Austin Mann wrote his own unique blog post about 10 years with the iPhone, and he summed up the importance of this line of phones very nicely as "the camera I've used to capture my life."

I think that's a very powerful statement, and is not something most people really would have been able to say before the last 10 years. It's hard to imagine, but 10 years ago there was no such thing as Instagram or Snapchat or iMessage or basically any of the image sharing services we use today. Instagram got us all taking pictures of not only the exciting parts of life, but the mundane. Snapchat is the first image-based messaging service worth a damn, and it's amazing. And Apple and Google have photo syncing services that ensure you not only can store all of your life's photos safely, but that you can search for whatever you want and see a memory immediately.

People have not always photographed their lives like we do today. I take pictures of everything and I don't do it because I think every moment of life is worth framing on a wall, but because every little moment might be worth remembering down the line. And I don't worry about taking too many pictures because storage is (essentially) unlimited, and it costs me nothing to over-document my life. This was not possible to any previous generation, and we are quick t forget this fact.

The iPhone is absolutely the most important tech device in my life. It is the hub that everything I do runs through. I took maybe 1,000 photos in my entire life before I got an iPhone in 2011. According to Apple Photos I've taken 11,000 in the past 6 years alone¹.