We don’t do commercials here, so the point of today’s post isn’t to encourage you to go out and buy anything. But the point is that when Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone just eight years ago on January 9, 2007, he announced a product that has probably influenced something you already own, whether you’ve ever bought an Apple product or not.

Combining old-fashioned telephony with new-fangled computing has been an idea since at least the 1970s, and there were phones that surfed the internet before. But Apple deserves credit for turning the smartphone industry (was that really even a thing 10 years ago?) on its head with a sleek design that integrated all the doodads of its device in an elegant and intuitive fashion. People lined up to buy the things when they went on sale in June 2007, and competitors like Microsoft and Blackberry basically went back to square one to compete in Apple’s new reality. Blackberry's "work phone" niche pretty much ceased to exist in the brave new world. The truest indicator that the iPhone changed the whole game? QWERTY keypads were common in cell phones before 2007. Three years later, none of the top-tier smartphones had keyboards. Touch screens had become all the rage.

The reality of having something in our pockets that is theoretically a phone, but in truth carries out countless functions that have nothing to do with spoken conversation is still a new one, and we’re still figuring out what it means for us. Boredom seems to have been banished with an endless variety of games (not to mention the entire internet) at our fingers each moment…but so has quiet introspection. Arguments over who starred in that one movie, with the guy and the thing, are a thing of the past. Just whip out your phone and IMDb that sucker. Convenience and endless information are the air we breathe, and while it’s probably made us lazier and dumber than our forerunners, we’re also more efficient and knowledgeable (without needing to actually know more) than they could have hoped.

Something like the iPhone was always going to happen. Science fiction has seen around this corner for decades. It just so happens that Apple got there first. A lot has changed in just eight years. Steve Jobs is gone, and so is the first iPhone (officially declared “obsolete” by Apple in 2013). Things move fast in the digital world, and keeping up with the “flood of electronic babble” (to coin an EPCOT phrase) is our new challenge. Only now it’s a challenge that’s always at our fingertips.

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