“Ten years ago this month, Steve Jobs took the stage at Macworld to announce the iPhone. Under his second tenure at Apple, the company had already managed the twin masterstrokes of reimagining consumer hardware design and reinventing the music industry,” Evan Dashevsky writes for PC Magazine. “This new undertaking, however, would prove transformative.”
“The first-generation iPhone introduced the masses to the concept of computing everywhere. Following that breakthrough, the Internet would join people at the dinner table, while walking the dog, in line at the post office, while watching TV, while running for the presidency, and in the bathroom,” Dashevsky writes. “If a time traveler from the mid-90s arrived in 2010, they’d find themselves in an era where no bit of knowable information — or social contact — was out of reach; the hive-intelligence was always present.”
“Fast forward to 2017, and it feels almost quaint that we are still accessing our virtual world through palm-sized rectangles,” Dashevsky writes. “I hope I’m not coming off as too #FirstWorldProblem precious here, but in a world surrounded by silky smooth automation, using a smartphone to complete basic tasks is beginning to feel clunky and garish.”
“In the show Black Mirror, computer interfaces are implanted in users’ eyeballs, thus obliterating the barrier between Man and Matrix,” Dashevsky writes. “We’re probably still a ways off from that (though people are trying!), but shrinking this tech to something the size of a pair of glasses is a real possibility. It’s just a matter of when.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The iPhone, and its innumerable knockoff leeches, has many years ahead as the primary means of computing everywhere. What supplants it will quite likely be something less obtrusive or, in the case of eyewear + personal assistant (AI glasses), something regarded as less obtrusive (easier and quicker to use regardless of the drawbacks of wearing glasses).
Removing obstacles between the human brain and the Internet is the goal.