So June 29th came and went and I almost forgot to mark it, but the iPhone just turned ten. Ten years since Steve Jobs walked out and did the whole "three things" bit and then it turned out to be one thing wearing a trenchcoat. I didn't get one at launch, for the record. Nobody I knew did. It was AT&T only, $499 for the 4GB model or $599 if you wanted the fancy 8GB, and I was still on a family plan with a Nokia that could survive being dropped down a flight of stairs (tested, confirmed). I didn't actually own an iPhone until the 3G came around in 2008, secondhand, screen already a little scratched.
It's weird going back and reading what the reviews said at the time. No copy and paste. No App Store. That didn't show up until 2008 either, almost a year later, which feels insane now considering the entire economy that thing spawned. EDGE data that crawled. And people still lined up for it like it was a rock concert because, honestly, it kind of was one. I remember the visual voicemail demo getting a bigger cheer than half the actual hardware specs, which tells you something about how bad voicemail was before that.
Anyway there's a wave of "ten years later" pieces floating around this week if you want the full nostalgia trip, and there's also a steady drip of rumors about what's coming this fall — OLED screen, wireless charging, ditching the home button entirely, all the stuff that's supposedly going to make the tenth-anniversary phone (if it's even called the 8, who knows at this point) a bigger jump than the last few years have been. I'll believe the notch and the Face ID stuff when I see it. Every year around this time the rumor mill spins up something wild and maybe a third of it survives contact with the actual keynote.
Unrelated complaint, sort of
Small tangent because it's eating at me: I ordered a lens filter off a UK shop last week and it's been sitting in FedEx limbo since basically last Tuesday, no movement on the tracking page at all. Turns out FedEx's European arm, TNT Express, got hammered by that malware outbreak that tore through Ukraine and then spread to Maersk, a bunch of pharma companies, WPP's ad offices, you name it. FedEx put out a filing admitting TNT's operations took a real hit and they weren't sure when things would be back to normal. So my $38 filter is apparently a casualty of a nation-state-adjacent cyberattack, which is a sentence I did not expect to type in 2017. I'm not going to do the big NotPetya writeup here. Every tech outlet on the internet already has, and honestly they'll keep having it for another week at least. Just funny how something that huge trickles down into something as dumb as "why is my package stuck in Cologne."
One more thing worth flagging while I'm here: the net neutrality "Day of Action" is set for July 12th, a little over a week out. Reddit, Amazon, Kickstarter, Etsy and a bunch of other sites have already signed on to do something visible that day (banners, popups, the works), pushing back on the FCC's plan to gut the 2015 rules. I'm planning to throw something up here too, nothing fancy, just enough to point people at where to actually file a comment. If you've never filed an FCC comment before it takes about four minutes and you don't need to write an essay, one paragraph is fine, they're mostly counting volume and reading a sample.
Ten years of iPhone is a nice round number to hang a post on, but honestly the more interesting thing to me this week is watching how much of the internet's plumbing turned out to depend on stuff nobody thinks about until it breaks — shipping logistics, ad agency networks, radiation monitoring at Chernobyl of all places, apparently that got knocked offline too. A phone getting better cameras is nice. A single piece of malware taking down a chunk of European shipping in a weekend is the story that actually keeps me up a little.
Filter's still not here. I'll update if it ever shows.