Apple's iPhone came out 16 years ago and changed the world

Posted:
in iPhone edited June 2023

Compared to today's iPhone 14 Pro and the upcoming iPhone 15, the very first iPhone that went on sale 16 years ago today was startlingly slow and incredibly limited -- yet it changed the world.




It was on June 29, 2007, that the original iPhone went on sale in the US, and arguably that was the day that it truly began shaking up what users expected from a phone.

We and the phone industry had already known all about it for over five months. But it wasn't until you could buy it that the impact of this little device began to be felt -- even inside Apple.

"[Going on sale] is a happy moment, but it's also a stressful one," Apple's Tony Fadell told the Wall Street Journal for a video released in 2022. "What's going to happen when it goes out into the world?"

"It was amazing," said Greg Joswiak, now senior vice president of worldwide marketing at Apple in the same interview. "I mean, it's still it just kind of gives me a goosebumps because it was history."



Origins of the original iPhone



"The start of the iPhone project happened from the iPod project," said Fadell, best known for his work on Apple's iPod. "We started seeing these feature phones with cameras starting to add digital music features, tools in your phone."

"And it was clear at some point they might be able to catch up with us with this lead that we had with the iPod," he continued. "We were saying... what is the future of the iPod? And if people have two devices in their hand, which one would they pick up every time."

How the original iPhone was received



Most of the concerns and criticisms of the original iPhone now seem peculiar, but chiefly because the iPhone itself has reshaped our ideas of what is normal. At the time, the best smartphones had certain key features that the iPhone lacked, and many people cared.

For instance, it was then a big deal that the battery was sealed and couldn't be changed -- although it's still a big deal for some people. It was a big deal that the iPhone didn't have a physical keyboard, and that you couldn't add memory cards, if you can even remember what those were for.

Curiously, though, it wasn't at all a big deal that the iPhone shipped without an App Store. Certainly plenty of people wanted third-party apps, but that wasn't on the list of reasons so many predicted that the iPhone was certain to fail.

One entirely valid and possible reason the iPhone could have been doomed was that originally it solely ran on AT&T. Unquestionably a limitation, and doubtlessly enough reason that some people didn't buy, that exclusivity also became part of why iPhone succeeded.

The original iPhone (source: Apple)
The original iPhone (source: Apple)



Apple went with AT&T because it -- or rather the Cingular network that was then bought by AT&T -- agreed to Apple's demands for control. At the time, it was normal for networks to have at least a say in the hardware designs of phones that were going to use their cell service.

It was also normal for those networks to insist on their own apps being included on the devices. But Apple wasn't having any of that, even if it meant starting off with just one network in the US.

So the iPhone was Apple's design, Apple's product, and AT&T had none of the cell carriers' usual influence on the phone. The result was a phone that had none of the carriers' typical constraints, and that's where the world -- and Apple -- changed.

"The culture Apple changed dramatically because the people who had them they were always messaging or they were always emailing," said Tony Fadell. "When people were in the meetings, they were doing this all the time, it became a constant deluge of emails and messages and you're like, 'Oh my God, no one could get off of them.' And you're like, something's different here.



Selling the iPhone



Back then, it was also normal for the price of phones to be subsidised so that users got them cheaply at the start, and paid dearly over time. Apple broke with that tradition, at least initially, by selling the original iPhone outright for $499 and $599, depending on whether you had the 4GB or 8GB version.

In 2023, the iPhone 14 starts at $799 with 128GB. That latest iPhone is actually substantially heavier than the original, at 172 grams compared to 135 grams. The iPhone 14 Pro weighs even more at 206 grams, with the iPhone 13 Pro Max a long way toward twice the weight at 240 grams.

But then the iPhone 14 Pro Max does come with a 6.7-inch display, instead of a 3.5-inch one. And the iPhone 14 Pro Max even comes with a 12MP camera on on the front, instead of the original iPhone's sole 2.0MP camera on the rear.

These are all the kind of specifications that Android manufacturers would come to use as they tried to compete with the iPhone. Apple was not amused, especially not with Samsung.

"They were annoying," Greg Joswiak told the Wall Street Journal in 2022. "And they were annoying because as you know they ripped off our technology."

"They took the innovations that we had created and created a poor copy of it and just put a bigger screen around it," he said, "and you know so yeah, we were we were none too pleased."

Imitation was not seen as flattery, but it had to be seen as a sign that this type of smartphone was the future. Yet back at the start, so very many believed it would go nowhere.

Steve Jobs presents the iPhone



There is much about the original iPhone presentation that gets missed today because of what we know happened next -- and because of what we've forgotten about phones in 2007. Back then, we believed phones were an established technology and Steve Jobs worked his speech hard to change our mind.

Not only did he point to deficiencies in the phones we all knew and, if not loved, at least accepted, but he also positioned Apple extremely precisely. In truth, Apple had never done anything like the iPhone, but watch the speech and soon you'll believe that the company had a legendary background in mobile devices.





We now know that the whole presentation was held together with string and prayers. Even so, it is a piece of precision work which does not just launch a device, it positions it.

And yet, at the time, enough people either weren't convinced -- or would rather prefer to not be convinced.

No chance of success



Microsoft's then CEO Steve Ballmer, for instance, famously ridiculed the iPhone for just about all the reasons it would then succeed and Windows phones wouldn't.

"There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share," he said in April, 2007. "No chance. It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get."

Blackberry CEOs, at the time, were privately divided over the iPhone. Mike Lazaridis said of Apple that "these guys are really, really good." Jim Balsillie said, "it's OK, we'll be fine."





The technology industry is oddly conservative about changes, it tends to base its judgements on what has worked before. So, too, did much of the technology media industry.

Launch day



June 29, 2007, did without question appear to be an enormous success for Apple. There were queues everywhere, it looked like this was the smash hit that, well, it eventually was.

Things must've gone a little less well than hoped, however, because in September, Apple cut prices. It dropped the 4GB version and cut the 8GB from $599 to $399. If you were able to get your hands on one, unsold 4GB models were cut to $299.

Steve Jobs later reported having received hundreds of emails from angry buyers who'd paid the full price -- and so Apple put things right. Or at least, it made something of an effort.

For a time, anyone who had paid the full price could have a $100 credit. That still meant they'd paid $100 more than later buyers, and it did not mean they got that cash back.

Nonetheless, if you had paid the full amount, you tended to not be unhappy with the phone itself. The price, certainly, but not the iPhone.

"As it turns out, much of the hype and some of the criticisms are justified," wrote David Pogue in the New York Times. "The iPhone is revolutionary; it's flawed. It's substance; it's style. It does things no phone has ever done before; it lacks features found even on the most basic phones."

"Despite some flaws and feature omissions, the iPhone is, on balance, a beautiful and breakthrough handheld computer," wrote Walter S. Mossberg and Katherine Boehret in the Wall Street Journal. "Its software, especially, sets a new bar for the smart-phone industry, and its clever finger-touch interface, which dispenses with a stylus and most buttons, works well, though it sometimes adds steps to common functions."

According to Statista, Apple sold 1.9 million iPhones in 2007, despite not being available until the end of June. And despite not seeing a price cut until September.

It's not possible to directly compare that year with the present day, as Apple ceased publishing sales numbers for the iPhone in 2018. However, in the latest data before that cut-off date, Apple had sold 216.76 million iPhones in 2017.



Looking back at what Apple did



"We've created an incredible tool to help people with how they learn, to help with how the communicate, how they're entertained," said Joswiak on the 15th anniversary. "It's a powerful tool, but at the same same time we want to help people [with] the fact that there's moderation needed."

"But we don't make our money off in engagement," he continued. "There's no [such thing as the] more you use your iPhone, the more money we make."

"That isn't the way it works, right?" he said. "We just want you to have this great experience and sometimes that does mean [you've got to] temper how much you're going to use this... to moderate how much you want to use this."

"Truly, we just thought this was going to be a fun, easy to use thing when you want to do a few messages," said Tony Fadell. "[We] didn't think it was going to become the center of your life."

Short-lived and long-lived success



The original iPhone was discontinued on July 15, 2008, but it lives on in the gear collections of many Apple fans. It lives on in the iPhone 14 range and the forthcoming iPhone 15 series.

And it also lives on in the screens and the technology of just about every smartphone you can possibly buy today.

Maybe Samsung, Microsoft, Huawei, and the rest would have come up phones that were all-screen, all multi-touch displays, that revolutionized the world.

But they didn't.

Apple did, and the iPhone is a rare case of when you can pinpoint the time that an entire industry changed. Maybe that date was the original unveiling of the iPhone, maybe it was during the five months and 20 days we waited and other manufacturers scrambled.

Or just maybe it was June 29, 2007 at about 9:41 AM Pacific.

Read on AppleInsider

«1

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 26
    JapheyJaphey Posts: 1,767member
    It’s hard to imagine now that the iPhone used to come with a dedicated YouTube app already installed. I’d love to know how many people actually received that $100 credit after the price drop. I was one of those lucky few and I used it to buy an AirPort Express. Good times. 
    h4y3swatto_cobraFileMakerFellerbyronlhammeroftruthmobirdradarthekat
  • Reply 2 of 26
    A friend of mine, who has never owned an iPhone, made a comment to me about 5 years ago. He said something to the effect of, “Ha ha! It funny how for so many years cell phone commercials would show people zooming in and out of photos and everything was nice and smooth but that smoothness hasn’t been actually possible until about the last year.” I told him my very first iPhone zoomed photos smoothly, just like it was in the commercials. He didn’t believe it. 

    Fast forward a couple of years. He was visiting and I had recently pulled my original iPhone out of a closet. I charged it up and things worked pretty normally (no cell signal and some apps just can’t connect to anything these days but it works). I showed him pinch to zoom in the Photos app. He claimed to have forgotten ever making that comment about the commercials being so advanced. 

    I still have 2 original iPhones. They both still work. 
    edited June 2021 h4y3sbadmonkpscooter63watto_cobradesignrFileMakerFellerbyronlretrogustobloggerblogradarthekat
  • Reply 3 of 26
    lkrupplkrupp Posts: 10,557member
    Absolutely love the Ballmer and Pogue videos. This article should also have included the reaction of Google engineers when the iPhone was announced.

    https://appleinsider.com/articles/13/12/19/googles-reaction-to-apples-iphone-unveiling-were-going-to-have-to-start-over-on-android

    Then there was the tech curmudgeon John C Dvorak who ‘begged’ Apple to cancel the iPhone project before it ruined the company’s reputation.

    https://www.zdnet.com/article/there-goes-dvorak-again-telling-apple-to-forget-the-iphone/

    I’ve been around long enough to witness every single Apple product released be derided, dismissed, declared DOA and the last straw that would finally doom Apple to oblivion. Current object of derision? The child killing AirTag, of course.  And then there are the armchair engineers who hold court in tech blogs like AppleInsider spewing froth their requirements before they will buy an Apple product. They rail against Apple for not including what they claim would be a simple, easily implemented feature or function while not knowing a single iota of how software and hardware engineering works. 

    Wait for the inevitable reaction from a certain crowd here that will dismiss this article as blatant fanboyism on AppleInsider’s part. 
    edited June 2021 pscooter63Gabywatto_cobrawilliamhFileMakerFellerbyronlradarthekat
  • Reply 4 of 26
    davidwdavidw Posts: 2,036member
    >Apple went with AT&T because it -- or rather the Cingular network that was then bought by AT&T --- <

    As simple as that sounds, that not quite how it went down. Apple went with Cingular Wireless in 2006 and it was Cingular Wireless that bought out ATT Wireless in 2004. This formed the new Cingular Wireless Service and ATT Wireless became no more in 2005.

    And then SBC, who owned most of Cingular Wireless, (along with Bell South (a Baby Bell from the ATT break up), acquires the original ATT Corp. and kept the ATT name as it was more well known to consumers. This formed the new ATT Inc.

    This new ATT Inc.then bought out Bell South. So now ATT Inc. own all of Cingular Wireless and rebranded as ATT Mobility. Who ended up with the original iPhone release because of the deal Apple made with Cingular Wireless. But ATT Mobility is just the renaming of Cingular Wireless and ATT Inc is just the renaming of SBC. 

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT&T_Wireless_Services

    On a side note, this was why SF Giants PacBell Park had to change the name to SBC Park in 2004 and then to ATT Park in 2006.  As SBC bought out Pacific Telesis (Pacific Bell) in 1997 (after SF signed the naming rights for PacBell Park). And then SBC changed their name to ATT Inc. in 2006.  As of 2019, it's now Oracle Park, but all the old time fans still refer to it as PacBell Park.  


    watto_cobrawaveparticlebyronlradarthekat
  • Reply 5 of 26
    Time for some pics!



    My box is still shrink-wrapped from 14 years ago. The iPhone came with a nice dock as well!
    Most importantly, the phone still works!
    watto_cobraTheObannonFilebyronlradarthekat
  • Reply 6 of 26
    And I haven’t had to go to the AT&T store and pick a phone that seemed cool for the next 2 years from Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Blackberry, etc.

    Having Safari and real internet over cellular felt like the future in the palm of your hands. Absolutely incredible. 
    FileMakerFellerbyronlretrogusto
  • Reply 7 of 26
    How peoples memories fade… the inception of the iPhone was way before this article suggests… as a matter of fact, it was 14 years before the first iPhone… Who remembers these and can deny this was the start of it all? 




    FileMakerFellerbyronlhammeroftruth
  • Reply 8 of 26
    clemynxclemynx Posts: 1,552member
    The amount of revisionism about how much the iPhone has changed things is increasing more than ever. People who have spent a decade hating on iPhones are now starting to recognize that it is indeed a very good product, but the idea that Apple didn’t really innovate that much with the iPhone is still present. 

    Even new users who love iPhones often don’t realize how much phones sucked before. Not that anyone has to necessarily know the history of tech, but there is a lot of ignorance about what happened just 15 years ago.

    I am thinking of doing a commentary of the iPhone keynote.  
    byronlretrogustoradarthekat
  • Reply 9 of 26
    bageljoeybageljoey Posts: 2,004member
    clemynx said:
    The amount of revisionism about how much the iPhone has changed things is increasing more than ever. People who have spent a decade hating on iPhones are now starting to recognize that it is indeed a very good product, but the idea that Apple didn’t really innovate that much with the iPhone is still present. 

    Even new users who love iPhones often don’t realize how much phones sucked before. Not that anyone has to necessarily know the history of tech, but there is a lot of ignorance about what happened just 15 years ago.

    I am thinking of doing a commentary of the iPhone keynote.  
    Exactly. How many times has the iPhone been derided for things that soon became the standard—and the people who derided it forget what they said when it’s in their new phone. 
    The article mentioned no keyboard and no removable battery. It took a few years before the industry finally realized Apple was right all along. 
    Remember Flash and all the ads about getting the “whole internet” on other phones. Apple said: “we could do Flash, but it sucks.” And the haters howled!  A few years later flash was gone and no one cared. 
    Apple eliminated the microphone jack. How could they?  Now look for them on a flagship phone…
    FileMakerFellerradarthekat
  • Reply 10 of 26
    Dead_PoolDead_Pool Posts: 119member
    Next to fire, the wheel, and the car, the greatest invention of all time. 
    radarthekat
  • Reply 11 of 26
    waveparticlewaveparticle Posts: 1,497member
    Save Jobs is one of the most influential persons in history. 
    radarthekat
  • Reply 12 of 26
    Dead_Pool said:
    Next to fire, the wheel, and the car, the greatest invention of all time. 
    Enh. I'd put pre-sliced bread before the car - I think the environmental impact needs to be taken into account. :wink:
  • Reply 13 of 26
    MacProMacPro Posts: 19,718member
    I predict the iPhone will sooner that later have stereoscopic lenses to help drive the VisionOS devices that are coming.  It might not be the 15 but by the time the 16 rolls out I'd wager it will.  Most likely this will be limited to the high end iPhones.
    edited June 2023 byronl
  • Reply 14 of 26
    mjtomlinmjtomlin Posts: 2,673member
    MacPro said:
    I predict the iPhone will sooner that later have stereoscopic lenses to help drive the VisionOS devices that are coming.  It might not be the 15 but by the time the 16 rolls out I'd wager it will.  Most likely this will be limited to the high end iPhones.

    Might make more sense to introduce a stereoscopic camera system on the iPad Pro first. It was first with a LiDAR Scanner as well.
    byronlradarthekat
  • Reply 15 of 26
    byronlbyronl Posts: 356member
    MacPro said:
    I predict the iPhone will sooner that later have stereoscopic lenses to help drive the VisionOS devices that are coming.  It might not be the 15 but by the time the 16 rolls out I'd wager it will.  Most likely this will be limited to the high end iPhones.
    and to capture Spatial Videos to be viewed on Vision devices :)
  • Reply 16 of 26
    AppleZuluAppleZulu Posts: 1,989member
    Only sixteen years ago, there was no iPhone, and no app store. Applications were expensive and came with thick user manuals and a significant risk of incompatibility with operating systems, hardware, and other applications. OS upgrades were not free, and the purchase of an electronic device did not come with an expectation of free updates with new features and capabilities rolling out for several years. There was no expectation that apps would also continuously update for free with new features, as well as OS and hardware compatibility. Computing devices were not waterproof and would break if you dropped them. There were no wearables, no wirelessly networked speaker pods and no voice commanded AI assistants. There were no networked IoT devices for the home. There were no suites of inter-compatible, integrated ecosystem computing devices. 

    All that (and much, much more) in the lifetime of a high-school sophomore, and still one of the most commonly repeated themes on message boards like this is bellyaching about underwhelming, incremental updates of hardware and software. Hilarious.
    globbysflagelradarthekatFileMakerFeller
  • Reply 17 of 26
    sflagelsflagel Posts: 803member
    And I haven’t had to go to the AT&T store and pick a phone that seemed cool for the next 2 years from Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Blackberry, etc.

    Having Safari and real internet over cellular felt like the future in the palm of your hands. Absolutely incredible. 
    The original iPhone did not have 3G so Safari in cellular did not happen until later. 
  • Reply 18 of 26
    sflagelsflagel Posts: 803member
    The biggest gap of the original iPhone was not having 3G, so emailing and internet only really works on WiFi. The real miracle is that they still sold 1.9 million phones.
  • Reply 19 of 26
    sflagelsflagel Posts: 803member
    Microsoft did not lose to Apple since they were a pure software firm back then. They lost to Android, that was not excusable. 
    radarthekat
  • Reply 20 of 26
    sflagel said:
    And I haven’t had to go to the AT&T store and pick a phone that seemed cool for the next 2 years from Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Blackberry, etc.

    Having Safari and real internet over cellular felt like the future in the palm of your hands. Absolutely incredible. 
    The original iPhone did not have 3G so Safari in cellular did not happen until later. 
    sflagel said:
    The biggest gap of the original iPhone was not having 3G, so emailing and internet only really works on WiFi. The real miracle is that they still sold 1.9 million phones.
    What are you taking about? I had the original iPhone, and both Safari and email worked on the Edge network.
    ihatescreennames
Sign In or Register to comment.