My paean to the iPhone after ten years

That is my latest Bloomberg column, here is the closing bit:

Finally, names can be deceiving. The iPhone isn’t fundamentally a phone, even though Steve Jobs himself thought that phone service was the killer app for the product. Instead, it’s an all-purpose communications device, music player, recorder, camera, map, adviser, software distributor and dating-enabler rolled into one. When Siri gets better it will be a companion too. As iPhones and other smartphones became more widespread, the number of phone calls I received declined. No other device has done more to make the phone less necessary. I’ll get your text or email right away.

Maybe that’s what I like about it most of all.

And from the beginning:

First, we’ve learned that, even in this age of bits and bytes, materials innovation still matters. The iPhone is behind the scenes a triumph of mining science, with a wide variety of raw materials and about 34 billion kilograms (75 billion pounds) of mined rock as an input to date, as discussed by Brian Merchant in his new and excellent book “The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone.” A single iPhone has behind it the production of 34 kilos of gold ore, with 20.5 grams (0.72 ounces) of cyanide used to extract the most valuable parts of the gold.

Do read the whole thing.