Pod Insights The Vergecast Land of the Giants: This Changes Everything About this episode In Land of the Giants: The Apple Revolution, Recode’s Peter Kafka explores the company that changed what a computer is — and then changed what a phone is. From its beginnings as a niche personal computer company, Apple became the preeminent maker of consumer tech products, a cultural trendsetter, and the most valuable company in the world. And along the way, it changed the way we live.
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Transcript 6,265 words · 17 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's Chief Investment Strategist, and Colin Martin, Head of Fixed Income Research and Strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.
0:45 Nilay Patel? Hey everybody, it's Neil from the Vergecast. We've got something special in the feed today. It's an episode of Land of the Giants, a podcast we'd like to share from our friends over at Recode. You may have heard this episode in the Decoder feed last week, but if not, go subscribe to Decoder now. And two, listen to Land of the Giants, a podcast that explores how the biggest tech companies rose to power and what they're doing with that power. Previous seasons have covered giants like Google and Amazon. This season covers Apple. Obviously, we talk about Apple a lot. There's a lot going on with that company. There's the controversial CSAM features. There's the epic verdict and the challenges to how the App Store works. There's employee unrest. But if you want a deeper understanding of how Apple got to where it is and its relationship to China, Land of the Giants is going to explain all that and more. You're about to listen to the first episode in the series,
1:30 Nilay Patel? which explores the iPhone revolution. I'm in this episode. You're going to hear me talk about all the things that carried in my pockets before the iPhone and how obvious it was they were all going to be the same thing, the iPhone. You can follow Land of Giants wherever you find your podcasts. New episodes come out on Wednesdays. It's a great show. Here we go.
1:50 Speaker 00 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. But one giant company was not at the Consumer Electronics Show. Apple.
2:05 Speaker 02 Apple's absence at CES wasn't unusual. What was unusual was that Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO, was holding his own show at the same time 400 miles away.
2:14 Speaker 03 He set an unspecified special event at one of the convention centers in San Francisco.
2:24 Speaker 02 Walt Mossberg was the Wall Street Journal's tech reviewer, and he had more influence on tech than any other journalist. If you had a new computer, or gadget, or software you wanted the world to know about, you brought it to Mossberg first, and you prayed he liked it. Steve Jobs had cultivated a relationship with Mossberg for years. He called him up routinely, off the record, to shoot the shit. Now Jobs wanted Mossberg at his event.
2:47 Speaker 03 And 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."
3:01 Speaker 02 Mossberg said no. He was going to CES instead. Then he got another call. This time, it was Jobs on the line.
3:09 Speaker 03 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." 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." 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."
3:40 Speaker 02 That was a hard sell from one of the world's best salesmen, and it worked. Mossberg got on a plane to go see the Steve Jobs show.
3:50 Speaker 04 Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.
3:56 Speaker 02 Jobs was onstage in his standard uniform: jeans, New Balance, black turtleneck. He told the crowd he'd be introducing three revolutionary new products.
4:05 Speaker 04 The first one is a widescreen iPod with touch controls.
4:13 Speaker 04 The second is a revolutionary mobile phone. And the third is a breakthrough internet communications device.
4:27 Speaker 02 People who paid attention to Apple knew that Apple was gonna make a phone someday. So there were huge expectations it would be groundbreaking. But the phone itself, that was a total mystery.
4:38 Speaker 04 An iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator.
4:46 Speaker 04 An iPod, a phone.
4:50 Speaker 03 The way that he started kind of teasing you into thinking it might be multiple devices.
4:57 Speaker 04 Are you getting it?
5:02 Speaker 04 This is one device.
5:08 Speaker 04 And we are calling it iPhone.
5:13 Speaker 03 I thought it would change phones forever. It was incredible. I thought it was gonna be an enormous hit.
5:20 Speaker 02 And it was. The iPhone changed phones forever. But it also changed personal computing. It changed business. It changed Apple. And it changed us.
5:33 Speaker 02 Welcome to Land of the Giants: The Apple Revolution. I'm Peter Kafka. I cover technology for Vox and Recode. We 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. Products you touch, products you hold in your hand or wear on your body. Apple started out as an innovative but niche personal computer company. Now it's the world's most important consumer electronics company. Even if you don't use its products, you live in a world Apple has completely reshaped. It's created entirely new industries, wiped out giant competitors, and it's changed the way all of us live. And all of that's because of a single product: the iPhone.
6:22 Speaker 02 Okay, quick survey. What kind of phone do you have? If you're in America and you're listening to this podcast, you've got an iPhone. What's that? You got something else? You got an Android? Okay, it's possible. And truth, and because my editors want me to spell this out, iPhones only account for about half the smartphone market in the US. But even so, that still means you're using a phone that looks and behaves just like an iPhone. Because after the iPhone came out, there was no going back. It became the template. Next question. Do you remember what phone you had before you got an iPhone? And more important, do you remember what life was like before the iPhone? You probably don't. It was a while ago and a lot has changed. So we asked some tech journalists, The Verge's Neelai Patel and The Wall Street Journal's Joanna Stern,
7:07 Speaker 02 to help us remember the before times.
7:09 Nilay Patel? 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.
7:19 Speaker 05 You either used a regular cellphone, 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.
7:29 Nilay Patel? But the thing most people cared about was what does it look like? And that's where you got a phone like the Motorola Razr.
7:36 Speaker 06 Hello Moto.
7:37 Speaker 05 Everyone wanted the Razr phone. And that was around that time and that was like a status symbol. And then you had like another class of devices, which are really the BlackBerry or Pocket PC, which were like, get, I can't curse on this podcast, right?
7:51 Nilay Patel? Yeah, yeah, go for it.
7:52 Speaker 05 Yeah, it was get shit done phones.
7:56 Speaker 02 Connect to everything you love in life with BlackBerry.
8:00 Speaker 05 Type on this keyboard, send email. You could also text. You could also do phone calls.
8:05 Speaker 02 So phones were something you used to make phone calls, maybe text people. If you worked on Wall Street or you wanted to seem important, maybe you used it for email, too. And if you wanted to take decent digital photos or listen to music, then you needed a few other devices.
8:21 Nilay Patel? I think about the stack of things I carried around my pockets in 2006. You had your wallet, your keys, you had your cellphone, and then you almost always also had an iPod.
8:31 Nilay Patel? And the iPod was a far superior device to any cellphone. People preferred using them to their phones. And it just seemed obvious, I think, to everyone at every layer, whether you were a titan of industry or whether you were just a person carrying on two devices, that these two things should be the same thing.
8:45 Speaker 02 Steve Jobs was one of the people that realized that the iPod and the phone were going to merge. So, Apple needed to be the one that figured out how to merge them before someone else did. One big problem for Apple, it had never made a phone before. It'd been making computers since 1976 and iPods for the last few years, but cellphones were a whole different beast. 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. 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. Former Apple executive Tony Fidell helped build the iPod and then the iPhone. Why is it Apple that built the iPhone?
9:28 Speaker 02 Not Microsoft, not Sony, not BlackBerry, for that matter?
9:34 Speaker 07 These large companies try to take their properties, like Windows. They all try to take their property that they know and move their customers and this big operating system down 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. Do you use a stylus instead of a mouse now? Instead of using your finger?
10:00 Speaker 02 So you think this is an ideological thing, not a capability thing?
10:03 Speaker 07 That's what I've seen as 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. They have to rethink it from the bottom up.
10:17 Speaker 02 So, Apple knew it wanted to build a phone and that it would be starting from scratch. It rounds up a team to build something new. And Apple, which is famously secretive at all times, got even more clamped down this time around. Nitin Ghanatra was on the original iPhone engineering team, and part of his job was to recruit other Apple employees onto the project.
10:36 Speaker 08 I would go into somebody's office, somebody who we identified as we should really have this person on the team, and I would walk in and say, hey, I can't tell you what we're working on. I can't mention anything about 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. Do you want to come and do it? And most of the time, the answer was yes.
10:59 Speaker 02 Mark Hamblin worked on the original iPhone product team, focused on the touchscreen.
11:04 Speaker 09 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. 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.
11:24 Speaker 02 The extra dose of secrecy was a sign that the iPhone was a very big deal to Apple. Another sign, Steve Jobs was very, very hands-on. Francisco Tomalski was hired to work on the iPhone software, but not right away.
11:39 Speaker 10 When I first joined, it happened to be that Steve was on vacation, and he needs to personally approve everyone the day they start. And so they were just like, well, Steve's on vacation, so you're on vacation.
11:54 Speaker 02 And once Jobs signed off on you, the scope and ambition of the project became pretty clear.
11:59 Speaker 08 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. And so the pressure was ratcheted up because of that.
12:13 Speaker 02 Jobs had been a famously harsh critic of his employees' work in his early days. And 30 years after starting Apple, he remained intense. Francisco Tomalski remembers that Steve Jobs would check in on the team's progress every couple of weeks.
12:27 Speaker 10 I guess it was quickly discovered that the interactions were fairly demoralizing for the engineers. 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.
12:47 Speaker 02 The iPhone became a two-year sprint to build something Apple had never made and that no one else had either. A sprint that ended with Steve Jobs onstage promising three devices.
12:57 Speaker 04 A widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communications device.
13:06 Speaker 02 For the team that built it, that onstage demo was more stressful than any other moment.
13:11 Speaker 08 I mean, it was just, I've never been so nervous. You know, not even on my wedding day was I was I as nervous as that.
13:18 Speaker 10 If Safari crashes, we're in deep shit sort of thing.
13:22 Speaker 08 A buddy had a flask that he was passing around.
13:27 Speaker 10 It seems like it would be a pleasant memory, but it's not. It's a high anxiety memory.
13:32 Speaker 02 Everyone else who gathered to watch the unveiling, they had a different experience. The iPhone blew them away. Media treated it like a major international news event. Got a front page write-up in the New York Times. And it really was amazing. People had imagined combining a music player with a phone for years, but this was so much more. A computer merged with a phone, a music player and a camera, and a display you could manipulate with your fingers. A display that lets you call up just about anything on the internet. A triumph. But...
14:05 Speaker 08 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.
14:15 Speaker 02 Apple diehards lined up. They literally lined up overnight to buy the iPhone when it went on sale months later. A certain kind of tech dude loved it. If you had one, you could show it off at a party. But for regular people, the iPhone wasn't a must-have in the summer of 2007. It was expensive. Starting price was 500 bucks. This was back when most people had phones subsidized by the phone carriers. Speaking of carriers, the iPhone only ran on AT&T's network because AT&T was the only network willing to let Steve Jobs do whatever he wanted. But AT&T's network couldn't handle the iPhone. Calls dropped all the time. The iPhone didn't feel essential.
14:52 Speaker 05 That first iPhone was like a wow factor.
14:56 Speaker 02 Joanna Stern again.
14:57 Speaker 05 Like, it did a lot of things that you were like, holy crap, it's gonna do that? But we weren't quite sure what it was gonna do for us yet.
15:06 Speaker 02 So it took the iPhone a while before it became the iPhone. But eventually, by the fourth generation in 2010, everything had come together. The internet speeds got much faster and you could get the iPhone on other networks. The camera got better. It added a front-facing camera. Enter the selfie era. Batteries and chips improved and the phone got sleeker.
15:27 Speaker 05 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.
15:37 Speaker 02 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. An App Store, 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. It's what let the iPhone make good on the promise Steve Jobs laid out when he first showed it off. Here's The Verge's Neelai Patel. Chicken and egg, but what is more important? The iPhone or the apps that the iPhone enables?
16:09 Nilay Patel? The apps.
16:11 Speaker 02 Because?
16:12 Nilay Patel? 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. If you don't have the application ecosystem to support the actual breakthrough, you just have a widescreen iPod with touch controls.
16:28 Speaker 02 When we come back, the App Store revolution begins.
16:47 Speaker 02 The iPhone debuted in 2007 without an App Store. A year later, Steve Jobs added one, reluctantly. At first, the App Store was flooded with novelties. Digital versions of Pet Rocks. There were apps that let your iPhones make gun noises or act like a virtual Zippo lighter. Here's an actual headline from Wired that year. iPhone Fart App Rakes In $10,000 A Day.
17:10 Speaker 11 I remember one of the top apps, 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.
17:22 Speaker 02 For Chris Barton, though, the App Store wasn't a way to make a quick buck. It was a way to jumpstart a real business that actually solved a problem. Barton co-founded Shazam. This is an app that was like having a personal music nerd in your pocket. 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. Shazam existed before the iPhone and the App Store, but it was a pain in the ass to use. 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. Then came the App Store, which instantly let Shazam do two things. 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.
18:06 Speaker 02 And just as important, it let anyone with an iPhone find and download Shazam easily with a couple clicks.
18:12 Speaker 11 Before that, we had been looking at very small numbers of users, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of users. 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.
18:30 Speaker 02 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. They were pre-installed on the home screen. They called it the deck. And you got what you got. You didn't get a say in the matter. 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, and it was really hard to get any new software onto your phone. The App Store made this super easy, and Shazam found a huge audience via the iPhone. It eventually stalled out and sold to Apple for less than its investors had hoped, but Shazam still got a shot. And eventually, developers caught up to the possibilities that the iPhone, in combination with the App Store, could open up. And they made apps that changed the way we interact with each other and changed the
19:15 Speaker 02 world. Apps that built new industries.
19:18 Speaker 11 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, in just a couple clicks, you can start doing a whole bunch of other things." And so it was game-changing.
19:37 Speaker 02 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. Uber changed all that. And the person driving the car would use their phone to find you. You hired them temporarily with Uber and Apple acting as middlemen. That equation turned Uber into a $76 billion company that remade transportation and, for better or worse, kicked off the gig economy. None of that happens in a world where the iPhone doesn't exist. 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. And now they're multi-billion dollar businesses that have changed the way we socialize and think and vote.
20:21 Speaker 02 The App Store is the way all this gets to your phone. It's the store where you pick the software for your phone. This is one of those changes so massive, you couldn't really tell how big it was going to be. But it was also a change that happened very, very fast. In 2007, there was no App Store. In 2009, if you needed to do something, well...
20:40 Speaker 06 There's even an app for that. Yep, there's an app for just about anything, only on the iPhone.
20:48 Speaker 02 And now we don't even think about it. Apps and your phone are the same thing. The two of them together unlock a whole new world. 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. Apple is now an iPhone company that also sells computers and a few other things. Half of its revenue comes from the iPhone and just 10% from Macs. And most of the other non-Mac stuff Apple sells really is iPhone stuff, too. The App Store, which generates billions of dollars a year for Apple, that's an offshoot of the iPhone. AirPods, they're meant to work with the iPhone. You literally can't use an Apple Watch without an iPhone. You throw all that together, and 80% of Apple's revenue comes from the phone.
21:35 Speaker 02 So the iPhone has changed Apple and business and tech, but the thing that has changed most in the iPhone era is us.
21:43 Speaker 12 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.
21:55 Speaker 02 That's from a 2010 episode of Futurama. It's about devices planted directly into your eyes. Get it? iPhone. It came out a couple of years after the iPhone's debut. 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.
22:14 Speaker 13 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.
22:22 Speaker 02 How much time are we spending on our phones? A lot, obviously. We're not sure about the total amount. A couple of 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. And no matter how much time we spend with our implant/phones, it's time we're not spending doing something else.
22:45 Speaker 13 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 discretionary time, that's the time that most of us allocate significantly to our phones.
22:59 Speaker 02 Freaking out about tech and screens and how much time we're spending on them is not a new thing. People were doing this about TV as soon as TV showed up. I spent many, many hours watching bad TV in my basement growing up, and now my kids are spending many, many hours on their screens. But they're watching better stuff and they're playing cooler games. That's an improvement, right? Maybe. 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. But it feels different to me.
23:29 Speaker 02 And it seems different to people who study this stuff for a living. 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. 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. They think the phone encourages us to overshare with people we don't really know 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. 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. Other academics think there's a good chance that relying on your phone's GPS reduces
24:14 Speaker 02 your overall sense of direction. And teenagers are growing horns on the base of their skulls because they spend so much time hunched over phones. 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 of years ago before they had to walk it back. But we are very receptive to these kind of phone horror stories. We spend so much time attached to these things and we don't feel great about it. And also, we know that Apple employees themselves are worried about what happens when you live in all-screen life. Steve Jobs, for instance, famously limited screen time for his own kids.
24:51 Speaker 13 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. You can tell everyone you want them to use your product, but you make sure that you don't use too much of it at home.
25:03 Speaker 02 And now that Tony Fadell, 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.
25:11 Speaker 07 To be absolutely honest, I think about this weekly. You know, is this, you know, nuclear power or is this the nuclear bomb?
25:19 Speaker 02 In a 2018 essay for Wired, Fadell 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.
25:29 Speaker 07 But don't blame the refrigerator for what you put in it, right? The iPhone is a refrigerator. 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.
25:44 Speaker 02 This metaphor makes some sense to me. 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. Or maybe it's your fault for using Facebook too much. The refrigerator is just storing the ice cream. It seems like Apple likes this argument, too. Months after Fidel wrote his Wired story, Apple introduced Screen Time. It's a feature that tells you how much time you spend on your phone. That is a food label. And now Apple is requiring labels for apps, too. But we've had actual food labels for years. We're not getting any thinner. And I don't think telling you you're using your phone too much is what's going to make you put it down. So what would make you put your phone down? What if you got rid of your iPhone completely?
26:29 Speaker 02 Could you unbreak your brain and return to the life you lived pre-iPhone? We found someone who is trying to do this. Well, actually, my producer Zach Mack did. So right now, I'm going to bring him in to tell us about this experiment. Hey, Zach.
26:41 Speaker 14 Hey, Peter. What's up?
26:43 Speaker 02 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. And then you went out and found someone who's actually doing this every day.
26:52 Speaker 14 Yes, I found a woman named Lucy Adams.
26:55 Speaker 15 My name's Lucy. I'm 27. I'm a documentary filmmaker, and I live in Brooklyn, and I have a flip phone.
27:05 Speaker 14 So about nine months ago, she got rid of her iPhone.
27:08 Speaker 02 Why?
27:09 Speaker 14 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.
27:17 Speaker 15 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. And I was 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. But now that I have a flip phone, I really can't imagine going back to the iPhone life.
27:42 Speaker 02 But wait, why doesn't she just take the addicting, interesting apps that make her unhappy and just take them off her phone? Isn't that her real complaint?
27:50 Speaker 14 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.
27:58 Speaker 02 Yeah, no, that's a bad move, from what I understand.
28:00 Speaker 14 Yes. I want to make this clear. 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.
28:10 Speaker 15 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.
28:17 Speaker 14 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 gotta be honest, ditching my iPhone seems impossible. There's a constant navigation of logistics. "Hey, I'm in a new part of town. Where am I gonna eat? I don't know. Should I look at Yelp? Okay, it's late and I'm drunk and I need to get an Uber home." 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.
28:47 Speaker 15 You don't have the most immediate and easiest tool available. It doesn't mean that you can't get directions or can't call someone and ask for directions, but it's just, the reward isn't as immediate. And 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, "What's that bad about being lost?"
29:13 Speaker 02 Getting lost sucks. 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.
29:24 Speaker 14 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 reclaim her life and her peace of mind. 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. 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. She's got some hacks to help her get through her day, and part of that is relying on the people around her.
30:00 Speaker 15 Like, I've been out with friends and wanted to get a 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.
30:19 Speaker 14 If she's at a restaurant, she can't do the QR code thing.
30:22 Speaker 02 So someone else has to?
30:23 Speaker 14 Yeah.
30:24 Speaker 02 Wait, so Zach, it sounds like getting off the iPhone is not just a Lucy Adams project. It sounds like Lucy Adams' friends and bystanders have to help her get off the iPhone as well.
30:34 Speaker 14 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 Lyft for herself. But the iPad stays at home.
30:45 Speaker 15 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. You just adjust to it pretty quickly. I just think that having a flip phone has helped me just be a lot more intentional about my time.
31:06 Speaker 14 And do you feel like it's worth it? You would recommend this?
31:09 Speaker 15 100% recommend.
31:12 Speaker 02 So I don't think she's doing what she thinks she's doing. She's not giving up the iPhone, really, at all. She's using other people's iPhones. Even when she's at home, not using an iPhone, she's using an iPad, which is really just a big iPhone. I don't think she's left the iPhone behind at all.
31:27 Speaker 14 Well, she's not on it 10 hours a day, like you are.
31:31 Speaker 02 Zing.
31:32 Speaker 14 She's largely taken a step back from the phone. But yeah, she still lives in a society where we are reliant on smartphones.
31:41 Speaker 02 So that's what I think is most striking about what Lucy Adams is trying to do here. The starting point assumes that you have to have an iPhone. It's 14 years since the iPhone's been introduced, and now it's fully baked into society. It's not a mandate. I know it's a charged word. I'm gonna use it anyway, but it's pretty close.
31:59 Speaker 14 Yeah, this is, this is our life now. It feels almost impossible to go back, even if you try.
32:05 Speaker 02 None of us voted on this. We didn't explicitly consent to this. 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, but now we're here. We live in an iPhone world. Apple's world.
32:24 Speaker 02 Next up, how a computer company becomes all-powerful by ditching computers.
32:29 Speaker 16 Well, it 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.
32:41 Speaker 02 Land of the Giants: The Apple Revolution is a production of Recode by Vox and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Awesome people work on this show. Zach Mack is the show's senior producer. Our producer is Matt Fraschka. Jolie Myers is our editor. Serena Solan is our fact checker. Brandon McFarlane composed the show's theme and engineered this episode. Sam Altman is Recode's editor in chief. Our Chung is our showrunner. Nasheet Kirwa is our executive producer. I'm Peter Kafka. If you liked 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. Quick disclosure: Vox Media creates content for and does business with Apple. None of the people creatively involved this season of Land of the Giants are involved
33:26 Speaker 02 with those projects.
33:31 Speaker 02 You can listen to the full season of Land of the Giants wherever you find your podcasts.
33:37 Speaker 00 This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.
Previous Facebook's bad week: a 60 Minutes interview, a six-hour outage, and a Senate whistleblower hearing Next Surface extravaganza: a review of Windows 11 and Microsoft’s new Surface lineup Page updated October 13, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
