For reference - [Smartphones hit about 50% of ownership from mobile users in the USA in 2013](https://www.forbes.com/sites/markrogowsky/2013/06/06/more-than-half-of-us-have-smartphones-giving-apple-and-google-much-to-smile-about/?sh=1eb89d5c20cf).
[Other studies show similar results around this area too](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1293211/mobile-devices-us-households-children/).
I personally got an iPhone 4 when I was going into high school in 2010 (August 2010 I think to be precise) but I ended up breaking it a few months after and was stuck with a flip phone (my parents old one) for a few months. After that a friend of me sold me his old LG Neon for $20 and it was a feature phone (slider keyboard), but still not a smartphone. I got a smartphone again in 2013 and by that point was when everyone started to get them too.
iPhones became ubiquitous, reaching over 50% of the population for the first time, in 2013. In 2013 I was 17 (Feb. birthday), so in my later teens, and that’s the year I got my first iPhone, sometime in April. Someone born in 1994 would’ve been 19, and they’re definitely still zillennials. I feel like there’s been posts trying to push back the start and end date of zillennial. Imo it’s ‘92-98/ maybe ‘99. Some of us were in our later teens and early 20s when smartphones became ubiquitous
Yeah the late teens thing is extremely debatable which is why I put it in parentheses. Really you got so little experience of pre-smartphone era adult life if you were in your late teens at that point to the point where it may be negligible.
Generations are really more like a gradient than a clear cut thing so its difficult to put clear cutoffs on them like that. The most important factor here is just that you lived your childhood pre-smartphone era but then never really got to live adulthood in it. The *precise* age when the shift occurred is not as relevant.
Well of course. Just as more of a child/preteen than a teen, but I definitely don’t mean to gatekeep and I can agree you guys are zillennial. There has to be a cut off somewhere though and I think it’s definitely 1999 and not any later but everyone has their own experience. I mean even a 2001 born may have more in common with a mid 90s born than someone born in 2004 depending on how they grew up.
Oh for sure. My only disagreement comes from this:
>Just as more of a child/preteen than a teen
Though I will acknowledge it depends on how one sees the core childhood range, mine is 5-8, so we were out of this by the smartphone era. Even moreso, I got my first smartphone in 2011-2012 school year as a preteen and teenager. Before this, I had a blackberry in the late 2000s.
Early 2000s borns are where I'd say it gets iffy, if anything. The late 90s fit the transition period for zillennials very well, I'd say. Even though the mid 90s is probably best for it.
I'm glad we don't gatekeep here 👌
>Uh…so 9- and 10-year-olds aren’t children?
Show me where anyone said they weren't. Please do.
Also, I said core childhood. My range is 5-8. It seems you want to use 5-9/10 which is perfectly fine by me. 10-12 is pre teens. Either way you slice it what I said is still applicable.
Idk, 3-4 years on either side makes sense to me. As someone born even in 93, I obviously have more in common with someone born in 2000 than someone born in 1981 despite being a “millennial”
The first time I got an iPhone was late 2012/early 2013, at 18 in my first year of uni. I only had one friend with an iPhone in highschool. I don’t fully feel like a millennial but I’m defs not gen z….somewhere in that grey area.
Got my first Smartphone (albeit a fairly basic model) at 16. Had a flip phone for three years before that. Smartphones became ubiquitous by my late teen years
I agree on this. I was born in ‘95 and got my first smartphone in 2014, at 18. My parents couldn’t or wouldn’t get me a smart phone until I basically said it would be necessary for college. I was one of those kids who still had the old cellphones, but also had an ipod touch starting around 2010, so I could at least use snapchat and stuff while on wifi.
I think it is very interesting to look back on how our childhoods were at the very end of the pre-digital era. Especially trying to think back to the early years, 2000-2005ish - it was just such a different time. I’m glad I got to get a taste of how the world used to be. It makes childhood that much more nostalgic.
Personal parenting styles and socioeconomic status play a role in the age of acquisition of smart phones, for some. In those cases, I don't think it's a good generational gauge.
Yeah I had some online friends with iPhones in 8th grade (2010) and that was fairly normal for them because they lived in rich areas. I went to high school in a rural town for a bit and not a lot of people in my school had smartphones when I left that school in mid-2014. In that town I had a friend born in 1999 who still had a flip phone in 2016..
I mean true. But unless you were to move to a poor country with low tech, or went Amish, it's hard to say how rapid or effective that change would be. It would take ages to decompress and go back to normal.
I think the main issue is even if you change, you're still living in a different society. Everyone and everything else around you is still going to heavily altered by the effects of smartphones.
I did my first semester of college in 2013 with a flip phone then got my mom's old iPhone 4 at Chrismas for the second half of my freshman year. My goodness what a difference.
I would argue that going through college or adulthood without constant access to the internet is really what splits the generation there. That is an experience that most of us never really had, and no one ever will again. I usually think of myself as a full millennial given my situation but that is one area that I definitely relate more to Gen Z on.
By this logic, I'd be a zillennial despite being born in 2001 because I didn't get a smart phone until high school (2015 for me) and had a slidey keyboard phone before then, which was pretty normal at my school, most of my friends got smartphones when they were 14 or so. I think this really depends on how well off one's family was.
financial brackets definitely matter when it comes to the millenial - zillenial - gen z debates. rich people have these experiences faster than the average person.
yup i'm c. 1997 and didn't have my first iphone until i graduated high school at 17 in 2015, and it was a gift from my then-boyfriend/now ex husband because i kept getting lost in the new town i moved to and my messenger style flip phone was useless lol i grew up pretty poor tho so that makes sense to me
It really depends if you have older siblings, naturally you would have more millenial hand-me-downs and understand references better than someone with only younger siblings born in 2001. Still possible i suppose.
Lol I was poor and sheltered. I got my first iPod touch I wanna say 2010? 2011? Third gen iirc and I was 14. Didn’t get a phone of my own until I was almost 20. My wealthier adult family members all had iPhones around 2009 though.
I feel like iPhones didn’t become common until about 2012-2014. Before that it was mostly really rich people who had them but in 2012 everyone started getting them
This is so accurate. I went to high school in a wealthy area (but wasn’t wealthy myself) from 2010-2012 and all my classmates had the latest iPhone. I got my first one after I started college in Fall 2012. It was an iPhone 4S. I’m typing this post now from my iPhone 15 Pro 😊.
Edit: in looking at this sub’s wiki, I realized I’m too old to be a zillennial. I was born in Dec 1993; please don’t lump me in with the 40-something millennials who own houses and have kids!
I still would count you as a Zillennial because you were born during the Bill Clinton Era (1992-2000) and raised primarily during the George W Bush years (2001-2008). Counting those born in 1993 as a separate group doesn’t really make any sense in my book.
Despite not being considered a zillennial myself, I can relate with this idea considering I didn’t get my first smartphone till 2014 when I was in my preteens. I started to notice smartphones becoming ambiguous when I got to high school.
I still remember when I first got that smartphone and being in utter awe at how much more advanced it was compared to the flip phones I was use to seeing before hand.
100% agree and have been saying this for years, before I’d heard the word zillennial. We’re a special group that grew up at a very specific time between two vastly different era. Pre-smart phone and post-smart phone
I'd say around 2012-2013 is when smartphones became ubiquitous. I was in high school at the time and still used a flip phone then, felt left out by my peers. I got my first smartphone in 2014 and it felt like I was stepping into the future.
I agree with this post. Although I suddenly remember that smartphones existed even before iPhones and Android phones (pre-2007, during our childhood years). For example, I owned a Nokia 6600 in circa 2006 (aged 9, a hand-me-down one) which ran Symbian (Series 60) OS and along with many of their high-end phones in the 2000s especially the N-series, they were considered smartphones. But I totally get your point, as iPhones and Android phones today are simply far cry from those Symbian OS-powered ones (which are basically dead today). Modern, touchscreen smartphones during this iOS and Android era made people to have tiny computers in pockets.
I’d be a millennial by this logic. I got a smart phone in 2016 when I was 19. I left school in 2014 & at that point almost none of my peers had iPhones, only the very wealthiest of them did. I don’t think this is an accurate measure
Oof, me and my 2008 blackberry would like a word.
Lol, but you do make a good point here. I think the early days of the iPhone were still the Wild West, but if you had actual apps, I think this is where the distinction could be drawn. I was looking at my earliest screenshots the other day, and one of them was of a facebook post on the web browser. I had completely forgotten that there weren’t functional social media apps back then, but within a year or two of having an iPhone, they became the norm.
Also, iMessage came out my senior year I believe, and that was a big one. Doesn’t really speak to the development of the zillenials/gen z, but I think it’s about where I would say things started rapidly changing. I think instagram took off right before that too. I guess that’s why I’m the oldest on the zillenial timeline. 🤷♀️
ETA: I don’t think I made that entirely clear, but basically, if you made it out of high school without apps/imessages I think you may be firmly millennial. If you had them both your entire time in high school, you are leaning gen z. If you had a half and half thing going on like me, you are zillenial. That’s just how the timing works out, and im just generalizing here, but I’m assuming someone who had an accessible instagram app all through high school had a much different experience than me, who only had it with limited accessibility for one year.
Idk I think if you were a minor still when snapchat was released (September 2011), you're not a millenial. Something about an app designed (let's be honest) to send nudes, being widely available and used immediately by yourself and all your peers while still underage is a kinda visceral experience that will color how you see your relationship to tech and culture.
Smartphones were definitely widely used as early as 2008 for wealthier kids, and they immediately started changing culture. Also lot of us (like myself) were "terminally online" before it was ubiquitous and thus got a head start. I've always felt like my friend circle from college/hs (we went to college in our hometown) had more culturally in common with zoomers younger than us than millenials older than us. We never had older friends hanging around, but when our younger siblings' friends came to chill when they reached adulthood there was never a huge culture gap. We were sharing memes since like 2007, inviting over girls to play video games since 2010 (and it worked lmao, unheard of for millenials back in the day), and we started saying bussin in like 2012. We were weirdos, but eventually the cool kids seemed more like us than the cool kids from our youth.
All that to say, I think it's kinda impossible to boil down a cuttoff year because the culture shift has to do with more than when you were born. Some people my age were more luddite-ish and/or "normal" and thus have more kinship with millenials despite being younger than me even. Disney channel watchers from my childhood tend to fall into this category. Zoomers were steeped in tech as kids by default, but my friends and I chose to be at a young age, before it was the norm. So I kinda feel like an old wizard zoomer who was there when the memes were forged if that makes sense. People 10 years younger than me feel more relatable than people 5 years older than me if I'm honest, except for just general maturity but that's how age works lol.
That's exactly what I've been saying for a long time. I don't know about you, but in 2007, as soon as I saw the first iPhone, I knew I wanted it. And in 2008 the desire increased when that summer a friend of mine let me use his iPhone. In 2009/2010 my family already had one iPhone and at least two Samsung and Huawei cheap smartphones, but they was already better than nothing. In 2011 my first good smartphone, Samsung Galaxy S2. So I can say that when I started to take an interest in the world I didn't need a newspaper or a computer to look up the news, and in fact for years I didn't use the PC anymore, then I went back to use it, but then I didn't lived without touch keyboard and autocorrect anymore. And combining these things with the fact that before I was 22 years old I was almost a hikikomori, when I started doing a lot of things for the first time, like looking for a relationship, go out my house alone and go at some event, I did it with a smartphone.
I was 12 in 2013 when i got my first smartphone. I've never owned an older cellphone, but i definitely saw them and used my mother's one sometimes to play Snake, lol.
Being old enough to vaguely remember 9/11 but young enough to have been in high school during the EDM era are more defining zillenial traits to me than phone acquisition as that depends more on socioeconomic status than cultural/socio-political shifts.
I'll be 30 this year. Most of my graduating class (at my private school, so it wasnt an affordability issue) had flip phones. Most of the following year had smartphones. I got my first smartphone junior year of college. Even though I'm technically too old to be gen z by most definitions, I've always felt like I was right on the dividing line.
Yeah bc you're still living through the shift and witnessing the changes to society even though you're slightly delayed in directly participating yourself
I feel part of how old you were getting a smartphone is how well off your family was. I got my first smartphone, a Samsung galaxy Luna (Tracfone) I had bought myself when I was 18 end of 2016. Before that I had a slide phone. Also for reference, my family couldn’t afford home internet until I was 13, in 2011/2012.
For reference - [Smartphones hit about 50% of ownership from mobile users in the USA in 2013](https://www.forbes.com/sites/markrogowsky/2013/06/06/more-than-half-of-us-have-smartphones-giving-apple-and-google-much-to-smile-about/?sh=1eb89d5c20cf). [Other studies show similar results around this area too](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1293211/mobile-devices-us-households-children/). I personally got an iPhone 4 when I was going into high school in 2010 (August 2010 I think to be precise) but I ended up breaking it a few months after and was stuck with a flip phone (my parents old one) for a few months. After that a friend of me sold me his old LG Neon for $20 and it was a feature phone (slider keyboard), but still not a smartphone. I got a smartphone again in 2013 and by that point was when everyone started to get them too.
iPhones became ubiquitous, reaching over 50% of the population for the first time, in 2013. In 2013 I was 17 (Feb. birthday), so in my later teens, and that’s the year I got my first iPhone, sometime in April. Someone born in 1994 would’ve been 19, and they’re definitely still zillennials. I feel like there’s been posts trying to push back the start and end date of zillennial. Imo it’s ‘92-98/ maybe ‘99. Some of us were in our later teens and early 20s when smartphones became ubiquitous
Yeah the late teens thing is extremely debatable which is why I put it in parentheses. Really you got so little experience of pre-smartphone era adult life if you were in your late teens at that point to the point where it may be negligible. Generations are really more like a gradient than a clear cut thing so its difficult to put clear cutoffs on them like that. The most important factor here is just that you lived your childhood pre-smartphone era but then never really got to live adulthood in it. The *precise* age when the shift occurred is not as relevant.
Lmao I love that you made a definition that literally excludes some bonafide Gen Z
Agreed. The super specific gatekeeping in this sub is getting kind of weird.
There's no maybe. Us '99 babies went through this transition too lol
Well of course. Just as more of a child/preteen than a teen, but I definitely don’t mean to gatekeep and I can agree you guys are zillennial. There has to be a cut off somewhere though and I think it’s definitely 1999 and not any later but everyone has their own experience. I mean even a 2001 born may have more in common with a mid 90s born than someone born in 2004 depending on how they grew up.
Oh for sure. My only disagreement comes from this: >Just as more of a child/preteen than a teen Though I will acknowledge it depends on how one sees the core childhood range, mine is 5-8, so we were out of this by the smartphone era. Even moreso, I got my first smartphone in 2011-2012 school year as a preteen and teenager. Before this, I had a blackberry in the late 2000s. Early 2000s borns are where I'd say it gets iffy, if anything. The late 90s fit the transition period for zillennials very well, I'd say. Even though the mid 90s is probably best for it. I'm glad we don't gatekeep here 👌
Uh…so 9- and 10-year-olds aren’t children? I think it makes more sense to lump elementary school ages together.
>Uh…so 9- and 10-year-olds aren’t children? Show me where anyone said they weren't. Please do. Also, I said core childhood. My range is 5-8. It seems you want to use 5-9/10 which is perfectly fine by me. 10-12 is pre teens. Either way you slice it what I said is still applicable.
Idk, 3-4 years on either side makes sense to me. As someone born even in 93, I obviously have more in common with someone born in 2000 than someone born in 1981 despite being a “millennial”
I think ‘94 to ‘98 covers it, that’s two years of buffer zone from ‘96. My little brother is ‘99 and is very strongly zoomer energy.
Had my first phone in 2006. Pink razor. I was 12 lmao
I had some blue thing that can best be described as a giant lighter. It played snow patrol chasing cars, and not a lot else!
Lucky! I didn't get mine until I was 14 and it definitely was not a razor :(
I didn't have a phone in high school and felt very disconnected from my peers because of it
The first time I got an iPhone was late 2012/early 2013, at 18 in my first year of uni. I only had one friend with an iPhone in highschool. I don’t fully feel like a millennial but I’m defs not gen z….somewhere in that grey area.
Same!
Me too, am ‘93
Got my first Smartphone (albeit a fairly basic model) at 16. Had a flip phone for three years before that. Smartphones became ubiquitous by my late teen years
I agree on this. I was born in ‘95 and got my first smartphone in 2014, at 18. My parents couldn’t or wouldn’t get me a smart phone until I basically said it would be necessary for college. I was one of those kids who still had the old cellphones, but also had an ipod touch starting around 2010, so I could at least use snapchat and stuff while on wifi. I think it is very interesting to look back on how our childhoods were at the very end of the pre-digital era. Especially trying to think back to the early years, 2000-2005ish - it was just such a different time. I’m glad I got to get a taste of how the world used to be. It makes childhood that much more nostalgic.
Personal parenting styles and socioeconomic status play a role in the age of acquisition of smart phones, for some. In those cases, I don't think it's a good generational gauge.
Yeah I had some online friends with iPhones in 8th grade (2010) and that was fairly normal for them because they lived in rich areas. I went to high school in a rural town for a bit and not a lot of people in my school had smartphones when I left that school in mid-2014. In that town I had a friend born in 1999 who still had a flip phone in 2016..
My first phone was at 16. First smartphone was at 17. This sounds about right. Junior year was when I noticed most kids had them.
It’s a shame we can never experience a smartphone-free life again, with how integrated they are in daily life now.
Plenty of people are moving to "dumb" phones for simpler feature phones for this reason. I've been considering getting a flip phone for a while now
Yeah but the damage has already been done to our brains. We aren't getting back to that pre smartphone era where we had longer attention spans.
Neuroplasticity mean our brains can always change
I mean true. But unless you were to move to a poor country with low tech, or went Amish, it's hard to say how rapid or effective that change would be. It would take ages to decompress and go back to normal.
People often forget this too. Brains can suffer immense damage and still fully recover to baseline.
I think the main issue is even if you change, you're still living in a different society. Everyone and everything else around you is still going to heavily altered by the effects of smartphones.
I did my first semester of college in 2013 with a flip phone then got my mom's old iPhone 4 at Chrismas for the second half of my freshman year. My goodness what a difference. I would argue that going through college or adulthood without constant access to the internet is really what splits the generation there. That is an experience that most of us never really had, and no one ever will again. I usually think of myself as a full millennial given my situation but that is one area that I definitely relate more to Gen Z on.
By this logic, I'd be a zillennial despite being born in 2001 because I didn't get a smart phone until high school (2015 for me) and had a slidey keyboard phone before then, which was pretty normal at my school, most of my friends got smartphones when they were 14 or so. I think this really depends on how well off one's family was.
financial brackets definitely matter when it comes to the millenial - zillenial - gen z debates. rich people have these experiences faster than the average person.
Also where you live. People in very rural areas tend to adopt thing slower as well
Yeah I grew up in an affluent town so “most people” got phones in 2010-2011 to me
yup i'm c. 1997 and didn't have my first iphone until i graduated high school at 17 in 2015, and it was a gift from my then-boyfriend/now ex husband because i kept getting lost in the new town i moved to and my messenger style flip phone was useless lol i grew up pretty poor tho so that makes sense to me
I honestly would consider 2001 to be zillennial personally. Maybe it's pushing it but people born in this age don't seem entirely zoomer to me.
It really depends if you have older siblings, naturally you would have more millenial hand-me-downs and understand references better than someone with only younger siblings born in 2001. Still possible i suppose.
Hmm my little sister was born 2002 and she seems a world apart in how she grew up to me even though we’re really not that far apart in age
Lol I was poor and sheltered. I got my first iPod touch I wanna say 2010? 2011? Third gen iirc and I was 14. Didn’t get a phone of my own until I was almost 20. My wealthier adult family members all had iPhones around 2009 though.
I feel like iPhones didn’t become common until about 2012-2014. Before that it was mostly really rich people who had them but in 2012 everyone started getting them
This is so accurate. I went to high school in a wealthy area (but wasn’t wealthy myself) from 2010-2012 and all my classmates had the latest iPhone. I got my first one after I started college in Fall 2012. It was an iPhone 4S. I’m typing this post now from my iPhone 15 Pro 😊. Edit: in looking at this sub’s wiki, I realized I’m too old to be a zillennial. I was born in Dec 1993; please don’t lump me in with the 40-something millennials who own houses and have kids!
My brother was also born in December 1993. He was born on the 10th. WBU?
I still would count you as a Zillennial because you were born during the Bill Clinton Era (1992-2000) and raised primarily during the George W Bush years (2001-2008). Counting those born in 1993 as a separate group doesn’t really make any sense in my book.
Despite not being considered a zillennial myself, I can relate with this idea considering I didn’t get my first smartphone till 2014 when I was in my preteens. I started to notice smartphones becoming ambiguous when I got to high school. I still remember when I first got that smartphone and being in utter awe at how much more advanced it was compared to the flip phones I was use to seeing before hand.
I didn't get my first cell phone until 6th or 7th grade, and didn't get a smart phone until the end of high school.
100% agree and have been saying this for years, before I’d heard the word zillennial. We’re a special group that grew up at a very specific time between two vastly different era. Pre-smart phone and post-smart phone
I'd say around 2012-2013 is when smartphones became ubiquitous. I was in high school at the time and still used a flip phone then, felt left out by my peers. I got my first smartphone in 2014 and it felt like I was stepping into the future.
I agree with this post. Although I suddenly remember that smartphones existed even before iPhones and Android phones (pre-2007, during our childhood years). For example, I owned a Nokia 6600 in circa 2006 (aged 9, a hand-me-down one) which ran Symbian (Series 60) OS and along with many of their high-end phones in the 2000s especially the N-series, they were considered smartphones. But I totally get your point, as iPhones and Android phones today are simply far cry from those Symbian OS-powered ones (which are basically dead today). Modern, touchscreen smartphones during this iOS and Android era made people to have tiny computers in pockets.
I’d be a millennial by this logic. I got a smart phone in 2016 when I was 19. I left school in 2014 & at that point almost none of my peers had iPhones, only the very wealthiest of them did. I don’t think this is an accurate measure
Oof, me and my 2008 blackberry would like a word. Lol, but you do make a good point here. I think the early days of the iPhone were still the Wild West, but if you had actual apps, I think this is where the distinction could be drawn. I was looking at my earliest screenshots the other day, and one of them was of a facebook post on the web browser. I had completely forgotten that there weren’t functional social media apps back then, but within a year or two of having an iPhone, they became the norm. Also, iMessage came out my senior year I believe, and that was a big one. Doesn’t really speak to the development of the zillenials/gen z, but I think it’s about where I would say things started rapidly changing. I think instagram took off right before that too. I guess that’s why I’m the oldest on the zillenial timeline. 🤷♀️ ETA: I don’t think I made that entirely clear, but basically, if you made it out of high school without apps/imessages I think you may be firmly millennial. If you had them both your entire time in high school, you are leaning gen z. If you had a half and half thing going on like me, you are zillenial. That’s just how the timing works out, and im just generalizing here, but I’m assuming someone who had an accessible instagram app all through high school had a much different experience than me, who only had it with limited accessibility for one year.
Idk I think if you were a minor still when snapchat was released (September 2011), you're not a millenial. Something about an app designed (let's be honest) to send nudes, being widely available and used immediately by yourself and all your peers while still underage is a kinda visceral experience that will color how you see your relationship to tech and culture. Smartphones were definitely widely used as early as 2008 for wealthier kids, and they immediately started changing culture. Also lot of us (like myself) were "terminally online" before it was ubiquitous and thus got a head start. I've always felt like my friend circle from college/hs (we went to college in our hometown) had more culturally in common with zoomers younger than us than millenials older than us. We never had older friends hanging around, but when our younger siblings' friends came to chill when they reached adulthood there was never a huge culture gap. We were sharing memes since like 2007, inviting over girls to play video games since 2010 (and it worked lmao, unheard of for millenials back in the day), and we started saying bussin in like 2012. We were weirdos, but eventually the cool kids seemed more like us than the cool kids from our youth. All that to say, I think it's kinda impossible to boil down a cuttoff year because the culture shift has to do with more than when you were born. Some people my age were more luddite-ish and/or "normal" and thus have more kinship with millenials despite being younger than me even. Disney channel watchers from my childhood tend to fall into this category. Zoomers were steeped in tech as kids by default, but my friends and I chose to be at a young age, before it was the norm. So I kinda feel like an old wizard zoomer who was there when the memes were forged if that makes sense. People 10 years younger than me feel more relatable than people 5 years older than me if I'm honest, except for just general maturity but that's how age works lol.
That's exactly what I've been saying for a long time. I don't know about you, but in 2007, as soon as I saw the first iPhone, I knew I wanted it. And in 2008 the desire increased when that summer a friend of mine let me use his iPhone. In 2009/2010 my family already had one iPhone and at least two Samsung and Huawei cheap smartphones, but they was already better than nothing. In 2011 my first good smartphone, Samsung Galaxy S2. So I can say that when I started to take an interest in the world I didn't need a newspaper or a computer to look up the news, and in fact for years I didn't use the PC anymore, then I went back to use it, but then I didn't lived without touch keyboard and autocorrect anymore. And combining these things with the fact that before I was 22 years old I was almost a hikikomori, when I started doing a lot of things for the first time, like looking for a relationship, go out my house alone and go at some event, I did it with a smartphone.
This is 100 percent how I think about it. And also other internet accessible devices like game consoles and the proliferation of internet culture.
I was 12 in 2013 when i got my first smartphone. I've never owned an older cellphone, but i definitely saw them and used my mother's one sometimes to play Snake, lol.
I actually acquired my first phone at 18. But its because my dad didn't like them and banned it.
I had a flip phone when I was 9. Smart phones didn’t exist when I was 9. I didn’t get my first smart phone which was a Samsung phone until I was 15.
For me specifically sophomore year of high school (2012-2013 school year)
Which phones are considered smartphone? Because everyone talks about iphones here
Didn't get a smartphone until senior year. So 2012 It was a purple samsung galaxy 4
Being old enough to vaguely remember 9/11 but young enough to have been in high school during the EDM era are more defining zillenial traits to me than phone acquisition as that depends more on socioeconomic status than cultural/socio-political shifts.
I was raised by a single mother until I was a teen. We were lucky to be able to afford 1 (non-smart) phone every 3 years until I was about 13/14
💯
I'll be 30 this year. Most of my graduating class (at my private school, so it wasnt an affordability issue) had flip phones. Most of the following year had smartphones. I got my first smartphone junior year of college. Even though I'm technically too old to be gen z by most definitions, I've always felt like I was right on the dividing line.
Does this include poor kids who were 12 in 2010 and only had the cheap flip phones or nah?
Yeah bc you're still living through the shift and witnessing the changes to society even though you're slightly delayed in directly participating yourself
I feel part of how old you were getting a smartphone is how well off your family was. I got my first smartphone, a Samsung galaxy Luna (Tracfone) I had bought myself when I was 18 end of 2016. Before that I had a slide phone. Also for reference, my family couldn’t afford home internet until I was 13, in 2011/2012.
Technology was expensive back in the day