The point is more - today's smartphones are the first iphone with a better camera and faster data connection.

That said in other areas there's much more improvement, for example EVs, solar panels, intelligent search engines. Remember the days when we used scripts that would parallelize searches over lycos, yahoo, webcrawler, altavista, alltheweb, ...

The counter point is that the innovation never stopped, it just moved down a level. We 'optimized' the hardware (as in gave it sufficient form to fulfill necessary functions) then did the same for the application space. Twitter, Facebook, Google, music streaming, all solidifying their phone presence over the past ten years.

Just as the application space has begun to stagnant, suddenly our data is speaking back to us through LLMs. Such models will be the next space we'll 'optimize', but these models will also be optimizing themselves. Strange loop.

> Twitter, Facebook, Google, music streaming, all solidifying their phone presence over the past ten years.

I would argue these are all worse outcomes than I'd hoped for.

I dreamed we'd have utilities based on RDF and bittorrent that could pull down any data we liked. Track any authors across the internet, highlight all content about topics we liked, pull in all new astronomy photos. Automatic ranking and scoring to fit our preferences. Better collaboration, much higher signal, much less noise.

I thought we'd control the data, the pipes, the routing, all of it.

We have a product manager internet, not a magical utility knife internet.

In 2001 you could get the Kyocera Palm phone, which is a more valid comparison. But yes.

Nokia also released 9210 about the same time as 3310. From that perspective iPhone was even less of an improvement and a step back in some aspects.