SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The American obsession with the iPhone is complicated, as most love-hate relationships are.
It sometimes seems like a talisman so magical that we can't fathom living without all the pleasures and conveniences that it bestows almost anytime or anywhere. The iPhone, and its smartphone brethren, enable pictures that can be posted instantly on social media. We can play a game, watch a video, listen to music, send a text, check email, surf the internet, catch up on on the news, get directions, tap to pay.
Oh — and, every once in a while, we can even make or answer a phone call.
At other times, the iPhone seems like a drug-dealing pusher preying on our weaknesses and worst impulses while deepening our addiction to its endless stream of notifications and alerts that lure us into gazing at its screen as our attention spans become increasingly shorter.
It's a paradox that is confronting America while the iPhone is still a teenager, inhabiting the same demographic that it may have impacted the most. The device wasn't even born until 2007, when Apple co-founder Steve Jobs strolled across a stage to promise a mesmerized audience that they were about to see something that would change everything.
And it kind of did. Jobs, as often was the case before his 2011 death, proved to be eerily prescient — so much so that surveys have found a substantial number of people would pick sleeping with their iPhone instead of their lovers, if forced to make a choice.
The challenge now: figuring out if there is a better way to manage our complicated relationship with the iPhone and smartphones running on Google's Android software in a society that almost requires everyone to possess one. Is there a way to preserve all the benefits while preventing toxic habits? Is it fair to categorize its use alongside that of cigarettes, alcohol and junk food?
For the moment, at least, America seems to be drifting further down a digital river that evokes the closing passage from one of the greatest American novels of all: So we scroll on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the glowing screen.
Michael Liedtke covered technology for The Associated Press for 26 years. Part of a recurring series, “American Objects,” marking the 250th anniversary of the United States. For more American objects, click here. For more stories on the anniversary, click here.
Older iPhone models sit on top of empty boxes of newer iPhones in Phoenix, Tuesday, May 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills)
FILE - People watch an Apple iPhone advertisement outside an Apple store in Palo Alto, Calif., June 21, 2007. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma, File)
FILE - Apple CEO Steve Jobs holds up an Apple iPhone at the MacWorld Conference in San Francisco on Jan. 9, 2007. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma, File)
NEW YORK (AP) — Harvey Weinstein's defense urged jurors Tuesday to acquit him and put an end to a #MeToo-era rape case that has gone to trial three times, while prosecutors pressed to restore a onetime conviction that got unwound.
Weinstein, the former Hollywood honcho who has been imprisoned on various sex crime convictions since 2020, watched quietly as the two sides made their closing arguments about whether he raped hairstylist and actor Jessica Mann in a New York hotel in March 2013.
“She has taken on a false narrative about all of this,” Weinstein lawyer Marc Agnifilo said.
“She has absolutely no motive to lie. None,” prosecutor Nicole Blumberg countered, noting that Mann went through five days of grueling, deeply personal testimony.
Jurors are expected to start deliberating Wednesday. They will have to sift through the complexities of a yearslong relationship between Weinstein, 73, and Mann, 40.
They met in early 2013, when she was trying to make it big in Hollywood. She testified that she anticipated a professional connection, was taken aback when he started making sexual advances but decided to have a relationship with the then-married, Oscar-winning producer.
A few weeks later, according to Mann, Weinstein abruptly took a room at a hotel where she and a friend were staying. She testified that she accompanied Weinstein upstairs to tell him she didn't want a sexual interlude, but he trapped her in the room, grabbed her arms, insisted she undress, went into the bathroom for a time, and then raped her.
“He just treated me like he owned me,” she testified last month.
Weinstein didn't testify, but his defense contends the encounter was consensual and part of a caring, if on-and-off, relationship that Mann valued until Weinstein’s #MeToo downfall in 2017. That was when news reports about allegations against him propelled a global campaign against sexual assault and sexual harassment. He has said he behaved “wrongly” but never assaulted anyone.
He was convicted in 2020 of raping Mann, got the conviction overturned, then saw a jury deadlock on it at a retrial last year.
In summations Tuesday, Agnifilo portrayed Mann as an unreliable witness making an ill-supported, implausible accusation. He cited her uncertainty about various dates and details in the years-old events, and he recalled a point when she said she was struggling to stay focused during cross-examination, prompting court to end early for the day.
Agnifilo underscored Mann's warm email exchanges and get-togethers with Weinstein before and after the alleged rape — and a musing, diary-like note she wrote to herself two days after the encounter. In the note, she expresses her misgivings about her emotional attachment in a nonexclusive relationship, asks whether she loves “him or the idea of him,” questions her “woulds and would nots,” and worries about being “a ‘bad’ person.”
The note doesn't name the man, but Agnifilo asserted that it was about Weinstein and that its silence about the alleged assault spoke volumes.
“This is how she's falling in love with him,” the defense lawyer argued.
The prosecutor's rebuttal: “She’s burying what the defendant did to her, and she’s struggling with the good parts of the defendant and the awful, the evil parts of the defendant.”
Over the years, Weinstein encouraged Mann’s acting ambitions, helped her land a hairstyling job, provided emotional support during her father’s terminal illness and tried to send her money — which she declined — when she was broke, according to trial testimony and exhibits.
To Weinstein's attorney, it amounted to “a sweet, loving, supportive relationship.”
But to Blumberg, “This was a woman who got manipulated by that man.”
While Mann acknowledged she loved “a part” of Weinstein, she testified that she begged him not to do anything sexual that day in the Manhattan hotel.
“No means no — to everyone except Harvey Weinstein,” Blumberg said, adding: “Jessica Mann deserves closure and justice.”
At points during her summation, Weinstein shook his head slightly and exchanged glances with his lawyer.
Whatever the outcome of the trial, the former studio boss still will stand convicted of other sex crimes in New York and California, though he is appealing those convictions. If convicted in the current trial, Weinstein could face up to four years in prison — less time than he already has served.
The Associated Press does not identify people who say they have been sexually assaulted unless they agree to be named, as Mann has done.
Harvey Weinstein appears in Manhattan criminal court on Tuesday, May 12, 2026, in New York. (Steven Hirsch/New York Post via AP, Pool)
Harvey Weinstein appears in Manhattan criminal court on Tuesday, May 12, 2026, in New York. (Eduardo Munoz/Pool Photo via AP)
Harvey Weinstein appears in Manhattan criminal court on Tuesday, May 12, 2026, in New York. (Steven Hirsch/New York Post via AP, Pool)
Harvey Weinstein appears in Manhattan criminal court on Tuesday, May 12, 2026, in New York. (Steven Hirsch/New York Post via AP, Pool)
