Comment by entropy_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by entropy_ | Hacker News Reader

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The iPhone definitely did not definitely did not bring tons of people to computing for the first time. By the time the iPhone came out PCs and laptops were pretty much in every home anyway. Let me put it this way, I live in a third world country(Lebanon), and the first time we had a computer at home was in 1996(11 years before the iPhone), and by that point most of my friends in school already had a PC at home. We were not wealthy by any measure(more like lower to middle class at the time).

The iPhone did many things, but that is not one of them. No, what brought computing to the masses was Windows and cheap computers(around the time of the 486~pentium era). While I agree that nowadays it's common for a child's first interaction with computers to be a smartphone, this was definitely not the case when the iPhone was first introduced in 2007 and access to computers was already quite common and cheap everywhere around the world

Access != adoption.

Even if every house had a PC, it doesn’t mean everyone in that house used it.

Today it’s not uncommon for every person in the house to have their own smartphone. And they use them on levels rivaling television at its peak — hours and hours a day. And it includes the grandmas, grandpas, aunts and uncles who wouldn’t even touch the PC.

The iPhone and the smartphone era it ushered in a seismic shift in society, is that not obvious? Something like 2 billion smartphone users globally today, roughly a decade from the iPhone introduction. In the late 90s PC users measured in the millions.

Kids used their PCs to write homework assignments. Parents used it to print out directions from map quest.

The iPhone likely dramatically increased the frequency of use but PC penetration was near universal by the late 2000s.

FWIW my grandpa and most others at the retirement home use a dumb phone.

> In the late 90s PC users measured in the millions.

In the late 1990s, internet users (which, as the smartphone revolution hadn't happened, were largely a subset of PC users) were in the hundreds of millions and doubling roughly annually, though that slowed dramatically around 2000, but still was rapid enough to reach over a billion before the iPhone was introduced.

The smartphone revolution did a lot, but even so your are way overstating it.

I just don't think you can equate internet access with the relationship people have today with technology. Addressing several comments here, but frequency matters – it's a lot different to have a computer in every home that family members use to varying degrees, vs a smartphone in the hands of billions of people who are glued to them on a daily basis at levels that rival Television at its peak.

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