Multi-touch smartphone

Smartphones existed before the iPhone. BlackBerry dominated corporate email. Palm had loyal followers. Nokia's Symbian powered millions of devices. But these phones were defined by their physical keyboards and styluses—interfaces designed by engineers for engineers. When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone on January 9, 2007, he declared Apple was 'reinventing the phone.' The key innovation wasn't the phone itself but its interface: a capacitive multi-touch screen that eliminated nearly all physical buttons, responding directly to fingers with gestures like pinch-to-zoom and swipe-to-scroll.

The adjacent possible had been assembling for years. ARM processors delivered computing power at mobile-friendly wattage. Flash memory provided solid-state storage. Lithium-ion batteries offered adequate energy density. 3G networks enabled mobile internet. But the true enabling component was Corning's chemically strengthened glass. Apple's Gorilla Glass could survive pocket life—scratches from keys, drops onto pavement—while remaining thin and touch-sensitive. Without durable cover glass, pocket-sized touchscreens would have been impractical.

Multi-touch itself had deep roots. Jeff Han demonstrated large-format multi-touch at TED in 2006. Academic research stretched back decades. What Apple contributed was integration: combining multi-touch with a mobile operating system, app ecosystem, visual design language, and manufacturing at scale. The software was as important as the hardware—iOS's smooth scrolling with momentum, its responsive touch feedback, its intuitive gestures created an experience that felt natural rather than technical.

The cascade was immediate and industry-transforming. Google accelerated Android development, shifting from BlackBerry-style designs to touchscreen devices. Nokia and BlackBerry, caught mid-product-cycle, never recovered. Samsung became Apple's primary competitor. Within five years, smartphones had become the dominant computing platform globally, displacing not just feature phones but cameras, GPS devices, music players, and for many users, laptops. App stores created new software ecosystems. Mobile advertising transformed marketing. Social media became mobile-first.

By 2025, over 4 billion people carried smartphones. The device had become the primary interface to the digital world for most of humanity. What began as Apple's bet on multi-touch—a bet that its competitors initially dismissed as impractical for business users—had fundamentally restructured how humans interact with technology and each other.