Smartphones transformed everything. Now, there’s more disruption to come

The advent of the smartphone marked the merging of man and machine. These devices might not be embedded into our forearms just yet, but they have so seismically changed how we operate and interact as humans over the past decade that we’re all effectively cyborgs now. We’re each wholly devoted to these tiny unknowable machines, rarely out of hand or at the very least rarely out of reach.

IBM’s ill-fated Simon Personal Communicator—released in 1994 and best known for its appearance in the equally ill-fated 1995 Sandra Bullock film “The Net”—was the first touch-screen machine to merge phone, email and PDA. It took 2007’s first-gen iPhone, however, to spark the smartphone’s rise from novelty to ubiquity. In early 2010, hand-held devices took a major leap, with global sales doubling from roughly 50 million devices in the first quarter of that year to about 100 million in the fourth quarter, just as “Off Duty” was first documenting sweater trends. Smartphone-sales-per-quarter eventually surged to a peak of more than 400 million units during the final few months of 2016.