Even Steve Jobs Didn’t Predict the iPhone Decade

If Apple’s initial plan was to reinvent the phone, it’s almost an understatement to say it was successful. Jobs said in his presentation that Apple’s goal was to get to one percent of the smartphone market; it’s since sold more than a billion iPhones, igniting a market that has connected more people than ever before and making an almost unfathomable amount of money in the process. “It’s overachieved, and in a very short period of time,” Fadell says. But this is tech, and tech moves fast. So what’s next?

Moving on

A decade later, so much about the iPhone has changed—it is bigger, faster, and takes better pictures—yet it remains fundamentally the same. It is still exquisitely designed and intuitive. The iPhone defined how smartphones look and feel even as it evolved from being three things, as Jobs declared, to 3,000. But that evolution presents a problem. “Using so many apps, with so many icons on your top screen, is becoming cumbersome,” Amit says.

There’s great power in a phone that can do a thousand things, but an app-based universe requires you to learn each one of those things individually. Whatever comes next, be it chatbots or voice assistants or entire virtual worlds, will let you do new things without having to learn how. You’ll already know. The intuitive ease of the first iPhone will be everywhere.

You see this at Amazon, which clearly wants Alexa everywhere. Amit points to Alexa as a natural counterpoint to the iPhone. “It’s a joke from a functionality perspective, but it’s such a fresh concept and product in terms of interactions,” he says. It’s an entirely new sort of device, built on new infrastructure, meant for new things. It’s new in the same way the iPhone was new.

That makes you wonder where the iPhone—where smartphones—go from here. Apple’s already moving into the wireless future by killing the very 3.5mm headphone jack Jobs excitedly announced in 2007, and adding AirPods. Siri is in many ways the next homescreen, the place you begin every task simply by asking questions. The iPhone 7 Plus features two cameras, which can compute more data more quickly and surely will create new tools and use cases.

More than all that, though, the iPhone increasingly is the center of a vast ecosystem connecting all of your devices to you and to the internet. The first iPhone put a dozen devices in your palm; the next ones will add countless more. We’re already seeing this with smart devices that use Apple’s HomeKit, the expansive universe of beacons that connect to your phone, and the ability to pay for stuff with your phone or your fingerprint.

This makes you wonder what the future of the the iPhone might look like. For Rolston, it looks like AirPods combined with Siri and an increasingly powerful cloud driven by AI. The processing moves off the phone into the cloud. “That’s the future iPhone,” he says. “Just an earpiece.”

You might carry a screen for those few instances you need it—and you can see the Apple Watch fulfilling this need—but most of the time, that earpiece could be all you need. Or maybe something else. “Mobile phones will really be useful when we are mobile, walking around in public spaces,” Fadell says. “What we will see is that very similar functionality will be built directly into homes, office spaces, and even cars, where we can have the best screens (or not), power, microphones, connectivity, etc. We will be more effective and efficient using the tools.”

That future remains some time away, and it’s hard to say just what the iPhone of 2026 might look like. Even Jobs didn’t have that kind of vision. But he saw something no one else did when he said, “iPhone is like having your life in your pocket.” And he didn’t even know the half of it.