The smartphone
The device that rewrote attention
Description
Fewer than twenty years separate us from a world without smartphones, and almost no one alive today remembers that world clearly. The device sitting on the table next to most readers of this piece did not exist in any recognizable form before 2007, was not common before 2010, and did not become the dominant interface to the internet before roughly 2014. The pace was not unprecedented for a consumer technology, but the depth of integration into daily life was. The smartphone reached saturation in the rich world inside a decade and is still expanding through the rest of it.
What makes the device worth decoding is not the hardware itself. The processors, displays, batteries, and radios are recognizable evolutions of components that already existed. What is genuinely new is the bundle: a permanent, pocketable connection to the internet, plus a camera, plus a software platform that lets any developer reach the user, plus a notification system that lets any developer interrupt the user. None of those four elements were unprecedented in 2007. The combination was, and the combination is what mattered. The smartphone is the first general-purpose computing device that most humans carry with them at all times.
The consequences are still being measured. Some are obvious the collapse of the camera industry, the restructuring of retail, the flattening of the global music market. Others are contested and more important the effects on attention, on adolescent mental health, on political discourse, on the basic texture of social life. The honest position is that we are roughly fifteen years into a transition that will probably take fifty, and the data we have now is partial.
The question we're asking: what is the smartphone, where did it come from, and what has it done to the way we live?
What we'll see: the long convergence, the 2007 inflection, the engineering of attention, and the evidence of harm.
Table of contents
01The long convergence
The smartphone was not invented in 2007. It was assembled, slowly, from components and ideas that had been circulating for decades. The personal digital assistant arrived in the early 1990s the Apple Newton in 1993, the Palm Pilot in 1996 and offered a glimpse of what a pocket computer might look like, minus the network. The Nokia 9000 Communicator combined PDA and phone in 1996, with a keyboard, a small screen, fax capability, and email. It was expensive and bought mostly by executives, but the form factor existed. BlackBerry refined it through the early 2000s and built a corporate empire around mobile email.
The component pieces were maturing on parallel tracks. Capacitive touchscreens had been demonstrated since the 1960s but only became cheap enough for consumer devices in the early 2000s. Lithium-ion batteries reached the energy density required for an always-on connected device around the same time. Cellular networks moved from 2G to 3G between 2001 and 2005, making mobile data tolerable rather than punishing. Mobile processors became powerful enough to run a real operating system without draining the battery in an hour. Each of these was a long, unglamorous engineering effort with no single inventor.
02The 2007 inflection
The keynote on January 9, 2007 is now a small piece of business folklore. Steve Jobs walked on stage at Macworld and announced three products a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communications device before revealing that they were a single device. The performance was carefully staged, but the substance under the staging was real. The original iPhone removed the physical keyboard, replaced it with a multi-touch screen, ran a stripped-down version of Mac OS X, and treated the open web as a first-class citizen. Several of those decisions had been made elsewhere. Combining all of them in one product had not.
The first iPhone was not, in 2007, the device it would become. It had no third-party applications. It did not run on 3G. The camera was poor. The price was high and the AT&T carrier exclusive was restrictive. Reviews were mixed, and many serious analysts predicted it would fail. What it did establish was the form factor a slab of glass, almost no buttons, software-defined interface that the rest of the industry would converge toward over the next three years. By 2010, every major phone manufacturer was making variations on the iPhone. Even BlackBerry was within five years of irrelevance.
03The engineering of attention
The smartphone became the dominant computing device just as the business model of the consumer internet was settling into its mature form. Advertising had paid for the web from early on, but the metrics that drove advertising pageviews, clicks, time on site — translated unevenly to the new device. What translated cleanly was attention. A user with a phone in their pocket could be reached at any time, in any context, with any frequency the application chose. The companies that figured out how to convert that reach into measurable engagement built businesses worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
The mechanisms are now well documented. The infinite scroll, introduced by Aza Raskin in 2006 and adopted by every major social platform, removed the natural stopping points that had previously let users decide they were done. Variable-ratio reinforcement schedules, borrowed from the experimental psychology of slot machines, made each refresh a small gamble sometimes a reward, sometimes nothing, always uncertain. Push notifications turned the device into a source of small interruptions throughout the day, each one a candidate for re-engagement. The pull-to-refresh gesture, which serves no technical function, was retained because it produced a small ritual of expectation.
04The evidence of harm
Distinguishing what the smartphone has actually done from what it is blamed for is harder than it sounds. The device arrived at the same time as several other large changes the financial crisis, the rise of remote work, the political realignments of the 2010s, the decline in adolescent independence in rich countries and untangling its specific contribution is genuinely difficult. The honest position, as of the mid-2020s, is that some effects are well established, some are contested, and some are still being measured.
The most disputed question is the effect on adolescent mental health. Jonathan Haidt's argument, presented in The Anxious Generation in 2024, is that the period from 2010 to 2015, when smartphones became universal among teenagers and social media moved onto them, marks a clear inflection in rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm, particularly among girls. The data he marshals is striking. Other researchers have argued the effect sizes in individual studies are small, the international evidence is mixed, and other factors — declining time outdoors, parental anxiety, the broader culture of risk aversion are doing much of the work. The debate is active and the consensus is not yet settled.
05Conclusion
The smartphone is the most successful consumer technology of the century so far, and it remains the device through which most people experience the internet, manage their schedules, navigate cities, take pictures, communicate with family, and increasingly conduct work. The hardware has become a commodity, the operating systems have stabilized into a duopoly, and the major platforms running on top of them are now mature businesses with the political weight that maturity brings. Whatever the next computing platform turns out to be, it will be measured against the smartphone, and the bar is high.