Around 700 million people use an iPhone. I am baffled by this number. I can’t even think straight when I think of 1 million, but 700 million? I can’t imagine the true scale of 700 million users. That means that a staggering 1/3 of all cell phone holders have an iPhone. But this astounding scale that Apple has gotten to was relatively overnight. the iPhone launched in 2007. In a mere decade, Apple has built an empire of services, software, and hardware. Apple has single handedly changed the entire world for the better.

Practically no one knows the true impact of the iPhone. It changed every single aspect of the world. Every single job has been speed up and completely turned sideways since the iPhone. A practical example is of a very common job, the store owner.

Before the iPhone, managing the item supply would be a very tough job. It still is today, but the iPhone massively streamlined this process. Before the iPhone, a store owner would have to call up every single supplier that they were getting supplies from and physically go to the supplier to get their goods. The iPhone enabled this same store owner to easily schedule all of this automatically. Automatic delivery, automatic scheduling, an automatic win. This would greatly impact the scale of all businesses, and not just store owners. The ease of communication allowed for much quicker operations.

When my dad would go on a road trip with my mom, it was a big planning and logistics ordeal. The route, the hotel, the restaurant that they would stop in, all of that would have to be meticulously planned to the dot. If this plan wasn’t executed, then all they had with them was their lousy GPS which didn’t work very well. After the iPhone, all of this was eliminated. The route could be planned along the way. The trip was a new experience, with less planning and more of having fun, which is what a road trip is all about.

There are other countless other ways in which the iPhone revolutionized the world and life as we know, and the above example are just a small sliver of what the iPhone did.

But how did the iPhone come to be? Back when the iPod came out around 2005, Apple was doing great. Their sales were through the roof, they were all making lots of money, and financially, Apple was a very happy company. But Steve Jobs, the iconic leader of Apple, wasn’t satisfied. He saw the potential for a new market in the cell phone industry, and the technology was rapidly growing at that time. If they didn’t make something to break the roof off of this industry, there were in big danger of being splashed out of the water.

So Apple engineers, including Steve Jobs and his partner, Steve Wozniak, worked to make a new phone that would completely shatter the expectations of that time. The concept of not only acting as a phone, but as an entertainment and even gaming machine was the Apple concept. With the help of the newer touchscreen research that Apple had been doing, they came up with the first iPhone in 2007. After the iPhone came out, Apple truly dominated the phone industry. Sales skyrocketed to even higher numbers, and Apple truly became what it is today.