海角大神

This has been a week for thinking about tech and consequences.

Let鈥檚 not spend time on that 53-word tweet by the US president.

The iPhone just turned 10! You might remember getting an early one. Whatever you had before became a paperweight. While Apple didn鈥檛 invent smartphones, it did revolutionize them. The items it replaced 鈥渃ould fill a warehouse of nostalgia,鈥� notes at Recode. Some 1.2 billion iPhones have been sold to date, adding up to , reports Forbes.

Beyond ushering in the era of the ubiquitous smartphones, Apple also triggered an avalanche of apps. That undoubtedly helped speed our arrival at another tech milestone: This week Facebook reached 2 billion users worldwide. (Founder Mark Zuckerberg is bent on bringing the internet to parts of the world that remain disconnected.)

And operator behavior? Individuals haven鈥檛 always self-regulated very well. Bundled in with all of the good and productive, there is isolation, addiction, and bullying. States scramble to implement laws requiring hands-free phones for drivers. Families try to disinvite devices to dinner. Tweets own a weirdly big slice of the news cycle. (We said we wouldn鈥檛 go there.)

We鈥檙e seeing new signs of a quest for balance. indicates that nearly 6 in 10 teens now take voluntary breaks from social media (and are glad they did). That kind of milestone is worth noting, too.聽

Now to our five stories for today.