The iPhone and the Illusion of Incremental Progress
The iPhone and the Illusion of Incremental Progress
Each year, a new arsenal of iPhones releases on a neat and orderly schedule. And each year, the reactions follow similar patterns. Some laud the little improvements, fawning over enhanced lenses and heightened storage capacities. Others look at the ground gained and wonder, “Is that it?”
I don’t consider myself much of a tech person. But strangely, I still find myself pulled toward these annual product rollouts. I watch the keynotes and sit with rapt attention as Tim Cook and his entourage explain all of the ways that this new year’s assemblage of products will soar beyond their predecessors. It’s not the higher megapixel counts or enhanced frame rates that excite me. I certainly don’t gawk at the continual reminders that “this iPhone will have the best battery life of any iPhone,” or “the brightest screen,” or “the biggest display.”
What astounds me is that annual change is still possible — still the norm. That through these products, I can see my own evolution. Society’s evolution.
Some changes in my life have been gradual. But others were marked by defined dates on calendars: the first iMac, the first MacBook, and the first iPod. The first iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. Their unveilings tell the story of how we moved from an analogue world to one in which pocket computers reign supreme.
Sometimes I revisit old Apple Keynote presentations on YouTube. In them, Steve Jobs can still be found in his signature plain black shirts and dated Levis, issuing world-changing proclamations with his characteristic simplicity and gravitas.
“But the coolest thing about iPod… is that your whole music library fits in your pocket,” he explained a month after the terrorist attacks of September 11. The words landed with an equally seismic thud. And like the falling towers that left a new world in their wake, the portable music player Jobs announced that day would have a ripple effect.
In the iPod’s unveiling, I see the moment a frisbee-sized CD player left my life and a thousand songs fell into our collective lap. In the announcement of the iPhone, I see the entirety of human knowledge entering the palms of a billion different hands. In the release of the Apple Watch, I see the moment when supercomputers could suddenly be housed in little squares on flailing wrists.
And each year, new and improved models of each arrive like clockwork.
I can’t help but see something surreal in our ability to normalize this rapid rate of progress. For much of the world, the September release of Apple products is greeted as a banality.
The tech giant tries to sell the world on each new line of phones, but most consumers don’t see compelling reasons to upgrade annually. As prices soar, our hesitation is only natural.
The continuity between iPhone iterations makes it easy to forget that we’re living in an era of exponential progress. That’s likely by design. If each new year came with quantum technological leaps, these devices might spur real trepidation in users. By staggering rollouts and keeping each year’s new products familiar and accessible, they never send the public into fits of vertigo.
The leaps between generations are rarely so huge that they warrant adjustment. They never feel alien, even as home buttons are replaced with touch ID scanners, and those sensors are replaced with Face ID.
It’s easy to forget that entire centuries once passed without the technological jumps we’ve now grown to expect each passing September. Understanding the millennia that lapsed between the agricultural revolution and the birth of computers gives perspective on the exponential curve that yearly iPhones signify.
The smartphones in our pockets today contain over a million times more memory than the computer that launched the Apollo mission —more than 100,000 times the processing power it required to put men on the moon.
To live in the age when we can reasonably expect new smartphones each year is remarkable. Yet we’re so desensitized to this frenetic pace of progress that we earnestly complain that each year’s new models don’t do more.
On one hand, I feel like a typical consumer when I buy an iPhone every other release. But it’s also my strange way of processing just how far we’ve come. Reliably improving on what Apple released only a single year prior requires inhuman feats of innovation.
A ceiling to progress may exist — not just the point at which we can no longer squeeze more into thinning metal shells, but when we can no longer bear the growing pains that arrive with these technologies.
In the criticisms that emerge around each onslaught of new products, there’s a short-sightedness. People struggle to grasp how rapidly we’ve come this far — increment by increment.
Incremental improvement is moving from pre-Wi-Fi computers to pocketable smartphones in only a couple of decades. From kilobytes to terabytes of personal storage. From landlines to FaceTime.
And still, the misconception remains that Apple is just repackaging the same product over and over with fancy new labels. It’s true they’re the biggest company the world has ever known, and like most multinational conglomerates, shoring up profits is much of the impetus behind their innovation. But that doesn’t cancel out the breadth of their progress. All of the technological leaps forward that Apple has spearheaded. As with Jobs himself, the legacy of his company isn’t without complications. Greatness rarely comes without greed, and vision rarely comes without vanity. The two have always been entwined.
For Apple to find room for enhancement on this year-by-year basis is proof that we’re living in vertiginous times. The progress is more rapid-fire than we know how to make sense of. The idea that we’re covering unprecedented new ground with each iPhone release shouldn’t be controversial. It’s only because we’re accustomed to it that we believe the outrageous is normal. It’s one of humanity’s greatest blind spots.
We’re incapable of sitting with the weight of our colossal leaps forward. We’re given no grace period to reflect on what it is to live through the most fundamental change in human history. We’re in the midst of a ride that a species of cells and synapses could never properly prepare for.
As this digital whirlwind advances, it’s essential to seek out moments of reflection. As we peer out at the world from this peak of innovation, it’s critical that we understand the journey that led us here, and what it means to continue along this ever-accelerating highway.
Thanks for reminding us of what we have begun to take for granted.