4 New Economies, New Media

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was the leading presenter at the 2007 Macworld gathering in San Francisco. Amidst many technical glitches, he introduced the iPhone, the pioneer of all modern concepts of the smartphone; as he boasted, “Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.” The new iPhone offered internet access and a GPS (Global Positioning System) connection. The iPhone could send texts and emails, and it also incorporated a music system based on Apple’s popular iPod, as well as a convenient camera. Its touch-screen navigation and virtual interface represented a massive departure from earlier systems, which had used miniature keyboards. Little about this device was entirely new, and since 2002, BlackBerry had offered a smartphone including internet access, email, and texting. But the iPhone combined all those elements, together with elegant design, and far superior ease of navigation. It brought these technologies out of the realm of executives and tech enthusiasts, and into the consumer mainstream. Even to describe such a device today may seem ridiculous because smartphones have become so ubiquitous globally. At the time, the whole iPhone concept was so groundbreaking that some critics mocked it as an inevitable failure, but it met a phenomenal new demand. Apple sold 21 million iPhones in 2009, 125 million by 2012, 231 million in 2015. By 2017, the company’s revenue was $229 billion, and the following year, Apple became the first publicly traded US company with a market value of $1 trillion. By 2016, the number of smartphones of all types worldwide exceeded 2 billion.