The Whole World in Your Pocket.

Something happened on November 10, 2001.

Suddenly, you could buy a mobile device that would store about 100 albums of music and allow you to listen to it — anywhere. At the time, this capability was considered astounding and was unmatched by any other product.

The device that enabled all this? iPod, of course — the first dedicated music device from Apple in the renaissance years of Jobs 2.0.

The tag line for the product — “1,000 Songs in your pocket.” — immediately resonated and people quickly ‘got’ what the product was for.¹

It didn’t take long before the whole iPod product line took off. Within a few years nearly everybody seemed to be carrying one of these handy devices in their pocket, pinned to their shirt or strapped to their arm.

But of course it didn’t stop there. Six years later, by the time Apple had produced its 100 millionth iPod, Apple launched another earth shaking product: iPhone.  

Announced in Steve Job’s now much lauded keynote speech at Macworld on January 9, 2007, it generated shock and awe around the world.

As I am sure many of you will remember, iPhone was portrayed as three amazing products in one: a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary phone and a breakthrough internet communications device. When Steve demo’d it, the crowd went wild over how it made previously extremely difficult (or impossible) tasks super easy and fun.

Much of the demo time was dedicated to showing how iPhone could be used for the basic stuff — listening to music, watching videos, making calls, sending email and texts and browsing the web.

But there were a few other things that Steve showed off: a weather and stocks ‘widget’, which we would now call an ‘app’, and then something else. Something that he spent several minutes demoing … something he called “the best version of Google Maps on the planet”.

This particular part of the keynote caused roars of applause, especially when he used the maps app to find a nearby Starbucks — which he promptly called, live on stage, to order 4,000 lattes “to go” for the audience.

And that wasn’t the only maps feature to get a roar — the audience was particularly amazed when he zoomed into the Washington Monument, the Eiffel Tower and the Colosseum in Rome using satellite view. Watch the excerpt:

Amazing though it was there is a whole story behind this part of the demo. Steve Jobs talked about it later that year when he and Bill Gates were interviewed by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at the D5 conference on May 7, 2007 (video is well worth a watch BTW! Also here is the transcript):

I love Google Maps, use it on my computer, you know, in a browser. But when we were doing the iPhone, we thought, wouldn’t it be great to have maps on the iPhone? And so we called up Google and they’d done a few client apps in Java on some phones and they had an API that we worked with them a little on. And we ended up writing a client app for those APIs. They would provide the back-end service. And the app we were able to write, since we’re pretty reasonable at writing apps, blows away any Google Maps client. Just blows it away. Same set of data coming off the server, but the experience you have using it is unbelievable. It’s way better than the computer. And just in a completely different league than what they’d put on phones before.

But maps weren’t even part of the original plan for iPhone until just a few weeks before the unveiling on January 9, 2007. Nick Wingfield and Brian Chen recount their 2012 story in their article on Apple Maps in the New York Times:

Including a maps app on the first iPhone was not even part of the company’s original plan as the phone’s unveiling approached in January 2007. Just weeks before the event, Mr. Jobs ordered a mapping app to show off the capabilities of the touch-screen device.

Two engineers put together a maps app for the presentation in three weeks, said a former Apple engineer who worked on iPhone software, and who declined to be named because he did not want to speak publicly about his previous employer. The company hastily cut a deal with Google to use its map data.

Not only did maps get featured in Jobs’ launch keynote it also became a mainstay feature of the original iPhone ads:

And, 18 years later, where are we now?

Well today there are estimated to be 7.2 billion smartphones in use around the planet. They are used by 4.7 billion people.² That’s about 58% of the world’s population.

And every one of those devices has access to a maps app. And every maps app has a map of the planet.

So, if you boil it all down: at least one out of every two people on the planet now has a detailed map of the whole world in their pocket.

If that isn’t a Map Happening, I don’t know what is!

Epilogue

Well you did it. You suffered through all 12 episodes of “Map Happenings that Rocked Our World”. Hopefully many of you will have enjoyed at least a few of the posts.

If you missed some of the earlier articles and want to subjugate yourself to them, you can bookmark the whole list at maphappenings.com/history or simply browse them here:

12 Map Happenings That Rocked Our World

Part 1 — The First Map
The story of how, many thousands of years ago, the first map came to be.

Part 2 — The Birth of Coordinates
Geographic coordinates haven’t been around for ever. But they have been around for a while. Read the fascinating story of who invented them.

Part 3 — Road Maps!
Think road maps came out when people started driving cars? Wrong! Read on to find out the real story.

Part 4 — The Epic Quest for Longitude
Best selling books have been written and films have been made of this amazing story from the 1700s. It truly is an epic tale.

Part 5 — The Dawn of Tube Maps
The London ‘Tube’ (or subway) was the first of its kind to invent an entirely new kind of map. Now everyone’s copied it. Learn the history of how it came to be. 

Part 6 — The Advent of Computer Based Mapping
Computers started to emerge after the Second World War. Learn about the brilliant minds that first started using them for maps and mapping.

Part 7 — Those Views from Above…
Today we’re all accustomed to looking at satellite and aerial imagery of cities and places. This is the story of how it all came about.

Part 8 — Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?
Determining your current location is easy. You just open your phone and look at a map. But it wasn’t always that easy. The full story is in this post.

Part 9 — A Curious Phenomenon Called ‘Etak’
This is the story of the world’s first practical navigation system for cars. And it’s an amazing one that is hard to believe!

Part 10 — A Relentless Quest for Maps
Before Google Maps launched in 2005 there was another website that dominated maps on the web. This is the insider story of that site: MapQuest

Part 11 — Maps, Earth and Views
The fascinating background story about how Google Maps, Google Earth and Street View came to be.

Part 12 — The Whole World in Your Pocket.
This article!

Thanks for reading.

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1. The tagline was invented by the advertising agency Chiat Day, not Steve Jobs. ↩︎
2. Source: Genius: How Many People Own Smartphones In The World? (2025-2032) ↩︎