Smartphones existed before 2007 — BlackBerry handled email, Nokia carried heavy browsers, Palm Treo had run apps for years. But they all came with physical keyboards, small screens, and clunky interfaces. At Macworld 2007 Steve Jobs presented a different vision: "I'm introducing three revolutionary products: a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communications device." After a pause: "These are not three separate devices. These are one device. And we are calling it iPhone."

Two technical decisions had outsized impact: (1) eliminating the physical keyboard and turning the entire front face into a screen — meaning the user interface could be redrawn per application; (2) multi-touch — two-finger pinch-to-zoom, swiping, dragging gestures, with no stylus. Together these enabled a new hardware-software vocabulary.

In 2008 the App Store opened, and third-party developers could publish apps on the iPhone. Within a year companies like Spotify, Uber, Instagram, and WhatsApp were born — the "smartphone economy" had begun. In 2010 the Android ecosystem adopted the same design language; Apple and Samsung/Google ended up in patent wars, but the touchscreen-plus-app-store model became universal.

At the end of 2024 there were roughly 4.7 billion smartphone users — over half the people on Earth. The iPhone itself directly changed hundreds of millions of lives, and through Android indirectly billions more. How we reach information, money, entertainment, the state, and each other now runs through the iPhone and devices like it. When we say "computing moved from the desk to the pocket", this is the turning point being described.