The thing is that in that scene, Joe (Lee Pace) is being the salesman to Gordon the engineer, and is just starting to grasp that there is a shiny new thing about to be born, that building computers is going to enable something much bigger than just "we'll sell some hardware, and make some money"; that change is coming, it's going to be for a wider audience than just computer enthusiasts; computers would be the way to get there, but are not the thing itself.

Now we call that thing "the internet", "the huge software industry", "being online all the time", "social media" etc, but then they were not sure what it would look like.

He is totally chasing the shiny new thing that the others don't even see yet. Even as they bring it about.

It's tempting to identify the iPhone (and smartphones broadly) and that's not totally wrong. Yes, it replaces a bunch of discrete devices from times past reasonably well for most purposes: telephone, still camera, video camera, iPod/Walkman, voice recorder, GPS, etc.

But that's not really what makes a modern smartphone so transformative. It's doing all those things while being essentially ubiquitous, mostly always connected, open to an amazing ecosystem of apps that take advantage of the hardware capabilities, and with access to an amazing amount of online information.

Modern smartphones are great products for the most part but it's how they function as part of an ecosystem that makes them transformative.

It seems like very much a comment about the broader ecosystem being a bigger factor than an individual device.