Steve Jobs Announces the iPhone

On January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs changed the world by announcing the iPhone. The touchscreen device combined the previously wildly popular iPod with a camera, web browsing and other Apple native “apps.” Prior to this, phones were largely utilitarian devices that mostly served as communication devices. Overnight, Jobs replaced this useful-but-not-extraordinary hardware with a supercomputer. The effect that this had—not only on creativity but on our relationship with machines and the digital—is profound practically beyond hyperbole. As mentioned many times in this Timeline, Casey Reas mentioned several pre-conditions for NFTs in human history, including the dematerialization of the art object beginning in the 1960s and the rise of mass media art—coupled with our changing relationship with the machine and mechanical devices, as this author argues—in the 1970s and ’80s that paved the way for the NFT and digital art’s potential mass adoption. The next key step, according to Reas, is the sudden ubiquitous computer power afforded to billions of people on the planet in the form of a computer in their pocket. A gigantic leap in this development is the announcement of the first iPhone. Another theme of this Timeline is the challenges of accessibility of computers, dating back to Vera Molnar needing to sneak into Parisian mainframe premises to access one. Again, overnight, that issue, on a conceptual level, disappeared. The pathway to billions having access to a computer became apparent. It would take time to realize but the effects on human creativity and expression are still only being reached on a superficial level.