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On January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs walked onto a stage at the Moscone Center in San Francisco and, while wearing his signature black turtleneck, told the audience he was going to introduce three revolutionary products. The first was a widescreen iPod with touch controls. The second was a revolutionary mobile phone. Finally, the third was a breakthrough internet communications device. "These are not three separate devices," he said. "This is one device. And we are calling it: iPhone." Jobs was met with intense celebration from the crowd, and from then on, the electronic landscape of the world changed.
Seriously, though, what would life be without our favorite pocket-sized electronic? ‘Revolutionary’ cannot begin to describe the iPhone.
What phones looked like before
In 2007, mobile phones were ubiquitous but there were countless companies distributing the same product. Motorola RAZRs, Nokia candybar phones, and BlackBerrys (the dominant phones at the time) were good at one or two things. While BlackBerrys were excellent for email, Motorola made sleek phones that were good for calls. Unfortunately, using the internet on any of them was not an efficient experience: it was often slow, expensive, and miserable, to say the least. The idea that a phone could be a genuinely useful computing device was not yet real in most people's experience.
What made the iPhone different
The original iPhone combined several technologies in ways that hadn't been combined before.
Its capacitive touchscreen, for one, can detect the electrical charge of a human finger rather than physical pressure, allowing for the precise interaction and fluid interaction we know today. Even more, the "pinch to zoom" gesture, which is now completely intuitive to billions of people, was genuinely novel in 2007. What a time!
Unlike the BlackBerry and other dominant companies, the iPhone ran a full version of Safari, Apple's web browser, meaning it could actually display real websites as they appeared on a desktop.
The phone also integrated an iPod, a camera, and a visual voicemail system, which lets users see and navigate their voicemail messages like emails rather than having to dial in and listen through them in sequence. These features, which are mundane in today’s hyper-technological world, felt like a scientific fantasy to people who had never experienced it.
The scientific and engineering foundations
The iPhone was not built from scratch. Rather, it synthesized decades of research and development from across the technology industry. Its novel touchscreen technology had been developed by researchers including E.A. Johnson in the 196os. The ARM processor architecture that powered the iPhone had been in development since the 1980s. Other components, like lithium-ion battery chemistry, cellular networking, and GPS had long been in existence, but were never really utilized in the way Apple had.
Ultimately, Apple brought all of these technologies together with software design sophisticated enough to make them feel seamless. The App Store, which launched in 2008, was a critical part of this mission. By introducing the App Store, the iPhone was no longer a product, but a platform that anyone with programming knowledge could contribute to.
The world with iPhones
Ever since the iPhone was first introduced, it has reshaped nearly every aspect of life. Now, iPhones are present in communication, navigation, commerce, media, healthcare, education, and social connection. There are now more active smartphones on Earth than there are people. The mobile internet that the iPhone helped create has given billions of people access to information and economic participation that was previously impossible. It has also created new forms of distraction, inequality, and social challenge that we are still working to understand and improve on.
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