iPhone

The iPhone is Apple's smartphone product line, which went on sale on 29 June 2007 in the United States only. At the Macworld keynote of 9 January that year Steve Jobs presented "three revolutionary products of this class" — a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough Internet communications device — before adding: "These are not three separate devices, this is one device, and we are calling it iPhone." Combined with the 2008 App Store it commercially established the modern smartphone category by fusing the mobile phone, PDA, and MP3 player. IDC estimates 2025 shipments at 247.4 million units, up 6.1 per cent. In Apple's FY2025 Form 10-K the line accounts for US$209,586 m of US$416,161 m in net sales — 50.4 per cent, by far the company's largest single product.

History

The iPhone project began in 2004 under the code name "Project Purple". Two parallel streams — extending the iPod with a phone, and inheriting multi-touch from an internal tablet research effort — converged on the latter. A capacitive multi-touch display, a mobile OS rooted in Mac OS X (iPhone OS, later iOS), iTunes-based sync with a personal computer, and complete hardware-OS vertical integration: each of these was a discontinuity from Symbian and BlackBerry-era phones, and together they shifted the centre of gravity in the mobile market from carriers to device makers.

The July 2008 App Store opened third-party software distribution and entrenched the 30 per cent platform fee as the basic economic structure of mobile software. The iPhone 4 (2010) introduced the Retina display; the 4S (2011), Siri; the 5s (2013), Touch ID; the X (2017), Face ID and the notch; the 12 (2020), 5G and MagSafe; the 14 Pro (2022), the Dynamic Island — a Pro-only feature that year, with the standard 14 and 14 Plus keeping the old notch until the 15 generation; and the 15 (2023), USB-C. The 16 (2024) was sold on Apple Intelligence but did not ship with it: the first features arrived on 28 October in iOS 18.1, in US English only, and Japanese not until iOS 18.4 on 31 March 2025. Generation by generation, iPhone has set what becomes the smartphone-industry baseline. The 2025 iPhone 17 series, built on the A19 Pro SoC, drove the shipment year that IDC counts as Apple's first as the largest handset vendor since 2011.

Major Models

"Year" is the year of US release. Only the original was US-exclusive; Japanese sales began with the 3G.

Technical Innovations

• Capacitive multi-touch: within a few product cycles it made the physical-keyboard smartphone a legacy category, though BlackBerry's own shipments did not peak until 2011.
• App Store platform economics: Apple's figure for what developers selling digital goods and services have earned since 2008 is more than US$550 bn (January 2026), even as the 30% commission has become a global focal point of antitrust litigation and regulation.
• Apple Silicon predecessors: from the A4 (2010, beginning serious in-house design) to the A19 Pro (2025, 3 nm-class), Apple has designed its own Arm-architecture application processors for over fifteen years.
• Biometrics: Touch ID (2013) and Face ID (2017) became the industry-wide standards for payments and authentication.
• Computational photography: Smart HDR, Deep Fusion, Night mode, Cinematic mode and related pipelines shifted the centre of mobile imaging from optics to computation.
• 5G, satellite messaging, USB-C: pushed each generation's connectivity standard into the consumer mainstream.
• Apple Intelligence (from October 2024): a roughly three-billion-parameter on-device model, Apple-operated Private Cloud Compute servers, and ChatGPT hand-off added in iOS 18.2.

Market and Impact

Apple has not reported iPhone unit sales since fiscal 2018, so shipment figures below are IDC estimates and revenue figures are Apple's own.

• Shipments, calendar 2025 (IDC estimate): 247.4 m units, +6.1% year on year — enough to pass Samsung as the year's largest vendor for the first time since 2011
• Installed base: Apple reports only a company-wide installed base of active devices, over 2.5 billion as of 29 January 2026; it does not break out an iPhone-only figure
• iPhone net sales, FY2025 (Form 10-K): US$209,586 m, 50.4% of Apple's US$416,161 m total
• iPhone net sales, three months ended 27 December 2025 (Apple's fiscal 2026 first quarter, the iPhone 17's first full quarter): US$85,269 m against US$69,138 m a year earlier, +23%
• Greater China: a difficult 2024-2025 as Huawei and Xiaomi regained share — segment net sales fell 4% in FY2025 — with the December 2025 quarter up sharply to US$25,526 m

iPhone aggregates apps, payments, advertising, content distribution, and mobile-ad measurement into a single product-driven ecosystem. That positioning rewrote the framework within which Google's Android, Microsoft's Windows Phone, RIM's BlackBerry, Symbian, and Palm OS rose and fell.

Criticism

App Store fees, anti-steering, and the prohibition on sideloading have generated continuous litigation and regulation: Epic Games (from 2020), the EU Digital Markets Act applied from 2024, and a March 2024 US Department of Justice suit alleging smartphone monopolisation. Apple has permitted alternative marketplaces and third-party payments inside the EU, but has introduced new mechanisms such as the "Core Technology Fee" that critics see as minimal-compliance manoeuvres.

On right-to-repair, Apple's restrictions on third-party parts ("parts pairing") have been challenged in the US and France. The Self Service Repair programme expanded from 2023. Apple announced support for used genuine parts on 11 April 2024, with on-device calibration of new or used Apple parts "beginning in fall 2024" — that is, in iOS 18, not in the earlier iOS 17.4, which was the EU Digital Markets Act release. On security, commercial spyware such as Pegasus has been repeatedly detected attacking iPhones; Lockdown Mode shipped in iOS 16 in September 2022. The August 2021 plan for on-device CSAM scanning was paused that December and formally abandoned in December 2022.

Across the supply chain, conditions at Foxconn's Zhengzhou complex — including the autumn 2022 COVID-related protests — and the slow diversification of production into India and Vietnam remain pressure points, as does the sourcing of cobalt, tin, tantalum and tungsten. Apple has pledged carbon neutrality by 2030 and described certain Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 case-and-band combinations shipped in 2023 as its first carbon-neutral products — a company claim, not an independent finding — but the cross-supply-chain target is still some way off.