The birth of the iphone to tell you what innovation is

A lot of new products have been released this year at CES, but people should remember what really changed the world, according to Wired magazine. Eight years ago, Steve Jobs released his first iphone in Los Angeles, which heralded the death of the PC and the rise of smartphones.

How hot is the iphone? In 2006, the year before the iphone was launched, Apple's full-year revenue was $19.3 billion trillion, the sum of all Apple's product revenues. Last week, Malik, the founder of the tech blog Gigaom, said the UBS investment study predicted that sales of the iphone alone would generate more than $43 billion trillion in the fourth quarter of 2014. By contrast, chip maker Intel's sales in 2014 are expected to be just 55 billion dollars. Cisco, the network equipment giant, posted just 47 billion dollars in its 2014 fiscal year.

Since the iphone and its many imitators have seized the market for consumer electronics, it is not just PCs that hurt, TV sales are slipping and camera sales are slipping. Smartphones can achieve most of these products, and other electronic products have become less important.

At the same time, the whole world of smartphones is inseparable from the code set up by the iphone. Without the iphone there is no taxi application Uber. In a world without smartphones, Facebook is still a PC-browser-based service that is used by people who sit in the office all day to write diaries. Twitter can only be a messaging tool, telling a friend where you are. The World Wide Web will still be a king.

But the fact is, Apple said recently that the app Store has put more than 10 billion dollars in revenue back to app developers. Google Android may now be the world's largest mobile operating system by market share, but Apple has set up a catch-up target for Android to get revenue from developers.

Steve Jobs's Apple has been making a fuss about the appearance of the first iphone, gradually improving its configuration and trying to make it better. The larger-screen iphone 6 Plus subverts all this and is no longer seen as a big step forward. Even without any progress, Apple's woes highlight what qualifies as innovation, a word that has been abused in the technology industry but deserves to be used on the iphone. If we hadn't iphone,2015 years we might still be using sidekick and Treo phones.