10 years
10 years.
10 years since the first modern smartphone was born.
It’s been said that the launch of the iPhone marked a once-in-a-lifetime breakthrough, a near perfect marriage of bleeding edge technology and user-focused design to create a piece of technology over 5 years ahead of its competition.
It’s easy to take smartphone technology for granted these days, we’re always expecting bigger screens, better cameras, faster phones — but it’s easy to gloss over the fact that this original iPhone, to many, seemed like a practical impossibility at the time. The original keynote from 2007 had audible gasps from the audience as they witnessed a completely alien product that completely redefined their notion of what a phone could even be; something people didn’t even know that they wanted.
That, to me, is the perfect embodiment of passion and reluctance to settle. A testament to the power of critical, focused and principled design that can invoke a near magical experience. It’s proof that with enough sacrifice and passion, a vision once thought to be impossible, in the face of immense criticism and challenge, can become reality.
