We’ve Gained So Much With the iPhone. What Have We Lost?

Note to Self | Jun 28, 2017

Think back to June 2007. Taylor Swift had released her first single, Barack Obama was running a long-shot campaign for the presidency, and the iPhone was about to change everything.

That first iPhone had no GPS, no video, no app store. No Candy Crush, no Instagram, not even Google. So how did it take over our brains and the world? In the past decade, smartphones have displaced most of the things in our pockets. Calendars, datebooks, the Walkman. Watches, address books, business cards. Tickets, boarding passes, keys. Cash. Eye contact. Boredom.  

This week, what we’ve gained, and what we’ve lost, thanks to the iPhone. With David Pogue, one of the first four (non-Steve Jobs) humans to get his hands on one, and Adam Greenfield, author of Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life.

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