Land of the Giants: This Changes Everything

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Speaker 5 Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
I'm Kara Swisher, and today we've got a bonus episode from our friends at Recode.

Speaker 5 It's a premiere episode of the newest season of their podcast, Land of the Giants, this time breaking down the Apple Revolution.

Speaker 5 Land of the Giants dives into the origins of today's biggest tech companies, how they rose to power, and what they're doing with that power today.

Speaker 5 The entire series is available to Binge Now, and the the first episode explores the birth of the iPhone, not only how it changed phones forever, but personal computing, business, and the company itself.

Speaker 7 January 2007, the world's biggest tech companies were off to a massive convention in Las Vegas to schmooze and drink and show off stuff they wanted to sell.

Speaker 9 But one giant company was not at the Consumer Electronics Show, Apple.

Speaker 12 Apple's absence at CES wasn't unusual. What was unusual was that Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO, CEO, was holding his own show at the same time 400 miles away.

Speaker 14 He

Speaker 15 set an unspecified special event at one of the convention centers in San Francisco.

Speaker 16 Walt Mossberg was the Wall Street Journal's tech reviewer, and he had more influence on tech than any other journalist.

Speaker 10 If you had a new computer or gadget or software you wanted the world to know about, you brought it to Mossberg first.

Speaker 20 and you prayed he liked it.

Speaker 12 Steve Jobs had cultivated a relationship with Mossberg for years.

Speaker 16 He called him up routinely off the record to shoot the shit.

Speaker 3 Now Jobs wanted Mossberg at his event.

Speaker 21 And

Speaker 15 like others, I was invited and I said to Katie Cotton, his head PR woman who called to invite me, what's it about? She said, I can't tell you, but it's big.

Speaker 3 Mossberg said no.

Speaker 7 He was going to CES instead.

Speaker 19 Then he got another call.

Speaker 7 This time it was Jobs on the line.

Speaker 15 And he says to me, be there. I said, I don't have to be there.
I mean, I have all these other appointments. There are other companies other than Apple.
And, you know.

Speaker 15 And he said, I understand that, but you will kill yourself if you're not at this. And I said, well, what is the product? He said, I can't tell you.

Speaker 15 But he said, I'm telling you, I'm giving you my personal word. that it's the most important product since the Mac and that you will be extremely unhappy with yourself if you don't come.

Speaker 24 That was a hard sell from one of the world's best salesmen, and it worked.

Speaker 7 Mossberg got on a plane to go see the Steve Jobs show.

Speaker 25 Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.

Speaker 9 Jobs was on stage in his standard uniform, jeans, new balance, black turtleneck.

Speaker 7 He told the crowd he'd be introducing three revolutionary new products.

Speaker 25 The first one

Speaker 25 is a widescreen iPod with touch controls.

Speaker 25 The second

Speaker 26 is a revolutionary mobile phone.

Speaker 25 And the third

Speaker 25 is a breakthrough internet communications device.

Speaker 9 People who paid attention to Apple knew that Apple was going to make a phone someday, so there were huge expectations it would be groundbreaking.

Speaker 12 But the phone itself, that was a total mystery.

Speaker 25 An iPod,

Speaker 29 a phone,

Speaker 25 and an internet communicator.

Speaker 25 An iPod,

Speaker 25 a phone.

Speaker 15 The way that he started kind of

Speaker 15 teasing you into thinking it might be multiple devices.

Speaker 25 Are you getting it?

Speaker 25 This is one device.

Speaker 25 And we are calling it

Speaker 30 iPhone, iPhone, iPhone, iPhone.

Speaker 15 I thought it would change phones forever.

Speaker 31 It was incredible.

Speaker 15 I thought it was going to be an enormous hit.

Speaker 6 And it was.

Speaker 9 The iPhone changed phones forever.

Speaker 6 But it also changed personal computing.

Speaker 14 It changed business.

Speaker 11 It changed Apple.

Speaker 32 And it changed us.

Speaker 7 Welcome to Land of the Giants, the Apple Revolution.

Speaker 33 I'm Peter Kafka.

Speaker 7 I cover technology for Vox and Recode.

Speaker 7 We've spent a lot of time in previous seasons talking about powerful tech companies, Google, Amazon, and Netflix, but this is the first time we're talking about a powerful tech company that makes tech products for a living.

Speaker 19 Products you touch, products you hold in your hand or wear on your body.

Speaker 16 Apple started out as an innovative but niche personal computer company.

Speaker 38 Now it's the world's most important consumer electronics company.

Speaker 16 Even if you don't use its products, you live in a world Apple has completely reshaped.

Speaker 33 It's created entirely new industries, wiped out giant competitors, and it's changed the way all of us live.

Speaker 24 And all of that's because of a single product, the iPhone.

Speaker 11 Okay, quick survey.

Speaker 40 What kind of phone do you have?

Speaker 6 If you're in America and you're listening to this podcast, you've got an iPhone.

Speaker 13 What's that? You got something else?

Speaker 40 You got an Android?

Speaker 11 Okay, it's possible.

Speaker 42 In truth, and because my editors want me to spell this out, iPhones only account for about half the smartphone market in the US.

Speaker 9 But even so, that still means you're using a phone that looks and behaves just like an iPhone.

Speaker 16 Because after the iPhone came out, there was no going back.

Speaker 35 It became the template.

Speaker 38 Next question.

Speaker 6 Do you remember what phone you had before you got an iPhone?

Speaker 40 And more important, do you remember what life was like before the iPhone?

Speaker 20 You probably don't.

Speaker 6 It was a while ago and a lot has changed.

Speaker 28 So we asked some tech journalists, The Verge's Neli Patel and the Wall Street Journal's Joanna Stern, to help us remember the before times.

Speaker 44 In late 2006, you would buy a phone based almost entirely upon what it looked like because all it could really do was make phone calls.

Speaker 45 You either used a regular cell phone, which was a flip phone type thing, which you would really just use to make calls and you could do like light texting on it.

Speaker 44 But the thing most people cared about was what does it look like. And that's where you got a phone like the Motorola Razor.

Speaker 11 Hello, Moto.

Speaker 45 Everyone wanted the Razor phone. That was around that time.
And that was like a status symbol.

Speaker 45 And then you had like another class of devices, which are really the BlackBerry or Pocket PC, which was like, get, I can't curse on this podcast, right?

Speaker 22 Yeah, yeah, yeah, go for it.

Speaker 45 Yeah, it was get shit done phones.

Speaker 42 Connect to everything you love in life with BlackBerry.

Speaker 45 Type on this keyboard, send email. You could also text.
You could also do phone calls.

Speaker 32 So, phones were something you used to make phone calls, maybe text people.

Speaker 43 If you worked on Wall Street or you wanted to seem important, maybe you used it for email too.

Speaker 46 And if you wanted to take decent digital photos or listen to music, then you needed a few other devices.

Speaker 44 I think about the stack of things I carried around my pockets in 2006. You had your wallet, your keys, you had your cell phone, and then you almost always also had an iPod.

Speaker 44 And the iPod was a far superior device to any cell phone. People preferred using them to their phones.

Speaker 44 And it just seemed obvious, I think, to everyone at every layer, whether you were a a Titan of industry or whether you were just a person carrying on two devices, that these two things should be the same thing.

Speaker 42 Steve Jobs was one of the people that realized that the iPod and the phone were going to merge.

Speaker 19 So Apple needed to be the one that figured out how to merge them before someone else did.

Speaker 40 One big problem for Apple, it had never made a phone before.

Speaker 11 It had been making computers since 1976 and iPods for the last few years, but cell phones were a whole different beast.

Speaker 9 But one big advantage for Apple, it had never made a phone before, which means it didn't have ideas set in stone about what phones should be.

Speaker 34 The company wasn't trying to make small updates to existing phones that sucked, and it wasn't trying to jam its own PC software into phones.

Speaker 9 Former Apple executive Tony Fidel helped build the iPod and then the iPhone.

Speaker 8 Why is it Apple that built the iPhone, not Microsoft, not Sony, not BlackBerry for that matter?

Speaker 48 These large companies try to take their properties like Windows. They all try try to take their property that they know and move their customers and this big operating system down

Speaker 48 to this smaller device and say, it's like that, but in your pocket. You have all the capabilities, but it's in your pocket.
And they want to keep all the same anachronisms.

Speaker 48 And do you use a stylus instead of a mouse now instead of using your finger?

Speaker 19 So you think this is an ideological thing, not a capability thing?

Speaker 48 That's what I've seen is the fundamental failure with most of these companies who try to get into new spaces is they try to use old techniques to get into new spaces where they can't do that.

Speaker 48 They have to rethink it from the bottom up.

Speaker 9 So Apple knew it wanted to build a phone and that it would be starting from scratch.

Speaker 35 It rounds up a team to build something new.

Speaker 20 And Apple, which is famously secretive at all times, got even more clamped down this time around.

Speaker 37 Nitin Genatra was on the original iPhone engineering team and part of his job was to recruit other Apple employees onto the project.

Speaker 49 I would go into somebody's office, somebody who we identified as we should really have this person person on the team, and I would walk in and say, hey, I can't tell you what we're working on.

Speaker 49 I can't mention anything about

Speaker 49 the product itself. I can't give you any details about what you're going to do.
All I can say is that you're going to work your ass off.

Speaker 26 Do you want to come and do it?

Speaker 49 And most of the time, the answer was yes.

Speaker 34 Mark Hamblin worked on the original iPhone product team, focused on the touch screen.

Speaker 50 They put all of us working on the touchscreen stuff in one office area, which was quite new. And I got a nice window office overlooking the interior courtyard of the Infinite Loop campus.

Speaker 50 And then like three days later, they come in and they frost my windows. And so my nice view out in the courtyard was then blocked and so no one could see into my office.

Speaker 9 The extra dose of secrecy was a sign that the iPhone was a very big deal to Apple.

Speaker 10 Another sign, Steve Jobs was very, very hands-on.

Speaker 34 Francisco Tomolsky was hired to work on the iPhone software, but not right away.

Speaker 21 When I first joined, it happened to be that, you know, Steve was on vacation and he needs to like personally approve everyone like the day they start.

Speaker 21 And so they were just like, well, Steve's on vacation, so you're on vacation.

Speaker 33 And once Jobs signed off on you, the scope and ambition of the project became pretty clear.

Speaker 49 There was a lot of discussion about, you know, this is the most important product that Apple is going to ship. It was on his mind that this was a very important product to get right.

Speaker 49 And so the pressure was ratcheted up because of that.

Speaker 9 Jobs had been a famously harsh critic of his employees' work in his early days.

Speaker 16 And 30 years after starting Apple, he remained intense.

Speaker 16 Francisco Tomolsky remembers that Steve Jobs would check in on the team's progress every couple weeks.

Speaker 21 I guess it was quickly discovered that the interactions were fairly demoralizing for the engineers.

Speaker 21 And so they instituted kind of like a protection layer where there was one person who was designated to go take the quote-unquote feedback and abuse or whatever, and then like massage that into like, well, Steve didn't like this, and he thinks we should do this differently.

Speaker 16 The iPhone became a two-year sprint to build something Apple had never made and that no one else had either.

Speaker 28 A sprint that ended with Steve Jobs onstage, promising three devices.

Speaker 25 A widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communications device.

Speaker 16 For the team that built it, that onstage demo was more stressful than any other moment.

Speaker 6 I mean, it was just,

Speaker 49 I mean, I've never been so nervous. You know, not even on my wedding day was I as nervous as that.

Speaker 21 If Safari crashes

Speaker 21 weren't deep shit sort of thing.

Speaker 49 A buddy

Speaker 49 had a flask that he was passing around.

Speaker 21 It seems like it would be a pleasant memory, but it's not.

Speaker 42 It's a high-anxiety memory.

Speaker 6 Everyone else who gathered to watch the unveiling, they had a different experience.

Speaker 42 The iPhone blew them away.

Speaker 9 Media treated it like a major international news event.

Speaker 43 It got a front page write-up in the New York Times.

Speaker 16 And it really was amazing.

Speaker 17 People had imagined combining a music player with a phone for years, but this was so much more.

Speaker 19 A computer merged with a phone, a music player and a camera, and a display you could manipulate with your fingers.

Speaker 37 A display that lets you call up just about anything on the internet.

Speaker 11 A triumph.

Speaker 22 But...

Speaker 49 Just because you have the best technology in the world doesn't mean that it's going to be widely adopted. There are so many other aspects to shipping something that's commercially successful.

Speaker 19 Apple diehards lined up. They literally lined up overnight to buy the iPhone when it went on sale months later.

Speaker 36 A certain kind of tech dude loved it.

Speaker 13 If you had one, you could show it off at a party.

Speaker 9 But for regular people, the iPhone wasn't a must-have in the summer of 2007.

Speaker 28 It was expensive.

Speaker 32 The starting price was 500 bucks.

Speaker 28 This was back when most people had phones subsidized by the phone carriers.

Speaker 16 Speaking of carriers, the iPhone only ran on AT ⁇ T's network because ATT was the only network willing to let Steve Jobs do whatever he wanted. But ATT's network couldn't handle the iPhone.

Speaker 42 Calls dropped all the time.

Speaker 8 The iPhone didn't feel essential.

Speaker 45 That first iPhone was like a wow factor.

Speaker 32 Joanna Stern again.

Speaker 45 Like it did a lot of things that you were like, holy crap, it's going to do that. But we weren't quite sure what it was going to do for us yet.

Speaker 40 So it took the iPhone a while before it became the iPhone.

Speaker 16 But eventually, by the fourth generation in 2010, everything had come together.

Speaker 36 The internet speeds got much faster and you could get the iPhone on other networks.

Speaker 11 The camera got better.

Speaker 35 It added a front-facing camera.

Speaker 36 Enter the selfie era.

Speaker 34 Batteries and chips improved and the phone got sleeker.

Speaker 45 So it's a confluence of those technologies and certainly Apple being the one that put them together in that package to kick off what was the smartphone revolution.

Speaker 36 But the biggest change to the iPhone was something no one gave much thought to in 2007, because no one really knew it was missing.

Speaker 14 An app store.

Speaker 16 The thing that truly transformed the iPhone because it opened up the phone to the world's developers who made apps that changed what the iPhone could do for you.

Speaker 36 It's what let the iPhone make good on the promise Steve Jobs laid out when he first showed it off.

Speaker 16 Here's the Verges Nili Patel.

Speaker 31 Chicken and egg, but what is more important, the iPhone or the apps that the iPhone enables?

Speaker 32 The apps.

Speaker 44 Because Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone as a phone, an iPod, a breakthrough internet communicator. It's the breakthrough internet communicator that has changed the landscape of the entire world.

Speaker 44 If you don't have the application ecosystem to support the actual breakthrough, you just have a widescreen iPod with touch controls.

Speaker 13 When we come back, the App Store revolution begins.

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Speaker 6 The iPhone debuted in 2007 without an app store.

Speaker 16 A year later, Steve Jobs added one, reluctantly.

Speaker 36 At first, the App Store was flooded with novelties, digital versions of Pet Rocks.

Speaker 9 There were apps that let your iPhones make gun noises or act like a virtual Zippo-lighter.

Speaker 19 Here's an actual headline from Wired that year.

Speaker 13 iPhone fart app rakes in $10,000 a day.

Speaker 54 I remember one of the top apps,

Speaker 54 most popular apps was Flashlight. And at the time, you know, just the concept that it would be an app that turns your phone into a flashlight seemed very novel and useful.

Speaker 13 For Chris Barton, though, the App Store wasn't a way to make a quick buck.

Speaker 16 It was a way to jumpstart a real business that actually solved a problem.

Speaker 39 Barton co-founded Shazam. This is an app that was like having a personal music nerd in your pocket.

Speaker 34 Let's say you walk into Target, you love the song that's being piped in while you're buying your 12-pack of socks, you hold your phone up, and like magic, Shazam tells you what's playing.

Speaker 16 Shazam existed before the iPhone in the App Store, but it was a pain in the ass to use.

Speaker 9 You had to call a number and hold up your phone, and then Shazam would record a bit of the song and analyze it, and then a little later it would text you the name of the song.

Speaker 35 Then came the App Store, which instantly let Shazam do two things.

Speaker 42 It let Barton and his company build an app that could access the iPhone's powerful software and sensors so it could do all that looking up and analyzing right away.

Speaker 39 And just as important, it let anyone with an iPhone find and download Shazam easily with a couple clicks.

Speaker 54 Before that, you know, we had been looking at sort of very small numbers of users, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of users.

Speaker 54 And then with the hockey stick growth curve of smartphones and the app stores, we quickly went into the next years of seeing millions of users and tens of millions of users.

Speaker 42 This was a radical change in the way that software worked on phones. Before the App Store, phones came with a smattering of crappy apps.

Speaker 9 They were pre-installed on the home screen.

Speaker 36 They called it the deck. And you got what you got.
You didn't get a say in the matter.

Speaker 24 The phone companies and the phone carriers did deals behind the scenes, and so you'd buy a phone preloaded with apps you didn't choose and would never use.

Speaker 16 And it was really hard to get any new software onto your phone.

Speaker 9 The App Store made this super easy and Shazam found a huge audience via the iPhone.

Speaker 28 It eventually stalled out and sold to Apple for less than its investors had hoped, but Shazam still got a shot.

Speaker 42 And eventually, developers caught up to the possibilities that the iPhone, in combination with the App Store, could open up.

Speaker 37 And they made apps that changed the way we interact with each other and changed the world.

Speaker 20 Apps that built new industries.

Speaker 54 What the App Store solved for so many companies is that it largely changed users' behavior. And it basically said, okay, hey, everyone, you have these phones.
and now

Speaker 54 in just a couple clicks, you can start doing a whole bunch of other things. And so it was game-changing.

Speaker 19 Before apps, if you wanted to get a ride somewhere, you had to call a cab company, and you didn't really know when that cab would arrive, and who would be driving you, or what it was going to cost.

Speaker 40 Uber changed all that.

Speaker 43 And the person driving the car would use their phone to find you.

Speaker 32 You hired them temporarily with Uber and Apple acting as middlemen.

Speaker 6 That equation turned Uber into a $76 billion company that remade transportation and, for better or worse, kicked off the gig economy.

Speaker 42 And none of that happens in a world where the iPhone doesn't exist.

Speaker 9 Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, they're all designed to let users make and share and consume photos and videos directly from our phones, anytime, from any place.

Speaker 28 And now they're multi-billion dollar businesses that have changed the way we socialize and think and vote.

Speaker 24 The App Store is the way all this gets to your phone. It's the store where you pick the software for your phone.

Speaker 6 This is one of those changes so massive you couldn't really tell how big it was going to be.

Speaker 13 But it was also a change that happened very, very fast.

Speaker 32 In 2007, there was no App Store.

Speaker 35 In 2009, if you needed to do something, well.

Speaker 7 There's even an app for that.

Speaker 51 Yep, there's an app for just about anything, only on the iPhone.

Speaker 9 And now we don't even think about it.

Speaker 41 Apps and your phone are the same thing.

Speaker 36 The two of them together unlock a whole new world.

Speaker 40 The story of the App Store also tells us something about Apple, that while it used to be a computer company, those days are long gone.

Speaker 43 Apple is now an iPhone company that also sells computers and a few other things.

Speaker 33 Half of its revenue comes from the iPhone, and just 10% from Macs.

Speaker 6 And most of the other non-Mac stuff Apple sells really is iPhone stuff too.

Speaker 47 The App Store, which generates billions of dollars a year for Apple, that's an offshoot of the iPhone.

Speaker 42 AirPods, they're meant to work with the iPhone.

Speaker 6 You literally can't use an Apple Watch without an iPhone.

Speaker 16 You throw all that together, and 80% of Apple's revenue comes from the phone.

Speaker 6 So the iPhone has changed Apple and business and tech, but the thing that has changed most in the iPhone era is us.

Speaker 55 With the new iPhone, you can watch, listen, ignore your friends, stalk your ex, download porno on a crowded bus, even check your email while getting hit by a train. All with the new iPhone.

Speaker 6 That's for a 2010 episode of Futurama.

Speaker 28 It's about devices planted directly into your eyes.

Speaker 31 You get it?

Speaker 20 iPhone.

Speaker 6 It came out a couple years after the iPhone's debut.

Speaker 9 So most of us aren't injecting devices into our bodies quite yet, but Adam Alter, who teaches marketing and psychology at NYU and studies how phones affect our behavior, says we're basically there.

Speaker 27 75 to 80% of people say they can reach their phones without moving their feet 24 hours a day. That's a functional implant as far as I'm concerned.

Speaker 38 How much time are we spending on our phones?

Speaker 32 A lot, obviously.

Speaker 40 We're not sure about the total amount.

Speaker 16 A couple years ago, marketing company Zenith estimated we're spending three and a half hours a day on our phones, mobile, internet, and that seems super low to me because my iPhone tells me I'm spending 10 hours a day.

Speaker 9 And no matter how much time we spend with our implant slash phones, it's time we're not spending doing something else.

Speaker 27 I think it's taking the place of, to a large extent, recreation that doesn't involve screens. So if you look at how we spend our

Speaker 27 discretionary time, that's the time that most of us allocate significantly to our phones.

Speaker 51 Freaking out about

Speaker 42 That's an improvement, right?

Speaker 22 Maybe.

Speaker 34 Maybe all the unease we feel about the way phones have inserted themselves into our lives is just an echo of panics we've had in the past.

Speaker 42 But it feels different to me.

Speaker 9 And it seems different to people who study this stuff for a living.

Speaker 17 A lot of researchers are spending a lot of time trying to figure out just how precisely phones are changing the way we think and feel.

Speaker 36 Psychologists at the University of Arizona and Wayne State University, for instance, think there's evidence of an evolutionary mismatch between phones and how we've learned to behave over the years.

Speaker 34 They think the phone encourages us to overshare with people we don't really know.

Speaker 9 and simultaneously harms our close relationships because we're not talking to the people right in front of us, we're talking to randos far away on our phone.

Speaker 32 Swiss academics have argued persuasively that phones make you much more likely to stay up at night, which reduces your quality of sleep, which makes you more likely to be depressed.

Speaker 34 Other academics think there's a good chance that relying on your phone's GPS reduces your overall sense of direction.

Speaker 6 And teenagers are growing horns on the base of their skulls because they spend so much time hunched over phones.

Speaker 37 Okay, that last one is not true, but it sure sounded true, which is why that story popped up in very serious news outlets like the Washington Post and the BBC a couple years ago before they had to walk it back.

Speaker 32 But we are very receptive to these kind of phone horror stories.

Speaker 28 We spend so much time attached to these things and we don't feel great about it.

Speaker 51 And also, we know that Apple employees themselves are worried about what happens when you live an all-screen life.

Speaker 9 Steve Jobs, for instance, famously limited screen time for his own kids.

Speaker 27 I found this totally fascinating because It reminded me a little bit of that idea that you should never get high on your own supply.

Speaker 27 You could tell everyone you want them them to use your product, but you make sure that you don't use too much of it at home.

Speaker 35 And now that Tony Fidel, who helped create the iPhone, no longer works at Apple, he's willing to admit that he's ambivalent about the world-changing thing he made.

Speaker 48 To be absolutely honest, I think about this weekly. You know, is this, you know, nuclear power or is this the nuclear bomb?

Speaker 43 In a 2018 essay for Wired, Fidel argued that Apple needed to at least give its users more information about their phone use, the same way food labels are supposed to help you make decisions about what you put in your body.

Speaker 48 But don't blame the refrigerator for what you put in it, right? The iPhone is a refrigerator.

Speaker 48 If you want to put unhealthy things in your refrigerator, so you eat those every day and open that refrigerator every day, that's your fault.

Speaker 6 This metaphor makes some sense to me.

Speaker 36 If you're unhappy using your iPhone, maybe it's Facebook's fault because Facebook makes an addictive app that makes you unhappy and undermines democracy.

Speaker 6 Or maybe it's your fault for using Facebook too much.

Speaker 18 The refrigerator is just storing the ice cream.

Speaker 37 It seems like Apple likes this argument too.

Speaker 13 Months after Fidel wrote his Wired story, Apple introduced screen time.

Speaker 9 It's a feature that tells you how much time you spend on your phone.

Speaker 11 That is a food label.

Speaker 42 And now Apple is requiring labels for apps too.

Speaker 13 But we've had actual food labels for years.

Speaker 19 We're not getting any thinner.

Speaker 33 And I don't think telling you you're using your phone too much is what's going to make you put it down.

Speaker 32 So what would make you put your phone down?

Speaker 22 What if you got rid of your iPhone completely?

Speaker 32 Could you unbreak your brain and return to the life you live pre-iPhone?

Speaker 46 We found someone who is trying to do this.

Speaker 32 Well, actually, my producer, Zach Mack, did. So right now I'm going to bring him in to tell us about this experiment.

Speaker 11 Hey, Zach. Hey, Peter, what's up?

Speaker 13 So, Zach, when we were working on this show, we were trying to figure out how to illustrate what life would be like without an iPhone.

Speaker 9 And then you went out and found someone who's actually doing this every day.

Speaker 26 Yes, I found a woman named Lucy Adams.

Speaker 56 My name's Lucy. I'm 27.
I'm a documentary filmmaker, filmmaker and I live in Brooklyn and I have a flip phone.

Speaker 26 So about nine months ago, she got rid of her iPhone.

Speaker 22 Why?

Speaker 26 Because she felt like her phone and all the apps were making her unhappy. She quit social media a few years ago and she still felt like that just wasn't enough.

Speaker 56 I would just find myself opening my phone and not even having anything interesting to look at, just spending a lot of time on it.

Speaker 56 Now it's like, I'm not even doing anything that needs to be done on a phone. Maybe I'll just try it out and sort of like reset my brain's addiction to my phone.

Speaker 56 But now that I have a flip phone, I really can't imagine going back to the iPhone life.

Speaker 9 But wait, why doesn't you just take the addicting, interesting apps that make her unhappy and just take them off her phone?

Speaker 35 Isn't that her real complaint?

Speaker 26 Yeah, she said it was a slippery slope and she didn't think she could restrain herself over time. It's like the same reason you don't stock your fridge with beer if you're an alcoholic.

Speaker 19 Yeah, no, that's a bad move from what I understand.

Speaker 14 Yes.

Speaker 26 I want to make this clear.

Speaker 26 She isn't anti-technology. She participates in day-to-day society.
She uses a computer. She uses the internet at home, all that stuff.

Speaker 56 I told someone I had a flip phone the other day and they were like, so you must also be vegan. But no, I'm not vegan.

Speaker 26 I'm a vegetarian myself, so I know what it's like to make a lifestyle choice that requires a little extra work. But I got to be honest, ditching my iPhone seems impossible.

Speaker 30 There's a constant navigation of logistics. Hey, I'm in a new part of town.
Where am I going to eat? I don't know.

Speaker 26 Should I look at Yelp?

Speaker 30 Okay, it's late and I'm drunk and I need to get an Uber home.

Speaker 30 Like, there's so much managing of logistics and spontaneity in this city, and it just seems, it seems like particularly difficult to navigate without a smartphone.

Speaker 56 You don't have the most immediate and easiest tool available.

Speaker 56 It doesn't mean that you can't get directions or can't call someone and ask for directions, but it's just the the reward isn't as immediate. And

Speaker 56 sometimes it's annoying, but so far it hasn't been that bad. Even when I've gotten lost, I've just sort of been like,

Speaker 56 what's that bad about being lost?

Speaker 32 Getting lost sucks.

Speaker 9 Yeah, sometimes you get to reconnect with the world you haven't been observing, but most of the time getting lost just means you're stressed or late or both.

Speaker 26 I think she sees it a little differently in that she's willing to put up with a little bit of inconvenience in order to, you know, reclaim her life and her peace of mind.

Speaker 26 She says she's sleeping better, that she feels less anxious. She isn't doom scrolling till all hours of the night.
But then again, she has to put up with all this extra stuff now.

Speaker 26 When she's on the go, she can't pay for something using Venmo. She can't stream music or podcasts.
She can't participate in group texts with her friends. She can't show digital proof of vaccination.

Speaker 26 She's got some hacks to help her get through her day.

Speaker 23 And part of that is relying on the people around her.

Speaker 56 Like I've been out with friends and wanted to get an Uber home and just have to ask someone else to get it for me and then pay them back, which is, you know, not a big deal, but you are relying on other people and having to sort of ask them for favors, which depending on the person, you know, might not be that fun.

Speaker 26 If she's at a restaurant, she can't do the QR code thing.

Speaker 32 So someone else has to? Yeah.

Speaker 8 Wait, so Zach, it sounds like getting off the iPhone is not just a Lucy Adams project.

Speaker 17 It sounds like Lucy Adams' Adams' friends and bystanders have to help her get off the iPhone as well.

Speaker 26 She does have some other workarounds, though. Like when she's at home, she has an iPad because sometimes she needs to do something on Venmo or call a lift for herself, but the iPad stays at home.

Speaker 56 It's inconvenient sometimes, but like honestly, I don't think about it that much. Like I don't feel like all the time like, oh, there's another thing you needed a smartphone for.

Speaker 56 You just adjust to it pretty quickly. I just think that having a flip phone has

Speaker 56 helped me just be a lot more intentional about my time.

Speaker 26 And do you feel like it's worth it?

Speaker 30 You would recommend this.

Speaker 56 100% recommend.

Speaker 24 So I don't think she's doing what she thinks she's doing.

Speaker 19 She's not giving up the iPhone, really, at all. She's using other people's iPhones.

Speaker 39 Even when she's at home, not using an iPhone, she's using an iPad, which is really just a big iPhone.

Speaker 41 I don't think she's left the iPhone behind at all.

Speaker 26 Well, she's not on it 10 hours a day like you are.

Speaker 22 Sing.

Speaker 26 She's largely taken a step back from the phone.

Speaker 23 But yeah, she still lives in a society where we are reliant on smartphones.

Speaker 9 So that's what I think is most striking about what Lucy Adams is trying to do here.

Speaker 39 The starting point assumes that you have to have an iPhone.

Speaker 9 It's 14 years since the iPhone has been introduced, and now it's fully baked into society. It's not a mandate.

Speaker 28 I know it's a charge word.

Speaker 36 I'm going to use it anyway.

Speaker 22 But it's pretty close.

Speaker 26 Yeah, this is our life now. It feels almost impossible to go back, even if you try.

Speaker 32 None of us voted on this. We didn't explicitly consent to this.

Speaker 19 When you bought your first iPhone, you thought you're buying a phone, not that you were stepping into a portal where you can't go back.

Speaker 38 But now we're here.

Speaker 19 We live in an iPhone world.

Speaker 20 Apple's world.

Speaker 7 Next up, how a computer company becomes all-powerful by ditching computers.

Speaker 34 What changes it from a computer company to a consumer company? This is a dramatic, dramatic shift. I mean it helps sell a lot more computers.
But look, Apple's path was to become a consumer company.

Speaker 7 Land of the Giants, the Apple Revolution, is a production of Recode by Vox and the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Speaker 24 Awesome people work on this show.

Speaker 43 Zach Mack is the show's senior producer.

Speaker 24 Our producer is Matt Frassica.

Speaker 7 Jolie Myers is our editor. Serena Solin is our fact-checker.
Brandon McFarlane composed the show's theme and engineered this episode. Sam Altman is Recode's editor-in-chief.

Speaker 7 Art Chung is our showrunner.

Speaker 1 Nishat Kerwa is our executive producer. I'm Peter Kafka.

Speaker 7 If you like this episode, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or anywhere else you want to leave us a review. And tell a friend and subscribe to hear our next episode when it drops.

Speaker 7 Quick disclosure, Box Media creates content for and does business with Apple. None of the people creatively involved this season of Land of the Giants are involved with those projects.