The video reflects on the transformation brought about by the iPhone since its launch on June 29, 2007, coinciding with the birth of Noah Schmick. As Noah grew alongside this revolutionary product, the video chronologically explores how the iPhone has impacted his life and a whole generation that has never known a world without smartphones. It demonstrates how the iPhone evolved both in terms of hardware and cultural integration, becoming an essential tool in everyone's life.

Examining the wider effects beyond one individual's life, the video discusses how the iPhone initiated a broader mobile revolution, compelling competitors like Samsung and Nokia to innovate or fall behind. It highlights Apple's strategy, including exclusive interviews with executives like Greg Joswiak and Tony Fadell, showcasing how product features like the app store and multi-touch technology were crucial innovations that shaped app development, phone design, and our reliance on smartphones for both connections and conveniences.

Main takeaways from the video:

Please remember to turn on the CC button to view the subtitles.

Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. deluge [ˈdeljuːdʒ] - (noun) - A severe flood or an overwhelming amount of something. - Synonyms: (flood, torrent, overflow)

It became a constant deluge of emails and messages.

2. multitouch [ˈmʌltiˌtʌtʃ] - (adjective) - Technology that allows a touch screen or trackpad to recognize and respond to more than one point of contact. - Synonyms: (multiple touch, touch-sensitive, interactive)

Then over in the world of the Mac, they were making multi touch technology.

3. revolutionary [ˌrɛvəˈluːʃ(ə)nəri] - (adjective) - Involving or causing a complete or dramatic change. - Synonyms: (innovative, groundbreaking, radical)

Today, we're introducing three revolutionary products of this class.

4. dependence [dɪˈpɛndəns] - (noun) - The state of relying on or needing someone or something for aid, support, or the like. - Synonyms: (reliance, reliance, trust)

Noah's generation is the most extreme representation of that dependence because they've never known life without it.

5. intermediating [ˌɪntərˈmiːdieɪtɪŋ] - (verb) - Acting as a mediator or medium; intervening in a process. - Synonyms: (mediating, intervening, negotiating)

We are just intermediating reality with this screen in front of your face.

6. infringement [ɪnˈfrɪndʒmənt] - (noun) - The action of breaking the terms of a law, agreement, etc. - Synonyms: (violation, breach, contravention)

Apple sued Samsung for patent infringement, and by the end of the decade, Apple had received hundreds of millions for the patent violations.

7. patents [ˈpætənts] - (noun) - Exclusive rights granted for an invention, which allow the holder to sell or license the invention for up to 20 years. - Synonyms: (licenses, copyrights, trademarks)

Apple sued Samsung for patent infringement.

8. moderation [ˌmɒdəˈreɪʃən] - (noun) - The avoidance of excess or extremes, especially in behavior or political opinions. - Synonyms: (restraint, temperance, balance)

We want to help people with the fact that there's moderation needed.

9. revolution [ˌrevəˈluːʃən] - (noun) - A significant change that usually occurs in a relatively short period of time. - Synonyms: (uprising, transformation, upheaval)

It was Apple's iPhone that really kicked off the mobile revolution.

10. empower [ɛmˈpaʊər] - (verb) - To give someone the authority or power to do something. - Synonyms: (authorize, enable, permit)

They came from what we did to empower developers.

The iPhone Generation - An Inside Look at a 15-Year Journey - WSJ

Twelve 1110. So June 29, 2007. We were excited. We were terrified. It's a happy moment, but it's also a stressful one. What's gonna happen when it goes out into the world? We don't know what's about to come. This is a totally new experience and something that's gonna change our lives forever. It was amazing. I mean, it still just kinda gives me a little bit of a goosebumps because it was history. Two, one, three. A lot of nervousness, a lot of stomachache, a lot of excitement. I'm Lauren Schmick. And I'm Jason Schmick. And our son Noah was born the same day the very first iPhone was released.

This is the story of the iPhone baby and how 15 years shaped a generation. Try to remember life before the iPhone. Its hard, but Noah schmick literally cant because, well, hes never lived a day in the world without an iPhone. But this isnt just about one teenager who shares his birthday with a world changing piece of glass and metal. I used to post this on your birthday every year. Its because its Steve Jobs wishing you a happy birthday because look at you. Got the cake and your birth date on there. Little numbers right there. Was personalized. He cared. This is about how over the last 15 years, the iPhone itself went from a baby to a teen. As it grew and developed, so did our dependence on it. Noah's generation is the most extreme representation of that dependence because they've never known life without it. It's a generation that fears being disconnected.

This is everything you'd ever need in the palm of your hands. Why would you never be off of it? They have the sum of the world's entire knowledge and all of your closest people instantly available to talk to. If you gave this thing to a cavemande, like, they'd freak out. Of course, today, it's not just the iPhone. It's all smartphones. Galaxy S 22 Ultra breaks all the rules of what a smartphone can do. Legacy phone makers such as Samsung, Nokia, and BlackBerry creator RIm were forced to adapt or die after the introduction of the iPhone. So you thought BlackBerries were all business? Well, it was Google's Android operating system, combined with more affordable phones from Samsung and others that captured the biggest global market share. It was Apple's iPhone that really kicked off the mobile revolution.

So I set out to pinpoint the major developments of the iPhone that led to that dependence with exclusive access to Apple executives past and present, who made this revolutionary product. Alongside those conversations, I went to Wisconsin. Hi, Joanna. And I traced the story of Noah, his twin 13 year old siblings, and his parents. Just like millions of other families, Apple's invention made them more connected and disconnected in ways no one anticipated. Look, baby's first picture. And this blob is his head. But look, he has his hand up by his face. And that's exactly how he was born. With his hand right up. While noaa was in development, Apple was developing its own baby over 2100 miles away. The start of the iPhone project happened.

From the iPod project. We started seeing these feature phones with cameras, starting to add digital music, features. 100 tunes in your phone, baby. Hello, Moto. And it was clear at some point they might be able to catch up with us, you know, with this lead that we had with the iPod. Imagine a phone that has all music on one side and all talk on the other, just like you. The mobile phone wanted to have everything. It wanted to be all in one device. At the time, we were also saying, okay, what is the future of the iPod?

And if people have two devices in their hands, which one would they pick up every time? After Tony Fadal co invented the ipod, Steve Jobs had a new task for him and a few others in early 2005. Figure out what an Apple phone would look like. One was a iPod plus phone, which looked like an iPod classic. It had the wheel on it. We tried for weeks, six, eight weeks, to try to crack the code on that. We couldn't make it work. There was another project, and we were doing in the iPod team. We were making a full screen iPod, and the full screen iPod was. We were playing videos at the time on the iPod, but it was in a smaller screen.

Then over in the world of the Mac, they were making multi touch technology. All three of those things came together over time to create what we know as the iPhone. Today, we're introducing three revolutionary products of this class. By January 2007, it was ready to show the world. A widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough Internet communications device. These are not three separate devices. This is one device, and we are calling it iPhone.

My group that I work with, we were all Big Mac fanatics. Every one of us, our jaws just hit the floor. We're like, this is the coolest thing we have ever seen. I just. I knew I had to have one. But instead of standing in line for that very first iPhone, Jason Schmick grabbed his digital camera, iPod and BlackBerry, and headed to the birthing center right after he fired off an email to his colleagues. Well, I titled it Red alert. It looks like the iPhone isn't the only thing being released today. I will not be in today. Lauren went into labor last night around 06:00 p.m. in Madison. The iPhone and Noah were released to the world.

Here he is, everyone. Noah Harrison Schmidt. Was there anything surprising to you as the phone gets out into the world about how it starts to be used? The culture at Apple changed dramatically because the people who had them, they were always messaging or they were always emailing. When people were in the meetings, they were doing this all the time. It became a constant deluge of emails and messages. And you were like, oh, my God. No one could get off of them. And you were like, something's different here.

But messaging, phone calls, and music weren't the end game. What came next really changed things. As we arrive at iPhone's first birthday, we're gonna take it to the next level. And today we're introducing the iPhone three g. The year I got my first iPhone was 2008, and it was the 3G. So it looked something like this? Oh, my God, yes. I forgot how curved the bottom was. The second iPhone had faster 3g connectivity. That speed, combined with a new software feature turned the iPhone into something more than a phone.

There's an app for that. In 2008, the iPhone 3G brought faster 3G networking and the revolutionary app store. Greg Josuiak was part of a small team, Steve Jobs, tasked with rolling out the iPhone to the masses. He now leads marketing for Apple. You know, the other great innovation was in 2008. It was the app store that is what created this massive set of things. That is what changed our lives. Right? They didn't all just come from us. They came from what we did to empower developers.

When I joined Apple in March 2009, there were roughly about 8000, 6000 apps submitted per week. I mean, it had grown quickly. Oh, yes. The store exploded beyond Apple's expectations. And so the company hired Philip Shoemaker to oversee it. 2008, Christmas, one developer made a million dollars. And that issued a gold rush to everybody. And developers started submitting en masse. When the app store launched, Apple actually expected maybe 500 apps. We were at 25,000 apps per week. There were all kinds of apps. Ones that would turn your phone into a flashlight, a restaurant critic, a personalized dj, and loads that would, well, turn your phone into a babysitter.

We started to canned Noah the phone shortly after the twins came along. So he was, you know, two, maybe three, be entertained for a minute at a restaurant or I. And breastfeeding, you know, he knew where the page of games was. That he was allowed to play, and even if it was a hit the chicken and it makes a chicken sound to him, that was the greatest thing in the whole world. I never thought that kids apps would take off. The iPhone was, for those of us that have been in the phone space for a while, seemingly kind of difficult to use, right? People didn't understand how to swipe, how to input text, et cetera, et cetera.

But I was wrong. The days of bringing toys and books and crayons to the restaurant were over. Now games and apps were just a tap away. But that instant gratification had some unforeseen and expensive consequences. In 2009, late 2009. My daughter is five years old. Her name is Miley. She started playing Smurfs a lot. About a month later, we realized that she had purchased $450 worth of credits. Smurfberries. So we instituted something we called the Miley Rule, which was a feature in the operating system that allowed the parent to turn off purchases, saying requires a password every time.

By the time Noah's generation was four or five, they were immersed in digital worlds that almost felt real. As for the real world, big leaps in the iPhone's camera were starting to give them a whole new way to see it. We set out to create an all new phone, a camera in the iPhone four s. We didn't set our sights on just making it better than every other phone. We've already done that. We set our sights on competing with the quality of many great point and shoot cameras.

This is one part where you, like, start really shaking your butt. There it is. You literally dance like that for the whole song. And still we're not tired. Your first kid, you take a photo of him doing anything, and because you think everything they do is amazing. I think the other thing that really kicked it into high gear for us using the camera was when Facebook became an app, because that was how we shared everything with my family. And my parents wanted to see photos of our kids all the time. With faster uploading and improved social media apps, Noah decided he wanted to be in more than just family photos.

I started watching YouTube when I was like, six or seven. I wanted to be a youtuber very badly. And did you ever try to shoot videos on your parents iPhones or your phones? Yeah, I would drag my parents out to record these terrible, terrible tutorial videos for just toys I got for holidays.

He's kind of big, even though on the back he's all stuffy. But soon, kids wouldn't even need their parents to hold the camera anymore. The next phone has a front facing camera, and we are trying to figure out what do you do with the front facing camera? And you can take a picture of the front facing camera. You take a picture of yourself. Is that going to be big?

I don't know. It was. It ends up being a spoiler. Big deal. Justin Santamaria was a senior engineer at Apple working on iOS and led the team that launched FaceTime in 2010. I remember having the vice president of iPhone come to my desk and say, steve wants to see a demo. It's really funny as Steve's kind of looking, he's holding his phone like this, looking down, and I remember this. He goes, I look abominable. It's ultimately not how people hold their phones today for selfies or video calls.

That's right. Not even Steve Jobs saw the impact of the front facing camera coming. Noah, though, has grown up surrounded by kids and adults with outstretched arms. I do not like to take selfies of myself because I don't understand the appeal fully, but my siblings definitely do. They take photos of themselves all the time. They'll do like an interlocked arm thing, like 1 second go fix for the other one. I went on vacation, and you saw people just taking selfies all day long on vacation when you're at a resort or whatever, and they're not enjoying the world around them. Wait a second. What's going on here? We are just intermediating reality with this screen in front of your face.

I think it's just society has trained them to take pictures of themselves. The iPhone was no longer just a phone. It was a powerful connected computer with a camera. But one thing held this device back from being something we could do more and more on. Today we are launching the biggest advancement in the history of iPhone, the iPhone six and the iPhone six plus.

And yes, they're bigger. They're a lot bigger. By 2014, the smartphone competition was huge. Literally. Check out this screen. This thing is huge. Pretty massive. Android phone makers, especially Samsung. Samsung, that says Samsung, began packing as much into these phones as possible. And with that, the phones started getting bigger. Would you mind moving your enormous phone? You mean the enormously awesome Galaxy?

Thinking back at that time, how big of a factor was Samsung and Android as they were hitting the market with these massive phones? They were annoying. And they were annoying because, as you know, they ripped off our technology. They took the innovations that we had created and created a poor copy of it and just put a bigger screen around it and, you know, so, yeah, we were none too pleased Apple sued Samsung for patent infringement, and by the end of the decade, Apple had received hundreds of millions for the patent violations.

A Samsung spokeswoman said the company has pioneered many mobile industry firsts, even in the rain, the shower, or the pool, including large oled displays and water and dust resistant devices. By 2014, Apple finally caved and the iPhone was now the size of a Samsung because Jason and millions of others saw the benefit of giant phones and yeah, I love this thing, man.

And I said I was never going to use a phone with a screen this big. Two years later, shortly after Noah turned eleven, Jason handed that six s plus down to his son. I was very excited when I got my first iPhone. It was probably one of the happiest moments of my life. I just remember like getting it and then just running away immediately to go play stuff. Cause a lot of my experience with phone games was at that point from just watching my dad.

Yes, for Noah, it meant games. Well, even more games he'd already played on his computer and gaming console, but now it was always with him. His very own iPhone, plants versus zombies, was a huge one for me. Minecraft pocket edition. Like a lot of the original phone games, like Flappy Bird, anchor Bird's a huge one. I would say by the time Noah was ten, he was pretty fully ingrained in like, the video game world. It has never been my favorite thing, and it is something that half of us have tried to set limits on.

During the late two thousand ten s, the iPhone not only grew in size, but in processing power. More power equaled more capabilities on my phone now, which is this one, I mostly just watch YouTube and listen to music. I play games and browse Reddit and stuff, but I don't really use it for phone stuff. It's just a small computer in my pocket.

After all that, there wasn't much left to do to make the iPhone more prevalent in our lives. Well, other than make it do all those things for even longer, we are so excited to tell you that with iPhone eleven pro, you now get up to 4 hours longer in your day. With iPhone eleven pro Max up to 5 hours longer than your day. Battery life's always important for a portable product. We've made it even a bigger and bigger point of emphasis, whether it means making the silicon more efficient, our ability to where we can increase the size of a battery, and certainly larger screen iPhones allow you to do that.

Wow. Ahead of his 15th birthday, Noah's parents finally upgraded his iPhone six S Plus to a new iPhone 13. This is cool, dad. Thank you. Biggest difference is definitely battery life. Like, on this phone, I could probably only play a game for, like, 2 hours before I have to plug it in. This one, I can play a game for an entire day and still get home after school day and be at, like, 50% battery. It's amazing. It's so much nicer.

Do you have a sense of how much time you spend on your phone? I feel like nothing. A healthy amount. That's Chloe, one of Noah's 13 year old siblings, who is especially attached to her iPhone twelve and apps like TikTok and Snapchat. I kind of feel like I'm always on a device. Besides when I go, like, hanging out with friends and even that, I'm, like, on my phone sometimes, but I'm mostly on my phone and stuff.

Like all of us, the schmicks have enjoyed each of those life changing innovations that have come along with the last 15 years of the iPhone. But now, possibly the greatest innovation Apple can give us, limiting how much we use it. Screen time empowers you with both insight and control over how you spend your time. We think this is going to be helpful for many people, but especially for some kids. We use screen time a lot to limit how much time they get with certain things. So having it locked down during the school day so they're not using it at school, which they're not supposed to do anyways, and at night to force them to actually go to sleep.

Yes. They just simply don't work between the hours of nine to 06:00 a.m. or something like that. We try. You know, we're always Chloe especially. We definitely get a lot of time requests throughout the day. Okay. All right. It's about time. And usually followed by a text message that says, my teacher said, I can have 15 minutes. Can I please have 15 minutes?

Here we go. That's pretty. I've been talking to a child who was born on June 29, 2007. This is him. Oh, that's his picture from June 29, 2017, taken with the iPhone. Not taken with the iPhone. Yes. You'll learn. But bummer. This is something he said to me during our interview a couple weeks ago. He says, this is everything you would ever need in the palm of your hands. Why would you ever be off of it?

Is that what you hope to hear? Or does some part of that make you feel uncomfortable? It's mixed, right. We've created an incredible tool to help people with how they learn and tell people how they work, you know, to help people with how they communicate, how they're entertained. It's a powerful tool, but at the same, same time, we want to help people with the fact that there's moderation needed. But we don't make our money off engagement.

Right. There's no, like, more you use your iPhone, the more money we make. That isn't the way it works. Right. We just want you to have this great experience. And sometimes that does mean I. You gotta temper how much you're gonna use it. You gotta moderate how much you wanna use this. Have you seen this with some of your own kids? We all have concerns around social media and the effect on kids.

My younger daughter. Yeah, no, she and I have talked about it, and she goes through periods where she's using it too much and then scales herself way back. Truly, we just thought this was gonna be a fun, easy to use thing when you wanna do a few messages. Didn't think it was gonna become the same center of your life.

We have burgers, we have fries, kind of. We have. I don't think there's a spirit. There is. There is. Here we go. All right. After 15 years of living with the iPhone, we now have to figure out how to live with it less. In theory, we have a no phones at the table for dinner. If we've learned anything from all this, it's that our individual willpower is only challenged by increasing technological advancements. It's always amazing that every time you think it's as good as it can get, we always try to manage a way to make it better.

But if and when that better thing comes, will we control it or will it control us? Thank you for cooking me. Thanks for cooking. As I've grown older, I've gotten way, way, way more into these things as, so as the rest of the world. They've gotten a lot better and they're going to keep getting insanely good. Taking away screens is like taking away my friends. No one can stop you from being on your phone at all times besides your own self discipline.

Innovation, Technology, Global, Smartphone Evolution, Cultural Impact, Apple, The Wall Street Journal