The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone

by Brian Merchant

technoculture,

the interplay between, well, technology and culture. It’s a firmament of ideas that drives both invention and imagination.

Computers and cell phones would develop on separate tracks for the next half a century—researchers made smaller, faster, more multifunctional phones and computers

until eventually they both were small enough to be smashed together.

if any of those 1990s handhelds had succeeded, the iPhone never would have happened, because Apple would not have seen a field ready to be plucked!”

Great evidence in support of the 10/10 Rule

Most of the iPhone engineers I spoke with didn’t cite the Simon as a major influence; some hadn’t even heard of it, and some had forgotten about it.

It’s nonetheless undeniable that the two phones have a slew of overlapping functionalities and philosophies.

There’s something that seems almost universal about the devices, maybe because their inventors were drawing from a rich shared history of technologi...

the conceptual framework for the smartphone, what people imagined they could do with a mobile computer, has been around far, far longer than the iPhone.

The smartphone, like every other breakthrough technology, is built on the sweat, ideas, and inspiration of countless people. Technological progress is incremental, collective, and deeply rhizomatic, not spontaneous.

The technologies that shape our lives rarely emerge suddenly and out of nowhere; they are part of an incomprehensibly lengthy, tangled, and fluid process brought about by contributors who are mostly invisible to us.

It’s a very long road back from the bleeding edge.

“Cerro Rico stands today as the first and probably most important monument to capitalism and to the ensuing industrial revolution,”

“Potosí was the first city of capitalism, for it supplied the primary ingredient of capitalism—money.

Potosí made the money that irrevocably changed the economic compl...

Today, Cerro Rico has been carved out so thoroughly that geologists say the whole mountain might collaps...

Yet around fifteen thousand miners—thousands of them children, some as young as six years old—still work in the mines, prying tin, lead, zinc, and a litt...

And there’s a good chance some of that tin is inside your...

many still die in the mines every year,

Thousands of workers do this every day.

Mining on Cerro Rico is a decentralized affair. The site is nominally owned by Bolivia’s state-run mining company Comibol,

but miners don’t draw pay from the state; they work essentially as freelancers in loose-knit cooperatives.

They gather the tin, silver, zinc, and lead ores and sell them to smelters and processors, who in turn se...

This freelance model, combined with the fact that Bolivia is one of the poorest countries in South America, makes regul...

That lack of oversight helps explain why as many as three thousand children are belie...

So many children work in Bolivia that in 2014, the nation amended its child labor laws to allow ten-year-olds to do some work legally. That does not include mining—it’s technically illegal for children of any age to work in the mines. But lack of enforcement and the cooperative structure make it easy for children to slip through the cracks.

the children work the deepest in the mines, in smaller, hard-to-reach places that are less picked over.

It’s high-risk, boom-or-bust work, and children will often follow their fathers into the mine to supplement the family income or pay for their own school supplies. Mining is one of the most profitable jobs an unskilled laborer can find, due in part to the steep risks.

silicosis,

a lung disease that afflicts many who spend years in the mine inhaling silica dust and other harmful chemicals—part of the reason why the life expectancy of a full-time miner in Cerro Rico is forty.

Workers get paid by the quantity of salable minerals they pry from Rico’s ...

They use pickaxes and dynamite to break the rock free and load it into mine c...

the workers are said to distrust more efficient technologies because they...

On a good day, these miners can make fifty dollars each, which is a hefty sum here. If they don’t manage to find any significant amount of silver, tin, lead, or zinc, they make nothing.

“About half of all tin mined today goes to make the solder that binds the components inside our electronics,”

Solder is made almost entirely of tin.

public companies must disclose the source of the so-called 3TG metals (tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold) found in their products.

Apple uses dozens of third-party suppliers to produce components found in devices like the iPhone, and all of those use their own third-party suppliers to provide yet more parts and raw materials.

It makes for a vast web of companies, organizations, and actors; Apple directly purchases few of the raw materials that wind up in its products.

That’s true of many companies that manufacture smartphones, computers, or complex machinery—most rely on a tangled web of third-pa...

In addition to precious metals like silver,

there are crucial elements known as rare earth metals, like yttrium, neodymium, and cerium.

All of these elements, precious or abundant, have to be pulled out of the earth before they can be mixed into alloys, molded into compounds, or melted ...

Aluminum is the most abundant metal on Earth.

it takes four tons of bauxite to produce one ton of aluminum, creating a load of excess waste. Aluminum smelters suck down a full 3.5 percent of the globe’s power.

Most of the cobalt that ends up in the iPhone is in its lithium-ion battery, and it comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Tantalum was, for a long time, sourced largely from the DRC, where rebels and the army alike forced children and slaves to work in mines

Most rare earth metals come from a single place: Inner Mongolia, a semiautonomous zone in northern China.

There, the by-products from mining have created a lake that’s so gray, so drenched in toxic waste, that it’s been dubbed “the worst place on earth” by the BBC.

Rare earths aren’t rare in the way we typically interpret that term. They’re not scarce;