iBoy

In the stairwell on the twentieth floor, three guys were slumped against the wall, puffing away on crack pipes. They were all about nineteen or twenty, and they were all totally wasted.

I had to step over them to get past. 'Excuse me,' I said. 'I just need to —'

'Hey, fuck,' one of them slurred at me, reaching out a grimy hand. 'Gimme your —'

I flicked at his hand, my head turning on the electric, and I gave him just enough of a shock to surprise him, maybe just sting him a little. He jerked his hand away, cursing sharply, and at the same time he dropped his pipe from the other hand. While he scrabbled around on the ground, desperately looking for his pipe — and simultaneously waggling his shocked fingers in the air — I stepped past him and climbed the last three flights to the twenty-third floor.

No matter how weird and scary this iPhone-in-the-brain stuff was — and, believe me, it was incredibly weird and scary — there was no doubt that it had its advantages. I just had to hope that the more I thought about it, the more I tried to rationalize it, the less weird and scary it would become.

Fat chance.

1000

The iPhone has already taken over some of the central functions of my brain. It has replaced part of my memory; storing numbers and addresses that I once would have taxed my brain with. It harbors my desires ... Friends joke that I should get the iPhone implanted into my brain. But... all this would do is speed up the processing, and free up my hands. The iPhone is part of my mind already ... the world is not serving as a mere instrument for the mind. Rather, the relevant parts of the world have become parts of my mind. My iPhone is not my tool, or at least it is not wholly my tool. Parts of it have become parts of me.

David J. Chalmers

Foreword to Supersizing the Mind (2oo8)

by Andy Clark

 I spent the rest of that night lying on my bed in my room, with my eyes closed, looking inside my head. It was a relatively quiet night (Crow Town is never completely silent), and I was so used to the distant sounds of the estate down below anyway — the raised voices, the muffled music, the revving engines and screeching tyres of (probably stolen) cars — it was all just a nothing-noise to me. The flat was fairly peaceful too — just the soft tap- tapping of Gram in her room, and the occasional whispered curse. I could smell the faint drift of cigar smoke from her room, and it was easy to imagine her hunched over her laptop, tapping away like crazy, with a small cigar smoking away in her mouth, the ash occa­sionally dropping on to her clothes, burning little holes in her shirt, her trousers ... that's what she'd be cursing about.

Anyway, it was quiet enough for me to just lie there in the darkness and try to make sense of the weird and scary cyberworld that was growing inside my head.

It was all too much for me at first. What I knew, what I sensed, what I had access to ... it was simply too vast, too alien, too unbelievably colossal to compre­hend. It was like suddenly realizing that you know everything there is to know. I could see it, hear it, find it, know it ... I could reach out to anywhere in the world and know whatever I wanted to know. It was all there: information, pictures, letters, numbers, words, symbols, faces, voices, bodies, hearts, thoughts, places ... everything. But it was far too much all at once. Too much to know. So I tried to concentrate, to focus ... I tried to make some order out of the chaos. And the best way to do that, it seemed to me, was to go back to the beginning. And the beginning of all this was the iPhone.

Everything I needed to know about iPhones — or every­thing I already knew — came to me in an instant:

The iPhone is an Internet and multimedia enabled smart-phone designed and marketed by Apple Inc. The iPhone functions as a camera phone (also including text messaging and visual voicemail). a portable media player (equivalent to a video iPod), and an Internet client (with email, web browsing, and Wi-Fi connectivity) using the phone's multi- touch screen to render a virtual keyboard in lieu of a physical keyboard. The first-generation phone (known as the Original) was quad-band GSM with EDGE: the second generation phone (known as 3G) added UMTS with 3.6Mbps HSDPA; the third generation adds support for 7,2Mbps HSDPA downloading but remains limited to 384Kbps uploading as Apple had not implemented the HSPA protocol. The iPhone 3GS was announced on June 8, 2009, and has improved performance, a camera with more megapixels and video capability, and voice control.

Manufacturer

Apple Inc.

Type

Candybar smartphone

Release date

Original: June 29, 2007

3G: July 11, 2008

3GS: June 19, 2009

Units sold

21.17 million (as of Q2 2009)

Operating system iPhone OS 3.1.2 (build 7D11),

released October 8, 2009

Power

Original: 3.7V 1400mAh

3GS: 3.7V 1219mAh

Internal rechargeable non-removable lithium-ion polymer battery

CPU

Original & 3G: Samsung 32-bit

RISC ARM 1176JZ(F)-S v1.o

3G: 3.7V 115omAh

620MHz underclocked to 412MHz PowerVR MBX Lite 3D GPU

3GS: Samsung S5PC100 ARM

Cortex-A 8

833MHz underclocked to 600MHz PowerVR SGX GPU

Storage capacity

Flash memory

Original: 4, 8, & 16GB

3G: 8 & 16GB

3GS: 16 & 32GB