The rise and fall of smartphones: a brief history of key moments
From the first brick-sized IBM model in 1994 to the explosive 2024 bestseller that blamed Big Tech for rewiring kids’ brains
August 1994: IBM releases the world’s first smartphone: Simon, a brick-size device with a few hours of battery life. It sells a measly 50,000 units over six months before being discontinued.
March 2002: Waterloo’s Research in Motion debuts the BlackBerry 5810, the first in a line of smartphones so addictive they earn the nickname “CrackBerry.”
June 2007: Steve Jobs announces the first iPhone in San Francisco, saying, with eerie prescience, “Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.”
June 2009: Apple introduces push notifications, ushering in an era of chronic distraction via uninvited ads, breaking-news alerts and inane social media updates.
June 2010: The selfie takes off after Apple launches the iPhone 4, its first smartphone with a front-facing camera, mere months before the launch of Instagram.
May 2012: A group of Australians coin the term “phubbing,” a portmanteau of phone and snubbing, to describe the act of ignoring the people around you in favour of your smartphone—soon to be joined by other delightful terms like “doomscrolling” and “brain rot.”
March 2013: The United Nations reports that more people in the world have access to mobile phones than to working toilets.
June 2018: Apple launches Screen Time, followed shortly by Google’s launch of Wellbeing—features meant to address the increasing number of hours people spend on their smartphones. They don’t work.
October 2021: Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen tells the US Senate that her bosses knew their “profit-optimizing machine was generating self-harm and self-hate” and that “Facebook became a trillion-dollar company by paying for its profits with our safety.”
May 2023: US surgeon general Vivek Murthy blames smartphones and social media for the youth mental health crisis.
March 2024: Jonathan Haidt’s bestseller The Anxious Generation controversially (but probably correctly) blames “phone-based childhood” for rewiring kids’ brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness.
May 2025: Quebec is the first province to tighten its ban on smartphones in schools, shifting from a no-phones-in-classrooms policy to a bell-to-bell ban that will come into effect this fall.
