25 for 25. The iPhone (2007)

Computers started big. ENIAC, the first electronic computer, filled a large room in the 1940s. IBM wasn't nicknamed Big Blue in the 1960s for nothing. Its mainframe computers, while powered by transistors rather than the vacuum tubes ENIAC depended on, still required office wings to themselves. Mini-computers of the 1970s were mini by comparison only, being as big as refrigerators.

The shrinking accelerated with the introduction of the personal computer, or PC, in the early 1980s. This fit on or under a desk, connected to a keyboard and a monitor. The executive on the go could get a portable version, which folded up into something the size of a suitcase.

Each PC was self-contained. When files had to be shared, they were stored on floppy disks, flimsy pieces of plastic, which were then physically transported to recipient computers. Scientists working for the US government contrived to connect computers via something called the Arpanet, but this was not generally accessible.

Meanwhile telephones remained stuck in the 19th century. Separate microphones and receivers were built into single handsets, and the humans who routed calls were replaced by automatic devices, but the phones were tethered to dedicated lines, meaning their users were too.

In the 1980s, though, Motorola introduced a mobile telephone. It was as big as a shoe box and as heavy as a brick, and it cost $4,000, only a bit less than a new Volkswagen. The more common means for people away from the office or home to stay connected was to carry a pager, a radio device that signaled to the user that someone had called his or her telephone, and gave the number. The user then found a pay telephone and returned the call.

To this point few people saw a connection between computers and telephones. The link emerged with the evolution of the internet in the 1990s. Email was a crucial feature, combining the text capabilities of computers with the immediacy of telephones. The first important step toward a hybrid of computer and phone was the 1999 Blackberry, a pager offshoot that allowed connections to email and the internet. So rapidly did the Blackberry catch on, and so addictive was it, that it was dubbed the “Crackberry”—crack being a form of cocaine. Blackberries also served as phones, but it was clear that the ability to talk over these devices was secondary.

All of which set the table for Steve Jobs to introduce the iPhone in 2007. It was called a phone as much to distinguish it from the Blackberry and other “personal digital assistants," or PDAs, as for any other reason. The ability to make telephone calls was the least of its attractions. It was chiefly a computer in the pocket, and it connected the user to the rapidly expanding digital world of the internet.

Jobs had been a pioneer of personal computing, a cofounder in the 1970s of Apple Computer Inc. Jobs got booted from Apple in the 1980s in a power play but was brought back in 1997 when the company was staring into the bankruptcy abyss. Apple computers had a loyal but small following. At a time when computer viruses plagued other companies, Apple computers were known to be secure, because hackers didn’t bother with such a tiny slice of the market.

Under Jobs, Apple branched out into non-computer consumer products. The iPod was a personal music player that proved popular, not least because of Jobs’s attention to details of design. Nor did it hurt that in a world of nerds, Jobs was perceived as the cool kid. An iPod became a ticket to the Jobs club.

But it was the iPhone, introduced in a glitzy presentation in 2007, that made Jobs into a cult figure and Apple into the most valuable company in the world. Other companies also made smartphones, but these never had the cachet of the iPhone.

Part of the reason was technical. Apple’s computers had always been closed to outsiders, in the sense that Apple both built the machines and wrote the software that gave the machines life. The rest of the computer world separated hardware from software, with the likes of IBM and Dell building the machines and Microsoft writing the programs. In the closed Apple system, the hardware and the software meshed seamlessly. Apple computers simply ran better and more reliably than the competition. They also cost more.

The iPhone continued the closed-garden approach. And though corporate tech officers refused to pay the Apple premium when buying computers by the thousands, individuals were willing to splurge in buying single phones for themselves. The high price of iPhones in fact became part of the appeal—to the point where the particular shade of white of the phones and earbuds was labeled “mug-me white,” for the signal it sent to potential robbers.

The iPhone sparked a revolution not simply in communication technology but in modern life more broadly. Smartphones placed the internet at users’ fingertips, meaning that a very large portion of humanity’s sum of knowledge was but a tap or two away at any moment of day or night. Information became ubiquitous and cheap. Younger people, especially, concluded that there was no need to fill one’s own brain with knowledge when you had what amounted to a far more powerful brain in your pocket.

Beyond information, smartphones fostered connections. Social media like Facebook and Twitter made it possible for users to be part of much larger communities of people with similar interests and similar views. And once it became possible to be always connected to these communities, to many people it became necessary to be always connected. Virtual communities could be more appealing than physical communities. Even as people grew more connected to the former they grew less connected to the latter.

Needless to say, the iPhone wasn’t responsible for all of this. During the nearly two decades since its introduction, Samsung has sold more smartphones than Apple, especially outside the United States. But in America many people are scarcely aware other brands exist. “iPhone” has become almost as generic a label as “Kleenex” and “Xerox.”