Science fiction as reality

What’s that in your pocket? Magic or art? The near ubiquitous iPhone may be rammed with very new technology, but it is a witness of very old, even mysterious, values. Few of us understand its inner workings, even as we indulge ourselves daily with its impressive powers to astonish.

‘My life,’ Daniel Harris wrote in Cute, Quaint and Hungry, his witty critique of consumerism, ‘is suspended above an abyss of ignorance. Virtually nothing I own makes sense to me.’ This is a familiar feeling. If we had to start over, few of us would know how to light a fire, still less design and manufacture a beautiful smartphone.

If civilisations are remembered by their most significant artefact, the iPhone is our memorial. Arthur C. Clarke once said that ‘any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic’. I asked Jony (since May, Sir Jonathan) Ive, Apple’s vice-president of design, if he was familiar with this idea when he was developing the iPhone in a secret Californian wizard’s den. ‘Absolutely!’ he said. Today we have science fiction as reality.

Technology may confer on the iPhone its magical powers, but old-fashioned art is at least as important in creating its ineluctable consumer appeal, a force so strong it turns phone users into delirious acolytes and evangelical supplicants. And this art was the subject of the recent legal stand-off between Apple and Samsung. The distinctive rectangular shape of the iPhone, with its carefully radiused edges, was one of the patents that Samsung infringed.

The Apple–Samsung trial will be remembered as one of the most significant in recent business (and, indeed, art) history. Nine jurors in San Jose heard a month of evidence which required them to make a fine judgment about where respectful inspiration ends and ruthless plagiarism begins.