Smartphone

Apple announces the iPhone in January 2007 and ships it that June. It is not the first phone with a browser or a camera. It is the one that makes a full computer, a radio, and a touchscreen the thing people mean by phone. Android follows within a year, and that competition is what spreads the shape.

The contribution is sensors in a billion pockets. Cameras, microphones, GPS, and accelerometers record continuously. The photos and text become the training fuel for the vision and language models after 2012. App stores also move software distribution off discs.

The phone needs every prior step: the transistor, the chip, the cellular radio that descends from 1901, the battery from the line that starts in 1800, and the web. It is a bundle, not a new science.

2007 is the iPhone announcement year. The world-scale effect is the early 2010s, when smartphones become ordinary outside rich countries.