[runarberg]

None of these actually were hard to sell. In 2007 we had mobile phones, we had mp3 players (the iPod was actually very good), we had CouchSurfing, etc.

I think the smart phone revolution is actually pretty overstated. It basically only made computers cheaper and handier to carry (but also more walled gardens). There are a few capabilities of smart phones we do today which we didn’t with do with computers and mobile phones back in 2007, such as navigation (GPS were a thing but not used much by the general public).

Your case would be much stronger if you’d use the World Wide Web as your analogy, as in 1995 it would by hard to convince anybody how important it would be to maintain a web presence. And nobody would guess a social media like the irc would blow up into something other then a toy.

However I think the analogy with smartphones are actually more apt, this AI revolution has made statistical models more accessible, but we are only using them for things we were already capable of before, and unlike the web, and much like smartphones, I don’t think that will actually change. But unlike smartphones, it will always be cheaper and often even easier to use the alternatives.

[rpcope1]

Even the navigation part, I'm not so sure. I remember Dad would bring a laptop when we would drive new places and it would be running Microsoft Streets and Trips with a GPS dongle, and I think that have been late 90s or early 00s. I remember seeing other people do that and by the time I was driving a lot in 07 I remember having a dash mounted GPS, maybe a Magellan or Garmin, that didn't cost that much and again I remember a lot of people doing it. The smartphone definitely displaced it, but it wasn't a complete novelty even for the general public.

[kelnos]

I think you lived in a strange bubble when you were a kid. When I was a teenager in the 90s, we'd have paper maps that we'd bring with us. We had no GPS. I don't think we knew what GPS was.

In the late 90s we'd print out directions from MapQuest. That was a game-changer. Still no GPS, though.

As an adult in the early 00s, I was still printing out MapQuest maps. In 2004 I got a car with a built-in navigation system! (Complete with a DVD drive in the trunk with a disc holding the maps.) It was still incredibly uncommon; I was one of the few people I knew who had one. I did know a few people who had Garmin GPS devices that they'd suction-cup to their windshield, but not many.

By 2007 most people were aware of GPS devices with little screens that you could bring into the car, though I'd guess maybe 25% of the drivers I knew then had one.

If your dad was bringing a laptop with a GPS dongle in the car in the 90s, I think you were very unusual. Hell, I didn't even have a laptop until 2004, and even then it was a hand-me-down from my dad's work. And I was in my 20s by then!

[runarberg]

I remember GPS being something mountaineers had. People who would take their jeeps up to the glacier had them. Boats also had them. Coincidentally I was a fisherman back then and did observe my captain using a super fancy navigation device with an interactive map (and yes the map did come on a DVD); I also knew a couple of jeep men (or jeppakarlar as we call them in Icelandic) who had something similar (though more compact) in their jeeps; and to top it of, I would spend hours on google earth, just having fun looking at the map on my desktop.

I however did not see this technology coming to our phones, and becoming this commonplace.

It has been a day since I wrote the upthread post, and navigation is still the only novel capability of smartphones, which I think would have been a hard sell in 2007. I really can‘t think of another example.

[kelnos]

> I however did not see this technology coming to our phones, and becoming this commonplace.

I didn't see a lot of things coming to phones. I never expected that I'd pay for things by hovering my phone over a payment terminal. Didn't think it would replace my iPod (or MP3 CD player, or Discman, or Walkman). Absolutely had no idea it would replace my camera.

And on the other side of the coin... my "phone" is barely a phone. The phone features are probably what I like least about it.

[rjrjrjrj]

Air travel has changed a lot.

Booking, boarding, change/gate notifications, rebooking options, customs and immigration is done via phone.

Transit to/from the airport via Uber or a transit pass stored in your smartphone wallet.

Baggage tracking via airtags

Yeah, there's vague precedents for this stuff from the desktop computer era, but it only _really_ works when you've got an internet-connected device in your pocket.

[runarberg]

Ahhh, payment via phones is also a new thing that I think very few people saw coming (including me). However it is also a very recent development and not really a part of the supposed smartphone revolution. In 2007 we did not have touchless payments (except in some public transit systems; gyms; etc. but it was limited to a special cards you couldn’t use for anything else) so this is definitely a new capability which was probably hard to sell in 2007.

The others you mentions, I would argue against. Yes it is convenient to order a taxi via an app on your phone, but in 2007 you could do so via SMS or a phone call, so not much has change really other then we now have one more interface to pick from.

I don’t see how smartphones have changed rebooking, nor customs, and especially not immigration which has become 100x more of a headache then it was in 2007. And finally, airtags are a separate technology from smartphones.

[rjrjrjrj]

Hand-waving away ride-sharing as not much of a change makes me wonder what you would actually consider to be significant. It completely upended the taxi business.

2007: arrive in a new city, figure out who to call (or maybe text) for that particular city, wait, hope someone will pick you up and understand enough of your language and the local geography to get you where you want to go, possibly some unpleasant haggling over the fare

2026: arrive in a new city/country, open Uber, specify in the app precisely where you want to go, choose a vehicle, when to get picked up, etc, track vehicle progress in real-time, up-front pricing

And that's the consumer side. The provider side was even more radically changed.

If you don't see how smartphones changed the experience of flying... maybe you don't fly anywhere?

Airtags are entirely dependent on the ubiquity of smartphones.

[alfanick]

Wardriving with a car + GPS and Atheros Wifi adapter and Pringles antenna, oh sweet 90s/00s.

[alfanick]

I used to have PDAs with Windows Mobile, hmm even a BlackBerry. Oh gosh, navigation apps were absolutely crap back then, screens were crap, cameras were crap. Video calls via "3g", if any of your friends/family also had a 3g-capable phone, maybe it worked, experience you couldn't compare to FaceTime. iPhone/Android, really brought a new life into this ecosystem.

[runarberg]

Camera phones were already very popular in 2007. The Flight of the Concords even made a joke out of it. But most people still owned a separate digital camera. It was not hard to predict that the cameras on your phone would get better and eventually replace your dedicated digital cameras. We all saw that coming.

Same with video calls, if anything that idea was oversold in 2007. Most people had Skype (or something similar) and would video call international calls (which were very expensive using the regular phone lines back then). If you were traveling internationally you would find an internet café log in to your Skype and make a call. Moving this capability to the smart phone was a no-brainier. Turns out that when we have it in our phones, video calls are still more popular on desktops (via zoom, etc.) in 2026.