Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1454922
54 I-CONNECT007 I REAL TIME WITH... IPC APEX EXPO 2022 SHOW & TELL MAGAZINE Nolan Johnson: You started off your presentation talking about sensors and how that changed everything. Not so long ago, we watched the whole MEMS market and application-specific design just basically crater and go away based on sensors and smartphones. Could you talk a bit more about that? David Pogue: I feel like, from the consumer standpoint, just about everything that people love today, and that they think is cool, is com- ing from the sensors, starting with the first iPhone where Steve Jobs, behind the scenes, would talk about the 35 sensors he crammed in there, from the accelerometer and compass to the gyroscope. To me, that was the success story of the iPhone. It lets it do all these human things like understanding speech, visuals, text to speech, speech to text, and so on. at led to enormous industries all based on sensors—the Internet of ings; self-driving cars, trucks, ships, and planes; drones and drone delivery; and robotics. It all came from this notion of better, cheaper, smaller sensors. Johnson: You basically have a control panel in your smartphone that is loaded with sensors. You can use that innately, or you can con- nect external sensors through all these smart devices to really expand and open your reach. at is a complete game changer for applica- tions. Pogue: It really is. Fieen years ago this month [ January], Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone by saying, "Today, we're going to unveil three radical products, an internet terminal, a tele- phone, and a music player." And then he joked, "Of course, it's not three different products. It's all this, the iPhone." He was almost right; it is indeed an internet terminal. at's what most people use it for most of the time, not so much to make calls. But the third one is, as you say, as a front end for the rest of the universe, for everything that your readers put together. Every device now has an app, light bulbs have an app, refrigerators have an app, your watch has an app, and the front end is all this little three-and-a-half-inch screen. It's kind of amazing because, again, there are no physi- cal keys. Typing on glass still isn't as good as pressing physical keys, but it's this massive trade-off that, I've got to tell you, in 2007, peo- ple didn't think would pay off. People thought that it was stupid. We can't go from a Blackberry, which has keys, to a device that doesn't have keys. But it was a trade-off people were willing to make. Johnson: S o m e o f t h e financial people in this industry—the bankers, the people watching M&A, the investment people—are commenting that we seem to be entering into a sec- ond super cycle. e first super cycle for the elec- tronics industry was com- mercializing the micro-