On January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs walked onto a stage in San Francisco and introduced "three revolutionary products." Then he revealed they were all one device. The audience went wild. The world would never be the same.
The Story
The development of the original iPhone was so secret that most Apple employees didn't know it was happening. Codenamed "Project Purple," it was built by a small team in a locked section of Apple's campus. Engineers who worked on it signed extra NDAs and were forbidden from telling even their spouses what they were building.
The challenge was immense. Smartphones existed — BlackBerry, Nokia, and Palm all had products — but they all had physical keyboards, styluses, or both. Apple's bet was that a glass touchscreen, large enough to be useful without a keyboard, was the future.
The multitouch technology that made it possible had been acquired by Apple when it bought a startup called FingerWorks. Jobs had been obsessed with it — he reportedly told his team "I want a device that uses the internet, that has a phone, and that has a touchscreen interface. No stylus. No keyboard."
When Jobs took the stage at Macworld 2007, he opened with: "Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything." He wasn't wrong.
The original iPhone had no App Store — that came in 2008. It ran on AT&T exclusively. It cost $499 for the 4 GB model. It had no 3G, no copy-paste, no MMS. Pundits called it overpriced and unfinished.
And yet, within a decade, smartphones running iOS and Android had replaced cameras, GPS devices, music players, alarm clocks, maps, newspapers, and televisions for hundreds of millions of people.
"An iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator. Are you getting it? These are not three separate devices. This is one device."— Steve Jobs, Macworld 2007
Key Specs
Fun Facts
Steve Jobs filed 200 patents related to the iPhone — including one for "a method for providing phone call rejection."
The original iPhone had no App Store — third-party apps weren't allowed until iOS 2.0 in 2008.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer laughed at the iPhone's price when it was announced, predicting it would fail.
Jobs secretly used a different phone during the keynote — the demo units were too unreliable to risk live.
Legacy
The iPhone didn't just disrupt the phone market — it annihilated entire industries and created new ones. It launched the app economy, transformed photography, killed the MP3 player, and put the internet in everyone's pocket. Few products in history have changed daily life so completely.