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Comment by blantonl | Hacker News Reader

I would argue that the mobile communications device called the "iPhone" is one of the most significant technology innovations developed in the past 100 years.

Love it, hate it, whatever, but it completely revolutionized what is practically access to "everything". You will be hard pressed to find an American consumer, from the richest guy to homeless people on the street that don't have a mobile communications device on their person with a touch screen and instant access to the collective works of the world.

The iPhone by itself as a stand alone business would be larger than Microsoft, Coca-Cola, and McDonalds among other revolutionary businesses.

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The iPhone is 15 years old, so it wasn't in the last decade.

No. But ubiquity and smartphones being just part of the fabric of everyday life comes pretty close to squeezing into the last decade. I didn't have one until probably 2011 (iPhone 3GS) and I'm not really a technology laggard.

The always on always online computer in your pocket changed things for sure - and perhaps it was the Internet finally coming into its own.

Maybe (maybe) ChatGPT will do something similarly transformative (I’m sus as the kids say).

From the perspective of today, the dot-com era wasn't really that different from before from the perspective of consumers. OK, e-commerce was gearing up but it's not like we didn't have mail order catalogs before. Many of us had feature phones but didn't use them a lot; you were mostly still tethered to a desktop of maybe laptop. Online information could still be pretty sparse for many things. Not really any streaming entertainment. Etc.

It's not just the iPhone/smartphone. If you showed me just the device in 2005, I'd probably have been "OK. Cool. But how well does it work without a keyboard?" And, in fact, I had a Treo in 2006 and didn't buy an iPhone until around 2010 or so. What was really game changing was the whole app ecosystem and universality of mobile. And that wasn't really in place until maybe close to ten years ago.

LLMs/generative AI could be game changing although I'm somewhere on the fence between this year's hype and this will change everything. Autonomous driving could be pretty radical as well but it would have to be pretty general purpose and that doesn't seem close to reality.

LG Prada predates iPhone and the form factor we have in phones is almost an inevitable outcome. The iPhone was a great execution and ahead of it's time, if you think it is the reason we have smartphones then you couldn't be more wrong.

IPhone was 2007, 16 years ago, which is more than the decade the OP asked for.

Not a great answer for the GP though.

Last ten years? Maybe something in deep learning.

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