Technologic
cat technologic | awk '{printf("%s, ", $0);}' | sed 's/,/\n/g' | grep -i " it" | sort | uniq
Consider the 2005 Daft Punk classic ”Technologic”.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8K90hX4PrE).
How does this anthem of user empowerment stack up against the Apple iPhone, released two years later and refreshed essentially annually since (even past the 2021 breakup of Daft Punk)?
Buy it – Yes, iPhone does this. See also 'Pay it', below .
Charge it – Also yes. the original iPhone charged through an iPod-style 'dock' connector. In 2012 this changed to the 'Lightning' connector and changed again to USB C in 2023. iPhones gained wireless charging in 2017.
Lock it – iPhones have had screen locks since the first version. More troublesome are the 'subsidy locks' imposed by cellular carriers that tie a phone to a particular mobile network. In June of this year, the FCC proposed a new regulation which would require carriers to unlock phones within 60 days of activation. An original purpose of the subsidy lock was to shield consumers from confronting the astonishing cost of a modern mobile phone. How expensive is a phone? An iPhone Pro Max, the top of the line at the moment, costs $1,199. This is the same price as an iPad Pro with an 11" screen and otherwise comparable specifications (including a cellular modem). Both are a hundred dollars more than the current 13" MacBook Air. Whatever the value proposition, it turns out that the subsidy lock was ultimately less effective at capturing users than ... just marketing.
Name it – Yup. Under Settings -> General -> About. Yours is probably 'Gertrude's iPhone (4)'.
Plug it – Plug it is mostly the same as 'Charge it' above. It's worth noting that Apple's current laptops and premium tablets also support Intel Thunderbolt over their USB C connector while Apple's iPhones do not. iPhones otherwise support many of the same accessories over USB that their larger cousins do. Recent phones support USB C 'alt mode', allowing phones to connect directly to external displays. Older phones support HDMI in a similar manner with Lightning to HDMI adapters.
Surf it – Surf it is basically the brief of the original iPhone. Apps? Who needs apps! There's a web browser able to handle just about anything! Except YouTube, which in 2007 used an Adobe Flash video player. For that you would need an app. For anything else that used Flash in 2007, you would need the healthy disdain to realize that you didn't want to surf there anyway. CanIUse says that the iPhone iOS supported the wholesome and virtuous '<video>' tag from version 3.2 in 2010.
Touch it – Apple says that iPhones support up to five simultaneous touches, canceling them on a sixth touch. iPads are said to support up to eleven. Clear evidence of a thumb on the scale in favor of Spinal Tap vs. Princess Bride. Interesting that Princess Bride is available on Apple's media store but Spinal Tap is not.
Write it – The original iPhone didn't feature the handwriting recognition of the earlier Apple Newton, nor a shorthand like Palm's 'Graffiti'. The first generation of Apple iPad brought along an optional keyboard dock that … I can’t remember if the keyboard did anything on the iPhone. I wrote about a thousand words of this post with the on screen keyboard on my iPhone.
Break it – yes. Oh, yes.
Bring it – Yes, though they have been getting bigger. The iPhone SE, the very smallest iPhone currently offered weighs in at 144 grams, 31 heavier than the original. It's also bigger. So bring it, but maybe not in your pocket.
Burn it – Yes, I mean no. Do not fold, spindle, mutilate, or burn iPhone. Though Apple's Mac laptops supported burning CDs from the time of the titanium Powerbook G4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_G4 , the iPhone cannot connect to a optical media burner.
Call it – Yes. It's pretty much in the name.
Change it – No. Hell, no. Apple does not want you changing your iPhone. You're lucky it can even be fixed.
Check it – find my iPhon e. Also, your bank is probably happy for you to deposit paper checks using your iPhone camera.
Click it – while touch events emulate click, a physical click on the home button is a quaint idea.
Code it – yes, since the App Store. Well, since before. See 'crack it' below.
Crack it – Yup. Yours may already be cracked. Crack also in the sense of ‘use it like a programmable computer’. There were several app installers available for a jailbroken phone before Apple’s own App Store was released. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Installer.app
Cross it – I ... don't know what that would mean here. I bet you could get an embroidered iPhone case.
Cut it – While the original iPhone featured an aluminum case and toughened glass from Corning, it could certainly be cut. In early versions, this was the only thing cut was likely to mean. cut and paste was introduced with iOS 3.0, while Apple's 'Final Cut' is not available for iPhone.
Drag it – html 5 drag events were supported 14 years after the introduction of the iPhone, just as Daft Punk was breaking up.
Drop it – see drag it, above, but otherwise yes. Drop was supported from the very first device. Hardware accelerated, even, at 1g.
Erase it – cellebrite says otherwise.
Fax – Ok, I'm cheating. The song says "send it, fax, rename it". Although the Apple Newton, Apple's Mac machines, and many other mobile devices supported fax natively, iPhone never has. I have never tried connecting a modem to an iPhone, but it supports Ethernet just fine with an adapter.
Fill it – Apple briefly offered a low-end original iPhone with 4 gigabytes of storage, it was quickly discontinued. iOS itself is now larger than that original phone.
Find it – Spotlight search was introduced in iOS 3, 2009, though several of the built-in apps supported search from launch. One of the most interesting recent findings about iPhone is that Google has paid as much as tens of billions of dollars a year to remain the default search engine on Apple devices, including iPhone.
Fix it – Apple's relationship with 3rd-party repair and self-repair is complicated.
Format it – erase all settings, for sure, but can it format a disk? Not yet, but support is rumored in the forthcoming iOS 18. No partitioning. Baby steps.
Jam – while iPhone has no mechanical transport to jam, the Lightning connector was famous for accumulating impacted pocket lint which can make charging unreliable. iPhones do support MIDI, and therefore a variety of other jams.
Leave it – Apple made 'find my iPhone' free from around late 2010, along with an incremental update to iOS 4.2.
Load it – in the sense of fill it, surely.
Mail – Yes. The original iPhone featured an email client. Actually mailing or shipping iPhone is somewhat more complicated. The most recent version of the IATA Lithium Battery Guidance Document specifies that up to 4 phones with single-cell lithium ion batteries can be mailed together in the same package without the lithium battery shipping mark. This does not apply to phones whose cells have been damaged or recalled, however.
Paste it – See Copy it, above. Also yes in the sense that iPhones are basically made of glue now.
Pause it – Yes, however the original iPhone did not support pause for Bluetooth audio. Support for AVRCP media controls came with the iPhone 5s in 2013 (I recall it being earlier). Early iPhones were compatible with a combination headphone / media remote that supported pause.
Pay it – Apple's own ApplePay contactless payment system was introduced in 2014. In 2007, the original iPhone could not even buy digital music assets from the iTunes Store.
Play it – Yes, generally the same as Pause it. iOS has no mechanism for adding additional codecs to the system, so the types of supported media are somewhat narrower than on a PC. In the sense of games, though, a range of games were developed for the original phone and could be played through the browser. Since then, iPhone has become a platform for immersive and resource-intensive games. I don't really play computer games, but I admire that the platform is able to satisfy both those looking to play Wordle, vintage 8-bit arcade titles, and Call Of Mayhem 3D: Death Bringer on the same device. It's almost ... It's almost like it's a real computer!
Point it – It took twelve years, but iOS 13 brought mouse support to iPhone, after a fashion. Just think about that for a second. IBM introduced its first mainframe, the 701, in 1952. Twelve years later, Douglas Englebart demonstrated the first computer mouse. On the other hand, the light pen (and therefore the 'touch' screen) also showed up in the early fifties.
Press it – Apple introduced '3D Touch' with the iPhone 6s and then discontinued it with the iPhone 11. With the corresponding iOS software, the phone could respond to touch events based on pressure. It was neat, but almost completely replaced with 'long press'.
Print it – Printing was not one of the things original iPhone did. Remember drivers? Device drivers? No? Then you should probably give some thanks to iPhone. While the iPhone was not the first phone or mobile device without third-party device drivers, it was one of the first mobile platforms that could have run CUPS but didn't. Thank you, Apple. Seriously. System-level printing came to iOS three years later as part of the 'AirPrint' function in iOS 4.2. Like many Apple technologies, AirPrint was mostly the agglomeration of existing pieces of technology – IPP, PDF, the UNIRASTER page language.
Read it – Read on the phone, yes. Read the contents of the phone – complicated in every sense. To this day, I remember almost nothing about the colorful iPhone 5C except that a friend had one (Hi!) and that it was the device at the heart of the Apple - FBI dispute regarding the San Bernadino mass shooting in 2015.
Rename it – yes, see name it. Unless you received a hand-me-down that is still locked.
Rewrite it — sure.
Rip it – See 'Cut it', 'Burn it' above
Save it – do any of the iPhone backups actually work? Are they write-only?
Scan it – This works in the Notes app. Aside from being trapped uselessly there, it’s impressive.
Scroll it – Yes. I think 'doomscrolling' would never have taken hold without touch-to-scroll.
Send it – One of the biggest differences between my iPhone and my laptop is that my iPhone will keep sending an email message even after I put it away. When I close my laptop ten seconds after sending an important mail, who could say?
Snap it – In the sense of snapchat, now snap, this seems true. The number of active daily users for snap appears to still be increasing. https://www.statista.com/statistics/545967/snapchat-app-dau/
Trash it – while iPhones now support drag and drop after a fashion, there is no interface idiom equivalent to the Macintosh trash can. Having written this, I just realized that I had never emptied the trash on this computer since I bought it two years ago. It had ballooned to around 3 gigabytes – of the terabyte SSD. Insubstantial, but larger than my laptop hard drives until the late 1990s.
Tune it – The original iPhone was available in the US only on AT&T at first. For years, Apple sold different SKUs able to tune to different cellular frequency bands around the world. Speaking of tune, people also had feelings about Apple not enabling the FM radio hardware said to be in early phones.
Turn it – Yes. The original iPhone had an accelerometer.
Unlock it – Complex topic.
Zip / unzip it – Complicated. At first, iPhone didn’t support files. These days, iOS can both unzip and zip.
Update it – Apple provides software updates for several years after a model is introduced. Apple vigorously defends their right to keep you from doing the same, either before or after Apple’s own support ends. It’s like leasing but where you buy it.
Upgrade it – Not really. In the sense that you can trade in an old car, maybe.
Use it – Look around, man. Yes.
View it – battery life is often listed in terms of how many hours of video can be played. The original iPhone could play video for seven hours on a charge. Video playback used to be a computational challenge for home systems. At one time, a system that could play video for seven hours on a charge might have been a beast that could run your VT100 emulator for twice as long. Hardware acceleration has flipped that on its head. It might be more power efficient today to stream a movie of a blinking cursor to an iPhone than to blink the cursor locally with a Javascript VT100 emulator.
Watch it – In the sense of view it, above, but there is another sense. You need an iPhone to use an Apple Watch. Got a Mac? Nice, but you can't set up a watch with it. Got an iPad? Also nice. Can't set up a watch that way. You can only use an iPhone. Am I the only one who thinks this is weird?
Work it – blah blah enterprise management and dual sim. This is not a work blog.
Zoom it – pinch to zoom may be one of the best things to ever happen to computer user interfaces.
Apple still has some work to do here. Fingers crossed that they will get it finished before any Daft Punk reunion. Perhaps Apple could sweeten the deal with Punk-themed Apple Vision helmet headsets. The biggest question for me is whether the destiny of the iPhone is to be a general-purpose computer or merely technologic.