Image via YouTube
It was a big weekend for Apple history and, it would not be hard to argue, for world history. A piece from MacRumors says Friday 7 January marked the 20th anniversary of the unveiling of the “sunflower” iMac G4. This was the one with the floating display attached to a sort of half-dome base. “Sunflower,” “lamp,” call it what you want. The piece says “the iMac G4 was innovative for its time as an all-in-one computer with a flat screen that can be moved around freely.” Introducing the machine, the piece has Apple co-founder and then CEO Steve Jobs saying, “The new iMac ushers in the age of flat-screen computing for everyone. The CRT display is now officially dead…”
Grand as that sounds, that’s not the thing that made world history. Yesterday - Sunday 9 January - marked the 15th anniversary of the unveiling of the iPhone. A separate piece from MacRumors says:
The original iPhone was a tiny little thing with a 3.5-inch LCD display, a plain old Home button, a thick chassis, huge bezels, a Samsung processor, and a 2-megapixel camera, but it was still unlike anything else that was on the market at the time.
The piece goes on to describe how limited other smartphones were, and how Apple has “led mobile phone design” ever since. If you doubt that, try finding a smartphone that doesn’t look like an iPhone. It can be done, but it’s not easy to do.
Maybe the most telling piece on what the iPhone hath wrought was from CNET. It ran through a list of products “vaporized” by iPhone. That list includes:
Stopwatches, point-and-shoot cameras, video cameras, personal digital assistants, calculators, GPS devices, watches, iPods and music players, calendars, books, landlines, magazines, paper maps, alarm clocks, portable gaming, audio recorders, and newspapers.
Personally, I find some of that debatable. If we accept the idea that the book is dead, I think Kindle and Amazon had more to do with that than did iPhone. As for magazines and newspapers - one could argue that Twitter did those in, though would Twitter have changed the world without modern smartphones, which - again - only happen because of iPhone?
Apps. Maybe that’s the real change. A category not destroyed, but created, for all intents and purposes.
Anyway - the whole thing’s worth pondering. Some piece I saw somewhere wondered what iPhone will look like in another 15-years. If it doesn’t look like glasses or contacts, I want my money back.
