Smart phones are a pinnacle product that combines materials science, supply chain management, electronic engineering, product design, graphic design, operating system design, application development, computer science, quantum electro-optics, digital signal processing, communication theory, satellite communication, and marketing - all in a small handheld device.

Not only are they absolutely miraculous, but they're commodity products that make the miracle seem routine and mundane.

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thomassmith65 5 days ago | parent [-]

When I watched the 2007 Apple keynote where Jobs announced the iPhone, it completely blew me away.

These days the smartphone doesn't fill me with awe anymore the same way many earlier and even subsequent inventions still do.

It's possibly because I could carry on quite easily without a smartphone. The greater loss would be for me to live without a mobile phone (of any variety), a computer, or a portable music player.

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eru 5 days ago | parent [-]

> When I watched the 2007 Apple keynote where Jobs announced the iPhone, it completely blew me away.

Wasn't the first iPhone basically just an iPod with a sim card?

I mean smart phones are a great achievement, but they were an incremental improvement, nothing to be blown away by?

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jcheng 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Not at all. The iPod of the day had a click wheel as an input device. The iPhone introduced us to capacitive touch, multitouch, gesture recognition, full web browsing. Huge leap compared to not only the iPod but the PocketPCs of the day.

Listen to the audience reaction when he shows how you scroll a list view: https://youtu.be/VQKMoT-6XSg?si=OmbgSG7nmEpdAETl&t=970

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musicale 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Wasn't the first iPhone basically just an iPod with a sim card?

It's the other way around. The iPod touch (introduced September 2007) was basically an iPhone (announced January 2007) without the phone part.

> I mean smart phones are a great achievement, but they were an incremental improvement, nothing to be blown away by?

Feature phones ("dumbphones"), even ones with cameras or music player functionality, were and are extremely limited compared to smartphones like the Palm Treo, which was basically a pocket-sized, wireless internet-connected computer with a much larger, color screen, OS and GUI, installable apps, and a tiny (but usable) keyboard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Treo

Phones using DoCoMo's i-mode (which took off in Japan starting in 1999) were sort of a bridge between feature phones and smartphones. i-mode will finally shut down in 2026.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-mode

Smartphones also generally looked very different pre-iPhone and post-iPhone.

> "What we had suddenly looked just so . . . nineties," DeSalvo said. "It's just one of those things that are obvious when you see it."

https://www.engadget.com/2013-12-19-when-google-engineers-fi...

	▲	eru 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		> It's the other way around. The iPod touch (introduced September 2007) was basically an iPhone (announced January 2007) without the phone part. Oh, thanks, I got my history the wrong way round!

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dragonwriter 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Wasn't the first iPhone basically just an iPod with a sim card?

No, the iPods that were like iPhones (iPod Touch) were after the iPhone, not predecessors. The main iPod at the time of the iPhone introduction ("iPod Classic") had a small, non-touch screen in the top area of the face (except, most of the face taken up by the physical "click wheel" control, and a hard disk for storage, and other immediately pre-iPhone iPod's were basically scaled down versions of the same design (with Flash memory on, IIRC, the Nano and Shuffle, and no screen on the Shuffle.)