way we socialize and think and vote. The App Store is the way all this gets to your phone. It's the store where you pick the software for your phone. This is one of those changes so massive you couldn't really tell how big it was going to be.
But it was also a change that happened very, very fast. In 2007, there was no App Store. In 2009, if you needed to do something, well... There's even an app for that. There's an app for just about anything, only on the iPhone. And now we don't even think about it. Apps and your phone are the same thing. The two of them together unlock a whole new world.
The story of the App Store also tells us something about Apple. That while it used to be a computer company, those days are long gone. Apple is now an iPhone company that also sells computers and a few other things. Half of its revenue comes from the iPhone and just 10% from Macs.
And most of the other non-Mac stuff Apple sells really is iPhone stuff, too. The App Store, which generates billions of dollars a year for Apple, that's an offshoot of the iPhone. AirPods, they're meant to work with the iPhone. You literally can't use an Apple Watch without an iPhone. You throw all that together and 80% of Apple's revenue comes from the phone.
So the iPhone has changed Apple and business and tech. But the thing that has changed most in the iPhone era is us. With the new iPhone, you can watch, listen, ignore your friends, stalk your ex, download porno on a crowded bus, even check your email while getting hit by a train. All with the new iPhone.
That's from a 2010 episode of Futurama. It's about devices planted directly into your eyes. Get it? iPhone. It came out a couple years after the iPhone's debut. So most of us aren't injecting devices into our bodies quite yet, but Adam Alter, who teaches marketing and psychology at NYU and studies how phones affect our behavior, says we're basically there. 75 to 80 percent of people say they can reach their phones without moving their feet 24 hours a day. That's a functional implant as far as I'm concerned.
How much time are we spending on our phones? A lot, obviously. We're not sure about the total amount. A couple years ago, marketing company Zenith estimated we're spending three and a half hours a day on our phones, mobile internet. And that seems super low to me because my iPhone tells me I'm spending 10 hours a day.
And no matter how much time we spend with our implants slash phones, it's time we're not spending doing something else. I think it's taking the place of, to a large extent, recreation that doesn't involve screens. So if you look at how we spend our discretionary time, that's the time that most of us allocate significantly to our phones.
Freaking out about tech and screens and how much time we're spending on them is not a new thing. People were doing this about TV as soon as TV showed up. I spent many, many hours watching bad TV in my basement growing up, and now my kids are spending many, many hours on their screens. But they're watching better stuff and they're playing cooler games. That's an improvement, right? Maybe. Maybe all the unease we feel about the way phones have inserted themselves into our lives is just an echo of panics we've had in the past. But it feels different to me.
And it seems different to people who study this stuff for a living. A lot of researchers are spending a lot of time trying to figure out just how precisely phones are changing the way we think and feel. Psychologists at the University of Arizona and Wayne State University, for instance, think there's evidence of an evolutionary mismatch between phones and how we've learned to behave over the years.
They think the phone encourages us to overshare with people we don't really know and simultaneously harms our close relationships because we're not talking to the people right in front of us, we're talking to randos far away on our phone.
Swiss academics have argued persuasively that phones make you much more likely to stay up at night, which reduces your quality of sleep, which makes you more likely to be depressed. Other academics think there's a good chance that relying on your phone's GPS reduces your overall sense of direction. And teenagers are growing horns on the base of their skulls because they spend so much time hunched over phones.
Okay, that last one is not true, but it sure sounded true, which is why that story popped up in very serious news outlets like the Washington Post and the BBC a couple years ago before they had to walk it back. But we are very receptive to these kind of phone horror stories. We spend so much time attached to these things, and we don't feel great about it. And also, we know that Apple employees themselves are worried about what happens when you live an all-screen life. Steve Jobs, for instance, famously limited screen time for his own kids.
I found this totally fascinating because it reminded me a little bit of that idea that you should never get high on your own supply.
You can tell everyone you want them to use your product, but you make sure that you don't use too much of it at home. And now that Tony Fadell, who helped create the iPhone, no longer works at Apple, he's willing to admit that he's ambivalent about the world-changing thing he made. To be absolutely honest, I think about this weekly. You know, is this, you know, nuclear power or is this the nuclear bomb? In a 2018 essay for Wired, Fadell argued that Apple needed to at least give its users more information about their phone use.
The same way food labels are supposed to help you make decisions about what you put in your body. But don't blame the refrigerator for what you put in it, right? The iPhone is a refrigerator. If you want to put unhealthy things in your refrigerator so you eat those every day and open that refrigerator every day, that's your fault.
This metaphor makes some sense to me. If you're unhappy using your iPhone, maybe it's Facebook's fault because Facebook makes an addictive app that makes you unhappy and undermines democracy. Or maybe it's your fault for using Facebook too much. The refrigerator is just storing the ice cream.
It seems like Apple likes this argument, too. Months after Fidel wrote his Wired story, Apple introduced screen time. It's a feature that tells you how much time you spend on your phone. That is a food label. And now Apple is requiring labels for apps, too. But we've had actual food labels for years. We're not getting any thinner. And I don't think telling you you're using your phone too much is what's going to make you put it down.
So what would make you put your phone down? What if you got rid of your iPhone completely? Could you unbreak your brain and return to the life you lived pre-iPhone?
We found someone who is trying to do this. Well, actually, my producer, Zach Mack, did. So right now I'm going to bring him in to tell us about this experiment. Hey, Zach. Hey, Peter. What's up? So, Zach, when we were working on this show, we were trying to figure out how to illustrate what life would be like without an iPhone. And then you went out and found someone who's actually doing this every day. Yes, I found a woman named Lucy Adams. My name's Lucy. I'm 27. I'm a documentary filmmaker.
And I live in Brooklyn and I have a flip phone. So about nine months ago, she got rid of her iPhone. Why? Because she felt like her phone and all the apps were making her an appy. She quit social media a few years ago and she still felt like that just wasn't enough. I would just find myself opening my phone and not even having anything interesting to look at, just spending a lot of time on it. And I was like, I'm not even doing anything interesting.
that needs to be done on a phone. Maybe I'll just try it out and sort of like reset my brain's addiction to my phone. But now that I have a flip phone, I really can't imagine going back to the iPhone life. But wait,
Why doesn't she just take the addicting, interesting apps that make her unhappy and just take them off her phone? Isn't that her real complaint? Yeah, she said it was a slippery slope and she didn't think she could restrain herself over time. It's like the same reason you don't stock your fridge with beer if you're an alcoholic. Yeah, no, that's a bad move from what I understand. Yes.
I want to make this clear. She isn't anti-technology. She participates in day-to-day society. She uses a computer. She uses the internet at home. All that stuff. I told someone I had a flip phone the other day and they were like, so you must also be vegan.
But no, I'm not vegan. I'm a vegetarian myself, so I know what it's like to make a lifestyle choice that requires a little extra work. But I got to be honest, ditching my iPhone seems impossible. There's a constant navigation of logistics. Hey, I'm in a new part of town. Where am I going to eat? I don't know. Should I look at Yelp? Okay, it's late and I'm drunk and I need to get an Uber home. Like there's so much managing of logistics and spontaneity in this city. And it just seems, it seems like
particularly difficult to navigate without a smartphone. You don't have the most immediate and easiest tool available. It doesn't mean that you can't get directions or can't call someone and ask for directions, but it's just the reward isn't as immediate. And sometimes it's annoying, but so far it hasn't been that bad. Even when I've gotten lost, I've just sort of been like, what's that bad about being lost? Getting lost sucks.
Yeah, sometimes you get to reconnect with the world you haven't been observing, but most of the time getting lost just means you're stressed or late or both. I think she sees it a little differently in that she's willing to put up with a little bit of inconvenience in order to, you know, reclaim her life and her peace of mind.
She says she's sleeping better, that she feels less anxious. She isn't doom scrolling till all hours of the night. But then again, she has to put up with all this extra stuff now. When she's on the go, she can't pay for something using Venmo. She can't stream music or podcasts. She can't participate in group texts with her friends. She can't show digital proof of vaccination. She's got some hacks to help her get through her day. And part of that is relying on the people around her.
Like I've been out with friends and wanted to get a Uber home and just have to ask someone else to get it for me and then pay them back, which is, you know, not a big deal. But you are relying on other people and having to sort of ask them for favors, which depending on the person, you know.
Might not be that fun. If she's at a restaurant, she can't do the QR code thing. So someone else has to? Yeah. Wait, so Zach, it sounds like getting off the iPhone is not just a Lucy Adams project. It sounds like Lucy Adams friends and bystanders have to help her get off the iPhone as well.
She does have some other workarounds, though. Like when she's at home, she has an iPad because sometimes she needs to do something on Venmo or call a Lyft for herself. But the iPad stays at home. It's inconvenient sometimes. But like, honestly, I don't think about it that much. I don't feel like all the time like, oh, there's another thing you need a smartphone for. You just adjust to it pretty quickly. I just think that having a flip phone has...
helped me just be a lot more intentional about my time. And do you feel like it's worth it? You would recommend this? 100% recommend. So I don't think she's doing what she thinks she's doing. She's not giving up the iPhone really at all. She's using other people's iPhones.
Even when she's at home, not using an iPhone, she's using an iPad, which is really just a big iPhone. I don't think she's left the iPhone behind at all. Well, she's not on it 10 hours a day like you are. Zing. She's largely taken a step back from the phone. But yeah, she still lives in a society where...
where we are reliant on smartphones. So that's what I think is most striking about what Lucy Adams is trying to do here. The starting point assumes that you have to have an iPhone. It's 14 years since the iPhone has been introduced, and now it's fully baked into society. It's not a mandate. It's a charged word. I'm going to use it anyway. But it's pretty close. Yeah, this is our life now. It feels almost impossible to go back even if you try. Yeah.
None of us voted on this. We didn't explicitly consent to this. When you bought your first iPhone, you thought you're buying a phone, not that you were stepping into a portal where you can't go back. But now we're here. We live in an iPhone world. Apple's world. Next up, how a computer company becomes all-powerful by ditching computers. Well, it changes it from a computer company to a consumer company. This is a dramatic, dramatic shift. I mean, it helps sell a lot more computers. But look, Apple's path was to become a consumer company.
Land of the Giants, The Apple Revolution is a production of Recode by Vox and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Awesome people work on this show. Zach Mack is the show's senior producer. Our producer is Matt Frassica. Jolie Myers is our editor. Serena Solon is our fact checker. Brandon McFarlane composed the show's theme and engineered this episode. Sam Altman is Recode's editor-in-chief. Art Chung is our showrunner. Nishat Kerwa is our executive producer.
I'm Peter Kafka. If you like this episode, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or anywhere else you want to leave us a review. And tell a friend and subscribe to hear our next episode when it drops. Quick disclosure, Vox Media creates content for and does business with Apple. None of the people creatively involved this season of Land of the Giants are involved with those projects.
