The Original iPhone Goes on Sale

At six in the evening on 29 June 2007, the first iPhones were sold to the people at the front of the lines outside Apple Stores. In the six months between the unveiling and the launch, the industry had not quite known what to make of the product. A telephone without a physical keyboard. A telephone running not a phone OS but a derivative of the Mac's. And a price—US$499 for 4 GB or US$599 for 8 GB—that ran near twice what the high-end smartphones of the day were charging.

In the years that followed, this machine would redraw the outline of the category itself.

The Unveiling

On 9 January 2007, at the Macworld keynote in San Francisco, Steve Jobs introduced one product to the stage. In his own framing, it was "three revolutionary products"—a widescreen iPod, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough Internet communicator—"and these are not three separate devices, this is one device."

That presentation would be replayed many times. When Jobs demonstrated scrolling, pinching, and zooming on stage, he became one of the first people in history to demonstrate multi-touch in front of a general audience.

What Was Actually New

Few of the iPhone's components were technical firsts. Multi-touch had been researched since the 1970s; smartphones, beginning with the IBM Simon in 1994, had been on the market for more than a decade. Touchscreens, soft QWERTY keyboards, and phones with embedded web browsers each existed already.

What was new was how the iPhone integrated them.

• Capacitive multi-touch was put at the centre. The mainstream of the day was resistive touch, requiring a stylus. The iPhone was designed from the start to be operated by fingers—several at once.
• The physical keyboard was removed. In an industry dominated by BlackBerry, this was heretical. Executives from the Windows Mobile and Symbian camps immediately judged the absence of a keyboard a defect.
• An OS X-derived operating system was placed on a phone. This too was without precedent. The software—later called iPhone OS and then iOS—was a full UNIX-derived OS descended from the desktop.

What Was Missing

The iPhone at launch was far from a finished product.

• It supported only EDGE (2.5G), not 3G. In the United States it was exclusive to AT&T.
• There was no third-party application platform. Apple's official line was that web apps were the development model. The App Store would not arrive until July of the following year.
• Copy and paste was not present. It would not arrive until iPhone OS 3.0 in 2009.
• The camera was two megapixels and could not record video.

Even so, roughly 1.4 million units sold in the United States between launch day and the end of the year.

Why It Changed History

The reordering of the industry that followed was as consequential as the device itself.

Between 2007 and 2010, Google reworked Android at high speed—the initial design had been oriented toward a BlackBerry-style keyboard device, and the project pivoted toward a touch-first design in the weeks after the iPhone unveiling. Nokia entered the long decline of Symbian. Microsoft's Windows Mobile effectively withdrew from the mobile market. Palm disappeared within a few years.

"Industrial earthquake" is the kind of phrase that loses its meaning through overuse, but here it fits.

Connected Events

Before the iPhone, Apple had already remade itself as a music-device company through the 2001 iPod and the 2003 iTunes Store; the iPhone was planned as a continuation of that arc. For the lineage that followed, see the iPhone timeline.