Unwired

The Unwired Ubertrend’s modern arc traces to a nondescript building on Chicago’s West Side in 1955. Inside, Robert Adler, an engineer at Zenith Radio, was working on the company’s latest product: a cordless remote control. His challenge was deceptively narrow — get four aluminum rods to emit a distinct ultrasonic sound the TV’s six-vacuum-tube receiver could decode.

The urgency was real. Months earlier, Zenith president Eugene “The Commander” McDonald had ordered an immediate redesign of the Flash-Matic, the first wireless TV remote, designed by Zenith engineer Eugene Polley. The Flash-Matic resembled a ray gun and used light signals to control four photocells — a system that didn’t work in bright sunlight. Adler’s replacement, the Space Command, was entirely mechanical. A push of the button caused a tiny hammer inside the control to hit an aluminum rod, producing a click. Hence the persistent nickname for remotes: “clicker.”

Polley and Adler were not the first to dream up a remote. Nikola Tesla had wirelessly piloted a four-foot boat at New York’s Electrical Exhibition in Madison Square Garden in 1898. On December 12, 1901, Guglielmo Marconi sent the first radio transmission across the Atlantic Ocean, jump-starting the wireless revolution. The technology’s commercial breakthrough required half a century more. The Space Command shipped in Fall 1956. The bomb cyclone of Unwired — the smartphone and its controlling apps — was still 51 years away.

The hinge point of Unwired falls on Friday, June 29, 2007, when a long line forms on Stockton Street in San Francisco. It is not a movie premiere or celebrity signing — it is iDay, the line waiting for the first Apple iPhone to go on sale. Some have been camped on the sidewalk for nights. Steve Jobs’s pitch is by now a memorized incantation: “It’s an iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator. An iPod, a phone… are you getting it?”

The early devices were buggy and the software was unfinished. Apple sold 700,000 iPhones the first weekend anyway. BlackBerry co-CEO Jim Balsillie famously dismissed it — “It’s OK, we’ll be fine” — in what would become one of the most-cited “last words” in tech history. By 2018, Apple had become the first company valued at $1 trillion. By Q1 FY2026, Apple reported an active installed base of more than 2.5 billion devices, and its market capitalization reached approximately $4.5 trillion as of May 2026.

The App Store opened thirteen months later, on July 10, 2008, with just 500 apps available. By the end of the launch weekend, 10 million apps had been downloaded. By June 2018, Apple had paid third-party developers $100 billion in software royalties. The expression “there’s an app for that” — trademarked by Apple in 2010 — became operating procedure for the consumer economy.

Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan named the underlying shift in a 2016 Bloomberg interview: “The intimacy and distributed power of a smartphone in the hands of a person is so different than anything we’ve faced in our business careers.” The Unwired Ubertrend had moved past gadget novelty. It had become the new social contract.

Steve Jobs initially resisted third-party access to the iPhone. His argument was that “the full Safari engine is inside of iPhone, so you can write amazing Web 2.0 and Ajax apps that look exactly like apps on the iPhone.” iPhone rebels who jailbroke their devices to install non-approved software made the argument moot. Twelve months after the iPhone’s retail launch, the App Store made its formal debut.

The mobile economy that followed generated $1.3 trillion in developer billings and sales through the global App Store in 2024 alone — including $131 billion in digital goods and $150 billion in in-app advertising (Apple, June 2025). Yelp launched augmented reality in an app feature called Monocle in 2009. IKEA Place and Amazon’s AR View let users virtually place furniture in real rooms. Google Lens identifies objects, plants, dog breeds and product labels. SkinVision diagnoses suspicious lesions. The smartphone has become the entry point for ancestry analysis (23andMe), genome reading (Veritas Genetics’ original $999 myGenome), augmented reality, voice translation, real-time payments, and identity verification at the airport.

The cultural payload was bigger than the technical payload. Social media apps mobilized the Arab Spring: on January 25, 2011, activists organized Tahrir Square via Facebook and Twitter. Wael Ghonim, a Google marketing manager, became the public face of the protests; one Egyptian man named his newborn daughter “Facebook” in tribute. For Twitter, the mobile inflection point came in 2011, when CEO Dick Costolo reported 55% of active users accessing the service via mobile. By 2013, that figure was 60%; by 2015, 80%. Posting updates with smartphones became the leading cultural transmission belt of the era — FOMO (fear of missing out) the leading psychological consequence.

Unwired is not one industry but three converging ones — the smartphone economy, the connected-home/IoT mesh, and the mobility platform — each measurable, each on an exponential curve since 2007. Read together, they describe the most consequential consumer technology reorganization since the household telephone.

The smartphone economy is the obvious headline. Apple alone reached a $4.5 trillion market capitalization by May 2026; the global App Store facilitated $1.3 trillion in developer billings and sales in 2024. Pew Research’s 2025 survey found 91% of U.S. adults own a smartphone, up from 35% in 2011. Millennials pick up their phones an average of 324 times daily, the highest of any cohort. The device has consolidated payment (Apple Pay, Google Pay), identity (Face ID, Touch ID), capture (camera), navigation (GPS), translation (Live Translate), and now generative AI (Apple Intelligence, Gemini, Copilot) into a single object.

The connected home is the quieter but larger build. Amazon Alexa alone has crossed 600 million units shipped lifetime; Google and Apple add hundreds of millions more. IoT as a category — from Belkin WeMo (2012) to Philips Hue (2012) to Samsung SmartThings (2012) to Lutron Caseta — has scaled to 18.8 billion connected IoT devices globally in 2024, projected to reach 40 billion by 2030 (IoT Analytics). The Matter standard (launched 2022) is gradually replacing the early walled gardens with cross-vendor interoperability.

The mobility layer is the third force. The connected commercial drone installed base reached 2.8 million units worldwide in 2024, with DJI holding approximately 70% global market share, and is forecast to reach 4.5 million units by 2029 (ResearchAndMarkets). The chapter cites a 2018 Venezuelan assassination attempt using two DJI Matrice 600 drones loaded with explosives. The technology cuts both ways — from drone-shot crop dusting (one South African farmer reports a 30% pesticide reduction) to drone-shot insurgency.

The next decade of Unwired plays out along three vectors that the 2019 chapter could only sketch.

First, generative AI moves on-device. Apple Intelligence (announced June 10, 2024), Google Gemini Nano on Pixel, Microsoft Copilot+ PCs and Anthropic’s Claude on iOS are turning the phone into a personal agent that drafts, summarizes, translates, books, plans and screens by default. The app paradigm — introduced by the App Store in July 2008 — is partially giving way to an agentic paradigm where the user states an intent and the device orchestrates the dozens of underlying APIs. The new “there’s an app for that” is “just ask the assistant.”

Second, the device form factor will diversify. Apple Vision Pro launched February 2, 2024 at $3,499. Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses sold 2 million pairs since their October 2023 launch, with EssilorLuxottica preparing capacity for 10 million annually by end of 2026. Humane Pin and Rabbit R1 launched as ambient-AI alternatives in 2024 (and largely failed). The screen is no longer the only interface. The face, the wrist and the ambient room are catching up.

Third, connected-home interoperability matures via Matter, the cross-vendor smart-home standard that launched in late 2022 and is now supported by Apple HomeKit, Google Home, Amazon Alexa and Samsung SmartThings. The next five years should see the early Belkin/Wink/SmartThings era of one-vendor walled gardens give way to a universal mesh. A connected home of fifty devices from twenty vendors becomes plausible to maintain.

Wernher von Braun’s aphorism applies: Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department. The Unwired Ubertrend is in that condition now. The technology is up. Where it lands — in the body, in the home, in the labor market, in the household structure, in the geopolitics of chips — is the next chapter. The masters of untethering have not run out of imagination. The audience has not yet found a ceiling.