Why We Went Nuts About the iPhone

It's hard to determine the wackiest aspect of iPhone craziness leading up to the launch of Apple's eagerly (to say the least) awaited venture into the cell-phone world on June 29. Was it the relentless media attention, which blended nuts-and-bolts business coverage with the obsessive overkill of a Paris Hilton stalkfest? Or was it the lunacy of the people dying to get those phones at the earliest possible moment? Standing outside New York's Fifth Avenue Apple store on launch day, with dozens of reporters interviewing the masses who braved days of heat and rain to snare their palm-size prize, there was a sense of being in the middle of a Zeitgeist hurricane. When people got wind that I was in possession of an actual iPhone, I was mobbed by rubberneckers. Since then, I've been suffering nightmares where I find myself gripping my iPhone for dear life, pursued, à la "A Hard Day's Night," by a pack of rabid fanboys desperate to run their fingers on my multitouch screen.

The iPhone itself is off to a ring-a-ding start, selling an estimated 500,000 to 700,000 units the first weekend. (Apple and exclusive carrier AT&T aren't announcing figures, but the latter did say it moved more iPhones that weekend than any previous cell phone sold in a month.) And the reviews are uniformly positive. (My own take, after three weeks of iPhoning, still holds: though there's still work to be done, the beautiful screen, the clever multitouch navigation and the well-designed and -integrated applications make this gizmo a genuine breakthrough.)

But sales figures and reviews don't speak to the unprecedented hoopla. What was it that made a five-ounce slab of silicon, aluminum and glass so important to us?

In part, you can chalk it up to the iPod factor. Before 2001, Apple was a company that made cool computers that only a small fraction of the public cared to buy. But over the next few years, 100 million customers discovered Apple's tiny music player, and bonded with it as they had with no previous gadget. The same crowd welcomed the news that Apple was going mobile. "Everyone we talk to hates their phones," Steve Jobs told me the week before the launch, in an attempt to explain the iPhone anticipation. People wondered if Apple could do for cell phones what it did for MP3 players.

That love-hate relationship we have with cell phones underlies the depth of our involvement with technology itself. Our everyday tools are the stuff of 1950s science-fiction novels. But though the digital age has widely expanded our abilities, the difficulty of accomplishing these tasks with ease often leaves us frustrated. When something comes along that promises to fulfill our ambitions, we pay attention. And when that something also promises to perform its duties with beauty and pizzazz—Apple's trademarks—we get a visceral buzz that's as much artistic enthusiasm as consumerism.

We've heard a lot recently about of the 40th anniversary of the Beatles' landmark "Sgt. Pepper" album. Back in 1967, new releases by universally loved bands like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Beach Boys were anticipated breathlessly, and greeted by monster sales, heated analysis and sonic ubiquity. These days, with our fractured tastes and long-tail preferences, no single musical act binds the culture in that way. But we do have technology in common, and when Steve Jobs says, in effect, "I Want to Take You Higher," he is feeding our hunger to merge our business needs and our entertainment desires in one irresistible package.