The Last Time Apple Stood Here, We Got the iPhone

The iPhone didn't merely change phones.

I think that's actually too small a way to remember what happened.

It changed photography. Navigation. Dating. Music. Banking. Transportation. Media. Retail. Advertising. Work. Politics. Childhood. Attention. Porn. Restaurants. Travel. How we argue. How we get lost. How we avoid getting lost. How we summon a stranger's Toyota at 2:00 in the morning and somehow consider this completely normal.

Entire pieces of civilization rearranged themselves around that little slab of glass.

Which is worth remembering because before the iPhone, there wasn't anything particularly inevitable about the slab. The mobile phone industry was absolute chaos. Flip phones. Vertical flips. Side flips. Sliders. Candy bars. Tiny keyboards. Giant keyboards. BlackBerrys. Razrs. Sidekicks. Nokia experiments that looked like someone had lost a bet.

It was phone origami. Every manufacturer had a different theory of what the thing was supposed to become because nobody had collapsed the problem yet.

We tend to look backward at successful technologies and erase the uncertainty that existed before them. Of course the phone became a glass rectangle. What else could it possibly have been?

Plenty, apparently. We built all of them.

Then Steve Jobs walked onto a stage in January 2007 and held up an answer.

Not a better flip phone. Not the ultimate BlackBerry. Not a more sophisticated version of the existing category. He effectively ended the argument.

It's a screen. You touch it.

The industry spent years exploring the possibility space. Jobs collapsed it.

And that, much more than the black turtleneck or the keynote theater or any of the mythology we've constructed around him, is the part of Steve Jobs that matters to what comes next. Because we're back there again.

Civilization Occasionally Loses the Map

I've spent an arguably unhealthy amount of time thinking about ridges. Not literal ones. Civilizational ones.

A valley is what happens after we've figured something out. The rules are mostly established. The roads exist. Specialization becomes useful. Optimization becomes valuable. Companies learn where the margins are. People build careers around the architecture. Schools teach it. Governments regulate it. Investors model it.

Eventually everyone has a map.

Then something changes underneath the system. The map stops matching the terrain.

That's the ridge.

It's the uncomfortable part between one settled world and whatever replaces it. And personally, this is where I tend to live. Perpetual ridge dweller. It's probably some combination of personality defect and occupational hazard, but I find the transition more interesting than the destination

.

The iPhone arrived at one of those moments.

The internet existed. Mobile phones existed. Digital cameras existed. MP3 players existed. Touchscreens existed. Portable processors existed.

None of those things individually represented the revolution.

The revolution happened when someone looked across the ridge and realized they were becoming one thing.

That's systems thinking at civilization scale.

The breakthrough isn't necessarily another component. Sometimes the breakthrough is recognizing that the components no longer make sense separately.

Unreasonable Resolution

I've called this unreasonable resolution.

It's the ability to look at a future that is still mostly fog and somehow see more detail in it than the available evidence seems to justify.

Not clairvoyance. Not prediction in the CNBC sense.

Resolution.

Jobs could apparently look at several technological trajectories moving simultaneously and form a remarkably coherent picture of where they intersected. Touch would get good enough. Processors would get powerful enough. Flash storage would get cheap enough. Displays would get beautiful enough. Mobile data would get useful enough. Battery life would become tolerable enough. The web would matter enough.

And somewhere around the intersection of all those curves was something that wasn't quite a phone, wasn't quite an iPod and wasn't quite a computer.

So Apple began pulling the bow back before the target existed.

That's the part people miss.

An iPhone-sized product can't be conceived on Monday and shipped on Friday. You're making decisions years before launch. You're committing engineering resources. Developing silicon. Negotiating components. Solving manufacturing problems. Building software around hardware that doesn't fully exist yet.

You're firing an arrow at the future.

And you aren't supposed to aim where the target is. You aim where it's going to be when the arrow arrives.

Jobs was unusually good at that.

The VOID

Years ago I started using a shorthand for this kind of visionary mind: VOID.

Vision — seeing what must exist, rather than merely improving what already does.

Obsession — staying with the idea long enough to drag it through all the ugly reality between concept and product.

Intolerance — refusing to accept friction, bureaucracy, mediocre design and all the little compromises that gradually murder a coherent idea.

Direction — understanding not only what should exist, but where the technological and cultural terrain is moving so you can steer toward it.

That last one is especially important. Vision without direction is just imagination. There are millions of people with ideas about the future. Some of them are spectacular. Some of them should probably remain in the notebook.

The rare skill is recognizing which futures are becoming buildable.

Jobs wasn't compelling because he imagined magical objects. He seemed to understand when the physics, economics, technology and human behavior were converging enough to make one of those objects inevitable.

Then he got there early.

Physics Gives the Future Guardrails

This is where visionary thinking becomes much less mystical than we tend to make it.

The future is wildly unpredictable from some layers of a system and surprisingly predictable from others.

Culture is messy. Consumer behavior is messy. Software is extremely messy.

Physics is stubborn.

You can project semiconductor processes. You can model power. You can watch memory density. You can estimate bandwidth. You know roughly where displays are going. You understand manufacturing curves. You know what sensors are approaching viability. You know what won't fit inside a thermal envelope no matter how inspirational the PowerPoint gets.

Hardware imposes boundaries. And boundaries reduce the number of possible futures.

That's incredibly useful if your job is aiming an arrow three years out.

You don't need a crystal ball if you can eliminate 99% of the physically stupid answers.

Then comes the harder part. You have to recognize the right answer among what's left. That's where the unusual brain comes in.

Seeing the Object Hiding Inside the System

The engineer can tell you that capacitive multitouch is becoming viable. The radio engineer can tell you where wireless networking is headed. The semiconductor team can tell you what the processor will probably be capable of. The battery people can tell you how long the thing can stay alive.

But somebody still has to stand above those domains and say: it's a slab of glass.

That's synthesis.

It's pattern recognition operating at a higher altitude. You aren't inventing every dot. You're seeing the picture behind the dots.

And once somebody gets the picture right, something peculiar happens.

The future suddenly becomes obvious to everyone else.

Look at smartphones now. There are enormous technical differences between them, but at the civilization level the argument is over. They're glass slabs.

Samsung didn't respond to the iPhone with a better hinge. Google didn't decide the future was obviously a keyboard that slid sideways. The possibility space collapsed.

That's what great product vision can do. It doesn't merely create another competitor inside a category. It ends a debate about what the category is.

That's an enormous amount of power for one product decision to have.

Then the Valley Appears

Once that happens, however, the nature of the problem changes.

The visionary moment doesn't last forever. Eventually the new terrain becomes mapped. The weird new object becomes normal. Developers build around it. Factories optimize around it. Supply chains reorganize. Businesses appear. Standards emerge. Billions of people adopt it.

Then you aren't standing on the ridge anymore. You're in the valley.

And valleys reward a different kind of genius.

The question stops being: what should this become?

It becomes: how far can this go?

That's where Tim Cook enters our story.

And I think history has been somewhat unfair to him precisely because he followed someone so mythologically associated with invention.

Cook wasn't Steve Jobs.

Thank God.

Apple didn't need another Steve Jobs for the next phase. Jobs had already fired the arrow. Cook's job was to build civilization around where it landed. And holy shit did he.

But that's Article Two.

Because the really interesting thing about Apple isn't that it had one remarkable CEO. It's that its last three leadership eras line up almost suspiciously well with three different phases of technological change.

Jobs gets the ridge. Cook gets the valley.

And now, after more than a decade of extraordinary optimization, the ground is rising underneath Apple again.

Because artificial intelligence is starting to dissolve the assumptions the entire modern computing industry was built on.

The app. The operating system. The interface. The device. The cloud. The idea of software itself.

We're surrounded by weird new forms again.

Chatbots. Agents. Glasses. Local models. Voice interfaces. Wearables. Giant cloud systems. Tiny edge systems. Autonomous browsers. Personal models. Ambient computers.

It's phone origami all over again.

Nobody knows what the thing is supposed to become.

Which means somewhere inside this mess is another collapse waiting to happen.

Another moment where someone walks onto a stage — or perhaps doesn't need a stage anymore — and shows us something that makes the previous five years of experimentation suddenly look obvious.

That is the ridge Apple is approaching now.

But before we get to John Ternus standing on it, we need to talk about the man who spent fourteen years turning Steve Jobs's arrow into one of the largest technological civilizations the world has ever seen.

Because Tim Cook didn't inherit the ridge. He inherited the valley. And he built the absolute shit out of it.

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Rich Washburn is a technologist, strategist, and Founder & Chief AI Architect of ARIA AI Labs, working at the intersection of AI, infrastructure, communications, and capital. He also serves as Managing Partner and Chief AI Officer at Eliakim Capital.