15 Years Ago, the iPhone Created ‘Big Tech'

The iconic consumer smartphone birthed a power shift the world is still reeling from.

- By Sascha Segan

Fifteen years ago, on Jan. 9, 2007, I sat on the floor of a Las Vegas Convention Center entryway and pondered the iPhone. While I was running around the Consumer Electronics Show looking at the latest LG Chocolate, Steve Jobs was over at Macworld changing the world.

I’d been covering smartphones for three years by then, and they were complex gadgets for road warriors. Apple simplified the smartphone and made it a must have for everyone.

This wasn’t solely about Steve Jobs’ brilliance. He struck when several other technologies were becoming available—3G for the mobile web and capacitive touch screens for finger-friendly interfaces. And he worked without the legacy-software hangovers that Microsoft, Nokia, and Palm all struggled through from the first generation of proto-smartphones.

The iPhone has made a huge number of things easy, many of which were previously the province of techies. Mobile social networking and image-sharing apps, the great 4G applications, generally came to the iPhone first throughout the early 2010s, transforming how we use our devices, interact with our friends, and see our world.

But with that has come a stifling feeling of control. Two companies, Apple and Google, now control pretty much all the mobile platforms in the US; two manufacturers, Apple and Samsung, sell the vast majority of phones. Three platforms, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok, manage much of our discourse.