In the winter of 2000, Steve Jobs took the stage at the Macworld conference and laid out what we now consider a very forward thinking idea: He said that the Mac would become the center of our digital lifestyle. We didn’t know it at the time, but Jobs and his team at Apple were secretly working on the iPod and a music store that used the Mac to side-load downloaded music to the iPod. When Jobs introduced the iPod the following year, he literally made the Mac a hub connected to a “spoke” — or cable — that was then connected to the iPod. For most of the last decade, the idea of the Mac working as a hub that side-loaded content to products like the iPod, iPhone and the iPad played itself out well, making it very easy for consumers to buy digital content and load it onto these devices. Over the past few years, Apple has refined this vision and starting making iCloud more of the hub to wirelessly organize content from its online stores to be downloaded directly to Apple products. While making the cloud the hub in this scenario is still the best way to think about this idea, it became pretty clear to me while at CES last week that in many ways, smartphones are really emerging as the hub of our digital lifestyles. Yes, smartphones are still connected to the cloud in terms of accessing data and transmitting information, but it seems to me that the smartphone in many ways is becoming the one device sitting at the center of our lives and working more like a hub in its own way. (MORE: Check out TIME Tech’s complete CES coverage) A good example of this is the role my smartphone plays in my connected car. My smartphone uses Bluetooth to connect to my car’s digital display, which has channels for music, data and voice. When a call comes in to me, the phone serves as the hub that connects to my car’s screen andImage may be NSFW.
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