The Smartphone Revolution
A while back I was in Chippewa Falls, which is a small city in central Wisconsin. While I was there, I went to the Chippewa Falls Museum of Industry & Technology.
Now, you might think a museum about industry and technology in central Wisconsin would not be that interesting. However, if you’re familiar with the history of information technology, then you know that Cray Research, the builders of the famous Cray supercomputer systems, started in Chippewa Falls in the early 70s. Consequently, the Chippewa Falls Museum of Industry & Technology has a lot of Cray stuff, including several examples of the Cray supercomputers that you can walk up and examine yourself.
It was pretty cool to get up close and look at the old Cray supercomputers. Back then computers like that were huge enough that they essentially came with their own cushioned benches. That’s not a joke, either. The original Cray systems actually had cushioned benches around the base that helped with the cooling system and gave technicians a place to sit while waiting for the system to finish running jobs.
It is interesting to reflect that you could take a bunch of those old systems from the 70s and 80s, combine them together, and they would still have only a fraction of the computing power of a modern smartphone that you can carry around in the back pocket of your trousers.
I was reflecting on that visit to the museum recently when I got my first iPhone.
I’ve been an Android user for the better part of the last fourteen years, but I was becoming increasingly annoyed by how Google was jamming AI features into every aspect of Android. (Short summary of previous posts on the topics: I don’t really like AI, and decided that my personal “line in the sand” will be that every book/audiobook that says “Jonathan Moeller” on the cover will have been written entirely by me without AI assistance of any kind.) However, I could live with that since I didn’t actually use the new AI features very much, but my old phone was beginning to die so I was thinking about getting a new one.
The final catalyst was a change to the Google Messages app. Google slipped in a feature that automatically generates replies to text messages, and it started auto-responding to messages without me realizing it.
To put it mildly, I was big mad.
I have spent a significant portion of my life very carefully considering what I’m going to say next so I don’t put my foot in my mouth, and so to have the app respond for me in a way that could potentially be misinterpreted was absolutely infuriating. So that change to the Google Messages was the final straw, and I got an iPhone for my replacement.
I suppose that represents a philosophical change for me. Twenty, twenty-five years ago, I was totally opposed to Apple’s “walled garden” approach to software. However, I’ve had a lot of IT experience since then, which involved dealing with a lot of malware and cybercrime. There are so many bad actors and predatory scammers out there that a heavy hand may be necessary to keep order in the Internet. Granted, there are legitimate & serious questions about whether or not that heavy hand should belong to a megacorporation like Apple, and just how heavy that hand should be, but that’s beyond the scope of this post and frankly way beyond my scope to decide.
But that is a digression. What do I think of the iPhone?
Overall, I like it. I especially like how there’s a system-wide switch to disable most of the new AI features. I remember doing tech support for early iPhones back in the 2000s, and this thing is quantum leaps and light years beyond it. In fact, it’s a little uncanny how much stuff it can do locally without an Internet connection. Like, it’s probably the single most capable handheld device I’ve ever used. Since I started using a smartphone for the first time in 2013 I’ve gradually been running more and more stuff off it, and the 2026 iPhone is the most capable at handling all of it. I’m very, very cognizant of the fact that it’s a personal computer that happens to have phone and messaging apps, and not a phone that happens to have some additional functions.
That’s what got me thinking about the Chippewa Falls Museum of Industry & Technology. Essentially, the smartphone revolution means that everyone is carrying around something more powerful than a 90s era Cray Supercomputer in their pocket or bag.
I suppose no one knows what the long term effects of this change will be, so we’ll just have to see.
The picture attached to this post is the interior of one of the Cray supercomputers in the museum. I took it because I thought it might make an interesting text overlay for the text on a book cover. 🙂
-JM