This thing is our lives.
The Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPhone, which represents one of the most influential technological innovations of all time, will turn five years old June 29. And if five years is anything in technology, it’s enough time to start taking something for granted.
Through several iterations, the iPhone turned a phone into a 21st century Swiss Army knife, packing a host of utilities into a sleek, 9-millimeter-thick, 5-ounce box. But after a prolonged amount of use, you might forget just how much crap Apple has taken off your back and crammed into a phone.
Off the cuff, even my relatively spartan iPhone 4 — I have roughly 40 apps and feel like a pauper compared to some of my friends — has replaced virtually a room’s worth of supplies. It’s got a camera, calculator, compass, dictionary, flashlight, voice recorder, navigation app, bar code scanner and an alarm clock, while also allowing me to read the news, play games, watch video, check my mail and overmanage my God-awful fantasy baseball teams. (And had I manned up and bought a 4S, I’d have a chatty personal assistant in my pocket).
Delve through the App Store, and you can supply yourself with a mobile bartender, a calorie counter, an exercise assistant, photo-editing software, coupons, a restaurant reservations-maker, a level device, an airhorn and more.
Which is all a long way of saying that past the hundreds of dollars you actually shell out to buy one, if you happen to cross paths with an engineer, designer or anyone involved with making the iPhone and other smartphones what they are today, give ’em a brief nod of appreciation that you don’t have to carry around something like this:
| Photo sources: Phone, controller, mailbox, dictionary, calculator, alarm, newspaper, camera, flashlight, television, voice recorder, bar code scanner |
Kyle Woodley is the assistant editor of InvestorPlace.com. As of this writing, he did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned securities. Follow him on Twitter at @KyleWoodley.
