It was genuinely valuable from a marketing standpoint to sort of like have Steve Jobs bequeath this under the world like Moses with a tablet.

Thank you. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week's guest is someone who I think you're going to be quite familiar with. And that's Brian Merchant. Brian is a tech journalist, author of The One Device, the Secret History of the iPhone, and co-editor of Terraform Watch Worlds Burn, an anthology of near-future science fiction that comes out in August. Now, Brian's been on the show a few times before, but you might remember

our conversation from September of 2021, that's episode 78, where we really dug into the history

of the iPhone, how it was made,

the innovations that went into it, the supply chain from the mining to the manufacturing,

that makes this product possible. That was a really important conversation. And I think shed a lot

of light on the iPhone, obviously drawing from Brian's book, the one device, not to say

this was all new or anything like that, but to really give people some more insight into what

it takes to make this product that so many of us are reliant on. In this week's episode, we are

extending that conversation. The iPhone came out 15 years ago yesterday, June 29th, 2007. In the United States,

of course, it came out a little bit later in Europe and in some other countries. And so instead

of digging deep into the history of the iPhone this time, we wanted to talk about the impact

that it's had in those past 15 years, the ways that it has

changed, the way that we interact with technology, the ways that it has altered the economy

and the way that many people work, and what it has meant for Apple itself as this company that

has benefited so much from selling this incredibly profitable product.

We get to a ton of interesting aspects of the iPhone in this discussion, whether that's how it enabled certain new economies like the gig economy,

the surveillance and tracking that it helped make possible, and how Apple surrounds this device with a kind of

environmental framing to make us feel guilt-free when we buy it. But I'm sure that there are

plenty of other impacts as well. So after you listen to the conversation, if you think that there

are others that you want to mention, feel free to reply to the tweet that I make about the podcast

on social media and share your thoughts on what the iPhone signifies

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