Don Lehman is the Founder and Designer of More/Real. You can follow him on Twitter.

Today is the seventh anniversary of the iPhone. It’s one of those anniversaries that feels both shockingly long ago and not that long ago, but what it’s providing for me today is perspective.

The perspective comes from Las Vegas, where today also happens to be the second to last day of CES. This year’s show is notable for the amount of wearable tech that has been demonstrated and almost universally dismissed as “not ready”. It reminds me of exactly where we were in the years leading up to the iPhone, when the only thing that was working for smartphones was the idea.

In retrospect the iPhone is obvious, but from our current vantage point, wearable tech is anything but. We like the idea, but no one has nailed it yet. It sure isn’t for lack of effort, as this CES has demonstrated, but it shows the chasm between idea and execution and how hard it is to marry the two.

It also gives context to the Apple vs. Samsung fight and why Apple is so mad about having their “obvious” ideas used by a competitor. Apple bet the company on making a great smartphone. The issues they had to solve: Underpowered OSes, a new interface, battery life, what does the thing look like, what features should it have… Does this sound familiar? These are the exact—and I mean literally, the Exact. Same. Issues. that companies trying to make wearable devices are facing.

When Apple did nail it, their competition couldn’t believe they had actually done it. RIM’s executives ripped open an iPhone on launch day and were shocked at what they had found. Their solution to battery efficiency had been to use a small, low res screen (by today’s standards) with an OS designed to minimize battery usage. It was an elegant solution for the time and everyone else was copying their lead. Apple’s solution? Use a really big battery. Obvious. In retrospect.

What I’m saying is this: Let’s appreciate what these companies who are trying their hand at wearable tech are trying to do. This is really hard stuff. But let’s also appreciate that no one has figured it out yet. When someone does figure it out, it will feel obvious. And everyone else will quickly copy them, forgetting how hard it was to do in the first place.