The Ineffable Evanescence of iOS

Apple was no stranger to handheld devices by the time Steve Jobs, with the new iPhone in hand, appeared onstage at Macworld Expo in 2007—the company had already released the Newton and the iPod. The Newton, though loaded with promising technology and interface ideas, had proved to be an ambitious failure, but the iPod, which offered simplicity as its most important interface achievement, was so big a success that at its height it brought in almost as much revenue as Apple’s entire Mac line. Even more importantly, the palm-sized music player was putting Apple-branded technology in many more customers’ hands than its flagship Macintosh ever had. By the middle of the 21st century’s first decade Apple could clearly see that small handheld devices would be a very large part of the company’s future.

“Very large part” doesn’t even come close to describing it. By the middle of the century’s second decade, handheld devices and the operating system that ran them completely dominated Apple’s and the tech world’s attention, achieving the sort of celebrity status that the Mac and its operating system, influential as they had been, never even distantly approached.

Coming up, I look at what happened when a new user interface model arrived at Apple in The Case of the New Kid in Town, explore the mysteries of its evolution in The iOS and iPadOS Look and Feel Casebook, focus on the growing importance of screen edges in The iOS and iPadOS Edge Cases Casebook, and examine today’s editing interface in The iOS and iPadOS Touchy Text Casebook.