The Original iPhone Goes on Sale

At six in the evening local time on 29 June 2007, all 164 Apple Stores in the United States began selling the iPhone. 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 bought only the handset: a new two-year AT&T service agreement, starting at $59.99 a month, was required on top.

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

The Unveiling

Six months before the launch, on 9 January 2007, at the Macworld keynote in San Francisco, Steve Jobs said he was introducing "three revolutionary products of this class"—a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough Internet communications device. Having named all three, he went on: "These are not three separate devices, this is one device, and we are calling it iPhone."

Apple's press release the same day carried the fuller claim. "iPhone is a revolutionary and magical product that is literally five years ahead of any other mobile phone," Jobs said in it. "We are all born with the ultimate pointing device—our fingers—and iPhone uses them to create the most revolutionary user interface since the mouse."

That presentation would be replayed many times. It was not, however, the first public demonstration of multi-touch. Bill Buxton's survey of the field dates working multi-touch input devices to the early 1980s and notes that the capability had been shown publicly for more than twenty years by the time the iPhone appeared. What Jobs did was show it running on something a person could walk into a shop and buy.

Fingers, No Keyboard, and OS X

Few of the iPhone's components were technical firsts. Buxton dates the first multi-touch input device to the University of Toronto's Flexible Machine Interface in 1982; smartphones, beginning with the IBM Simon, which went on sale 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. Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer, asked by CNBC for his first impression days after the unveiling, dismissed the price—"That is the most expensive phone in the world"—and then the design: "And it doesn't appeal to business customers because it doesn't have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good e-mail machine."
• 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.

EDGE Only, and No App Store

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.
• It was sold only in the United States. Apple's January announcement had promised Europe in late 2007 and Asia in 2008; the original iPhone never went on sale in Japan at all. The Japanese debut came with the iPhone 3G on 11 July 2008, through SoftBank Mobile.
• 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.

It sold quickly all the same. Apple announced the millionth iPhone on 9 September 2007, 74 days after launch. The figures it reported in its quarterly results—Apple's own sell-in numbers, not independent measurements of sales to end users—were 1,389,000 units cumulatively through the end of fiscal 2007 on 29 September, while the phone was still on sale only in the United States, and a further 2,315,000 in the December quarter, which added the first European markets from November onward.

The price did not survive the year. On 5 September 2007 Apple cut the 8 GB model from $599 to $399. Early buyers, $200 out of pocket two months after launch, complained; the next day Jobs published an open letter offering every one of them a $100 store credit. He wrote that "the technology road is bumpy," and then: "Our early customers trusted us, and we must live up to that trust with our actions in moments like these."

Android Reordered, Symbian Declining, Palm Gone

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

Between 2007 and 2010, Google reworked Android at high speed—by the later accounts of people on the team, the plan had been to ship a BlackBerry-style keyboard device first, and the project was reordered around a touch-first design 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.