The iPhone Isn’t Cool

I cradled my first iPhone like an egg after I bought it. The year was 2011; the season was winter. The ground was slushy, but I was too nervous to take the thing on the subway. It was an absolute luxury, by far the fanciest and, I felt, most fragile thing I owned—more Fabergé than farmstand.

The precise model was the iPhone 4, which looked like an ice-cream sandwich from the side and felt about as sturdy. I wasn’t just concerned about slipping and dropping the thing: It was dark, I was in a crusty part of New York, and I looked like I got scared at Death Cab for Cutie shows—would someone punch me in the face and yank it? The iPhone was relatively uncommon back then; BlackBerry—the traditionalist’s choice—was still more popular, but both were outnumbered by Android. Nokia was trouncing them all. Most Americans didn’t have a smartphone, and many had no mobile phone at all.

In a market generally defined by boring hunks of plastic, Apple gained an edge through impeccable design that was actually less functional than most of the competition. Many reviewers rightly pointed out that the touch screen was worse to type on than a physical keyboard, and complained about the iPhone’s fragility. In these early years, buying one was the fashionable choice, not the pragmatic one. It was cool.

How things have changed. As of this summer, for the first time ever, more Americans now use an iPhone than any other smartphone. Toddlers handle them while sitting in strollers. Parents handle them while pushing strollers. For a time during the pandemic, the Kardashians ripped through them on a weekly basis to film their show without risking exposure to a film crew. There’s no mystique, no scarcity, and not much in terms of novelty. The iPhone is like a tote bag with a few cameras: a utilitarian default.

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