iPhone

Appearances

1. June 29, 2007The Original iPhone Goes on SaleUnveiled by Steve Jobs at Macworld in January 2007, the iPhone went on sale in the United States on June 29 of the same year. By dropping the physical keyboard in favour of capacitive multi-touch and putting an OS X-derived operating system on a phone, the device rewrote the grammar of the product category that would later be called the smartphone.
2. July 10, 2008The App Store OpensLaunched alongside iPhone OS 2.0, the App Store opened with roughly 500 applications. The structure—official Apple distribution, a 70/30 revenue split between developer and platform—would form the spine of mobile economics for the next decade and a half. At the iPhone's original unveiling, Steve Jobs had argued that web apps were enough; eighteen months later, that policy was quietly abandoned.
3. July 11, 2008iPhone 3G ReleasedThe second generation, released a year after the original. It added 3G data, dropped the entry price to US$199 for 8 GB to expand the market, and—paired with the App Store, which had opened the day before—pushed the iPhone into the category of phone-plus-runtime-for-applications. Released simultaneously in 22 countries, it ceased to be a US-only device.
4. June 19, 2009iPhone 3GS ReleasedThe 'S' stood for Speed. CPU, GPU, and memory were upgraded enough to roughly double performance over the original. Video recording, voice control, a digital compass, and voice memos were added; iPhone OS 3.0 finally brought copy-and-paste, MMS, and a landscape keyboard. The 'S generation' pattern—refine in the off year between major redesigns—was established here.
5. June 24, 2010iPhone 4 — Retina Display and 'Antennagate'Apple branded the new 326-ppi panel the 'Retina display', claiming the human eye could not resolve individual pixels at normal viewing distance. The industrial design shifted to glass front and back with a stainless-steel sidewall—an aesthetic vocabulary that defined every iPhone that followed. The same stainless-steel band, however, doubled as the antenna; certain grips caused noticeable signal loss, triggering the 'Antennagate' affair, one of the most prominent PR failures in Apple's history.
6. October 14, 2011iPhone 4S and Siri — Jobs' Last LaunchDual-core A5, an eight-megapixel camera, and the Siri voice assistant. Steve Jobs died on 5 October, the day after the unveiling—the 4S effectively became his last product. Siri, derived from a startup spun out of SRI International and acquired by Apple, pushed the idea of operating a smartphone through natural language into the mainstream.
7. September 21, 2012iPhone 5 — Taller Screen, LTE, LightningThe aspect ratio shifted from 3:2 to 16:9 and the display grew to four inches. The body was thinner, in aluminium, and supported LTE for the first time. The most divisive change was the replacement of the nine-year-old 30-pin Dock connector with the reversible 8-pin Lightning—an overnight invalidation of the entire third-party accessory market.
8. September 20, 2013iPhone 5s — Touch ID and the 64-bit A7The home button became a fingerprint sensor: Touch ID brought biometric unlock and purchase authorisation to the mainstream. At the same time the A7 became the first 64-bit smartphone processor in the world—a transition the industry had expected two years later, and one that took competitors including Qualcomm by surprise. Touch ID would later become the foundation for Apple Pay (2014).
9. September 19, 2014iPhone 6 and 6 Plus — The Pivot to Big ScreensTwo models, 4.7 and 5.5 inches: Apple finally entered the 'phablet' market, four years after the Samsung Galaxy Note opened it. Ten million units sold on the opening weekend, breaking every previous iPhone launch record. Apple Pay was announced the same day, bringing NFC-and-tokenisation mobile payments to mass scale.
10. September 25, 2015iPhone 6s and 3D TouchThe pressure-sensitive '3D Touch' display arrived—an attempt to add a new input dimension based on how hard the user pressed. Neither developers nor users adopted it widely; beginning with the iPhone XR in 2018, Apple phased it out. One of the rare UI features Apple released and quietly withdrew.
11. March 31, 2016Original iPhone SE ReleasedA small body—the 4-inch shell from iPhone 5—stuffed with iPhone 6s internals. Aimed at users left behind by the move to larger screens and at emerging markets needing a lower entry price, it established a permanent slot in Apple's lineup: the 'inexpensive but current-generation' iPhone.
12. September 16, 2016iPhone 7 — The Headphone Jack RemovedApple removed the 3.5 mm headphone jack—an electronics standard for nearly a century—from the iPhone. The word Phil Schiller used at the unveiling, 'courage', was widely mocked as emblematic of Apple's hubris. In practice, the decision pushed wireless earbuds into the consumer-electronics mainstream; AirPods, launched the same day, became Apple's largest peripheral business within a few years.
13. November 3, 2017iPhone X — The Home Button Goes, Face ID ArrivesTen years after the original unveiling, Apple removed two of the iPhone's defining elements at once—the physical home button and the fingerprint sensor. In their place came the 'notch' at the top of the screen, embedding a depth sensor and an infrared projector for Face ID. Combined with the bezel-less OLED display, the iPhone's industrial design was rewritten from scratch for a second time.
14. September 2018iPhone XS and XR — Mass-Producing the Notched GenerationThe 'notched' design language introduced by iPhone X was rolled out across the lineup with the higher-end OLED XS and XS Max alongside the LCD-based, more colourful, less expensive XR. The experimental flagship of one year earlier had become Apple's whole lineup.
15. September 20, 2019iPhone 11 — Dual Cameras and Night ModeThe standard iPhone 11 and Pro/Pro Max established the iPhone as a 'camera with a phone behind it': multiple rear lenses became normal across the lineup. Night Mode, debuting here, lifted low-light photography sharply—handheld dusk shots ceased to be the preserve of dedicated cameras.
16. October 23, 2020iPhone 12 — 5G, and MagSafe RebornApple's first 5G iPhone, and the generation that returned to the flat-sided industrial language of the iPhone 4. A magnet array on the back revived the 'MagSafe' name—once retired from the MacBook—as both a wireless-charging standard and an accessory-attachment system. Announced during the pandemic, it launched a month later than the usual September window.
17. September 24, 2021iPhone 13 — Smaller Notch, ProMotionThe TrueDepth notch shrank by 20% for the first time since iPhone X. The Pro models gained ProMotion: a variable-refresh display running from 10 to 120 Hz, an upgrade that scrolling and animation made viscerally obvious. Battery life also improved meaningfully. A quiet, well-rounded year for the iPhone.
18. September 16, 2022iPhone 14 Pro and Dynamic IslandThe five-year run of the iPhone X notch ended—on Pro models. Two punch-hole cutouts replaced it, and the OS treated the black region as a dynamic, interactive UI element: the Dynamic Island, expanding and contracting to display ongoing activities. A hardware constraint (the location of the front camera and sensors) was reframed not as a flaw to be hidden but as a feature to be celebrated. The always-on display arrived in the same generation.
19. September 22, 2023iPhone 15 — The Move to USB-CThe eleven-year Lightning era ended; USB-C took its place. Less an internal Apple choice than a forced compliance with the EU's Common Charger Directive (adopted 2022, mandatory by the end of 2024)—a symbolic turn at which a port standard was set by regulation. The Pro models also gained USB 3 transfer speeds (up to 10 Gbps).
20. September 20, 2024iPhone 16 and Apple IntelligenceThe generation built around Apple Intelligence—Apple's own generative-AI suite. Summarisation, rewriting, image generation, and a strengthened Siri were designed to run on-device wherever possible, with selected workloads offloaded to dedicated Apple servers (Private Cloud Compute). A hardware-and-OS co-design intended to keep the AI surface on the device from being ceded to OpenAI or Google.