This week, Apple will introduce the iPhone, a glossy lozenge of gadget-whore nirvana that plays MP3s, takes photos, surfs the web and basically ensures that you’ll always be too busy to answer any calls you might receive on it. At $600 a pop, it also promises to revolutionize how much we pay for devices that don’t do anything radically new. Even so, geeks have been camped out in strip-mall parking lots for days to become first-generation iPhone owners.
But is Apple’s latest ingenue a true star, or just another pretty face? Cell phones have always been the Nicole Richies of high-tech devices—they started out chunky and one-dimensional and have been getting thinner, more stylish and increasingly ambitious ever since. Early on, most manufacturers recognized that standard cell phones had a major limitation. They only let us connect with people whose numbers we knew, and those people were boring. So the cell-phone industry repositioned its products as tiny engines of consolidated distraction. Today, Nicole Richie is an actor, a singer, a published novelist, a part-time Bongo jeans model and an aspiring perfume entrepreneur. And your cell phone plays games, sends e-mail, snaps photos and dreams of creating its own perfume line, too.
Certainly we all love Nicole Richie, but what would happen if she dropped her Da Vinci act and focused on becoming, say, the best part-time Bongo jeans model she could possibly be? Wouldn’t we love her even more? The problem with cell phones isn’t that they’re not enough like computers and TVs; it’s that they’re not enough like phones. (The ad agencies seem to understand this—pretty much every cell phone commercial is about dropped calls, limited range and other technical inadequacies.) Plus, they require more frequent care and feeding than most infants, their service contracts are too expensive and they have absolutely ridiculous relationship expectations. Even Nicole Richie, one imagines, lets you try her out for a while before demanding an exclusive one-year commitment.
But just because the iPhone doesn’t actually solve any of the major flaws that plague cell phones, does that make it a total bust? In January, when Steve Jobs first showcased an iPhone prototype, he insisted that cell phones need to be “more powerful” and “much easier to use.” With its single button and large touch-screen interface, the iPhone certainly looks simple to use. But then again, Blackberrys and Razrs don’t require any special knowledge to operate, either.
A few decades from now, though, the world is going to be very different. In Sweden, scientists subjected adolescent rats to prolonged cell-phone exposure and found that this causes neuron damage that may lead to premature aging, Alzheimer’s and other afflictions. English researchers believe cell-phone usage can potentially lower sperm counts.
Cell phones might even be suspects in the entomological mystery known as Colony Collapse Disorder, in which honey bees abandon their hives and disappear. There is some evidence that the radiation that cell phones and other wireless phones emit may cause nature’s tiny agricultural workers to quit their jobs and take off for parts unknown. Ultimately, their disappearance could have a huge impact on the nation’s food supply.
So imagine life in 2037. Today’s teens will be middle-aged morons with the barely functioning brains of methodically tortured lab rats. Every time they go foraging for whatever foodstuffs remain in a world without bees, they get lost. Every time they hit an ATM, they forget their PIN codes. In this scenario, more powerful cell phones are not just desirable; they’re crucial. We’ll need cell phones that order dinner, pay for it and have it delivered with the touch of a single pizza icon. The iPhone isn’t there yet, but one hopes it soon will be; otherwise, the human species may not survive.