Ubiquity in a decade.

It’s easy to remember the date as it’s the one on which I shelled out a shocking amount of money on a device the likes of which no one had seen before.

Seldom has technology been so compelling, so obvious in its promise of fulfillment of an unknown need.

Mercifully I was living in central California at the time so the lines at the local Apple Store in San Luis Obispo, a poor college town, were nothing like those in affluent San Francisco with all those memorable images of crowds around the block. Indeed, the device was so costly that Apple refunded $200 of the purchase price some months later after crafting the now famous financial subsidy model with AT&T. And AT&T was the sole carrier, there were no apps or AppStore and you pretty much enjoyed what the device came with. And you were deliriously happy that something so magical fitted in your pocket.

I paid my small tribute to Steve with a snap taken – where else but in San Francisco? – on the day of his death, October 5, 2011.

Pacific Stock Exchange building, Pine and Sansome, San Francisco.
G3, kit lens @ 71mm, 1/1250, f/7.1, ISO 1600

The iPhone roll out some months before the availability of the gadget remains the greatest promotional video ever.

Click to watch.

If one looks at the global penetration of smartphones – the iPhone and its many knock-offs, the device’s acceptance has been faster than that of all the key technologies which make life livable. Vaccines, modern medicine, transportation, electricity, sewers and so on, none has reached most of the world as quickly as the smartphone.

We now know Steve’s presentation to be some of the best showmanship since P.T. Barnum was a boy. He had multiple prototypes hidden on his body each barely capable of doing one thing. The iPhone was still months from a production model and was insanely buggy. But the master showman and carnival barker got away with it and the device remains one of the most reliable and bug free computers ever made. Watch that presentation. It is seamless. And today, for most consumers, a smartphone is the only computer they own.

Will Apple’s pricing and profit hegemony at the top end of the market prevail? The device has already taken Apple from a rounding error to being the world’s largest business and the single product dominance of its profitability, along with a chief executive who has yet to have an original idea, does not augur well for continued leadership when it comes to tech income statements. But no matter. This remains the most transformative device in human existence. And it was Steve who bashed all those engineers’ heads together and brought it to market.