The trio of phones will boast other features, such as facial-recognition technology, but their display size stands out--their average screen area, without accounting for a facial-recognition system that juts into the top of the display, is 23% larger than last year's three new phones and 28% bigger than the two models unveiled in 2016. Note: Screens on iPhone X and newer have facial-recognition systems that cut into the display. At a time when people are buying fewer new phones, bigger size brings two advantages. It helps Apple buoy prices and profit margins because it can sell larger phones at a greater markup than it pays suppliers for the larger screens. And it encourages people to use their phones more, helping momentum of Apple's services business, which includes app-store sales and subscriptions to video services like Netflix and HBO.

Rachel Law, the 20-something co-founder of a New York startup called Kip, is sitting next to me at a café, tapping her phone screen to show how the company's service based on artificial intelligence allows users to shop while on Slack by communicating not in typed or spoken words but in cartoonish emoji. If Law were doing this demo for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton and used the terms artificial intelligence, Slack and emoji in the same sentence, each candidate's brain would no doubt seize up like an engine that had run out of oil. We have a problem, folks. Over the next four-year presidential term, a swarm of fantastic new technologies, such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, blockchain, personal genomics and drones, will profoundly alter society, business and geopolitics in ways we've never seen. And our two major-party presidential candidates don't have a clue.