Detailed · 20 events
A History of the iPhone
2000s
Rafael Fernandez / TheGoldenBox (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Commons ↗ Unveiled 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.
Apple Inc. (Wikimedia Commons) · Public Domain (PD-textlogo; trademark of Apple Inc.) · Commons ↗ The App Store opened on 10 July 2008; iPhone OS 2.0 and the iPhone 3G followed the next day. Apple's own figure for opening day was more than 500 native applications, over 125 of them free. Funnelling every developer through one Apple-run channel, with a 70/30 split, formed the spine of mobile economics for the next decade and a half. The web-app policy Steve Jobs had called a 'very sweet solution' at WWDC in June 2007 was reversed nine months later, when Apple announced the iPhone SDK on 6 March 2008.
Dan Taylor (Flickr, via Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY 2.0 · Commons ↗ The second generation: announced on 9 June 2008 and released on 11 July 2008, a year after the original went on sale. It added 3G data and GPS, and cut the US entry price to $199 for 8 GB with a new two-year AT&T contract. Together with the App Store, which had opened the day before, it turned the iPhone into a phone that ran third-party software. It went on sale in 21 countries at once on 11 July, with France following on 17 July—and the list included Japan, which had never been sold the original iPhone at all. SoftBank Mobile carried it, making this the iPhone's Japanese debut.
gillyberlin (Flickr, via Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY 2.0 · Commons ↗ Announced by Phil Schiller at WWDC on 8 June 2009 and released on 19 June in the US and several other markets; Japan followed a week later, on 26 June, through SoftBank Mobile. 'S is for speed,' Schiller said on stage, putting the gain at roughly twice the iPhone 3G—the previous generation, not the original. Video recording, voice control, a digital compass and voice memos were added; iPhone OS 3.0, shipped alongside it, finally brought copy-and-paste, MMS and a landscape keyboard. US pricing was $199 for 16 GB and $299 for 32 GB with a new two-year AT&T contract, while the iPhone 3G dropped to $99 for 8 GB. The 'S generation' pattern—refine in the off year between major redesigns—was established here.
2010s
Justin14 (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Commons ↗ Presented at WWDC on 7 June 2010 and released on 24 June in the US, UK, France, Germany and Japan (SoftBank Mobile in Japan). Apple branded the new 326-ppi panel the 'Retina display', claiming the human eye could not resolve individual pixels at a normal viewing distance. The industrial design shifted to glass front and back with a stainless-steel sidewall. That same steel band doubled as the antenna, however; certain grips caused noticeable signal loss, triggering the 'Antennagate' affair and, at a press conference on 16 July, a free case for every buyer. It remains one of the most prominent PR failures in Apple's history.
Magnus D (Flickr, via Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY 2.0 · Commons ↗ Announced on 4 October and released on 14 October in the US, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan and the UK. Japan was in the first wave, and this was the generation that ended SoftBank's Japanese monopoly on the iPhone: KDDI (au) carried one for the first time. The phone brought a dual-core A5, an eight-megapixel camera and the Siri voice assistant. Steve Jobs died on 5 October, the day after the unveiling; the 4S became his last product. Siri came from Siri Inc., a spin-out of SRI International's DARPA-funded CALO programme that Apple acquired in April 2010; on this generation it was exclusive to the 4S, shipped in beta, and understood only English, French and German. Japanese arrived with iOS 5.1 in March 2012. Voice assistants predated it—the 4S mattered not for being first but for pushing natural-language phone control into the mainstream.
unten44 (Flickr, via Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY 2.0 · Commons ↗ Announced on 12 September and released on 21 September in the US, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and the UK—Japan in the first wave. The display grew to four inches and the aspect ratio moved from 3:2 to a 16:9-class widescreen; the aluminium body was thinner and lighter; and it was the first iPhone to support LTE. The most divisive change was dropping the 30-pin Dock connector—in use since the third-generation iPod in 2003, nine years earlier—for the reversible 8-pin Lightning, cutting compatibility with a vast third-party accessory market overnight. Apple sold an adapter separately. US pricing with a two-year contract was $199 for 16GB, $299 for 32GB and $399 for 64GB.
Raimond Spekking · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Commons ↗ The 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 that ran at least a year ahead of the rest of the industry's roadmaps, and one that took competitors including Qualcomm by surprise. Touch ID would later become the foundation for Apple Pay (2014).
Kazuhisa OTSUBO (Flickr, via Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY 2.0 · Commons ↗ Announced on 9 September and released on 19 September in the US, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Puerto Rico, Singapore and the UK—Japan in the first wave, China not among them. Two models, 4.7 and 5.5 inches: Apple entered the 'phablet' market three years after the Samsung Galaxy Note opened it in October 2011. On 22 September Apple said it had sold more than ten million units in just three days—Apple's own figure, published without a regional or channel breakdown. Apple Pay was unveiled at the same 9 September event, and these were the first iPhones with NFC, but Apple Pay itself did not go live until 20 October in the US, and not until 25 October 2016 in Japan.
freestocks.org (Flickr, via Wikimedia Commons) · CC0 · Commons ↗ Announced on 9 September and released on 25 September in the US, Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand, Puerto Rico, Singapore and the UK—Japan in the first wave, and China back in it after having missed the iPhone 6 launch day the year before. The 6s introduced 3D Touch, a display that sensed how hard the user pressed, and interactions built on it: Peek and Pop, and Quick Actions. Neither developers nor users adopted it. The iPhone XR of 2018 dropped the pressure-sensing layer for Haptic Touch, a long press, and the iPhone 11 generation of 2019 removed it from the line entirely. One of the rare UI features Apple shipped and then withdrew.
Announced on 21 March and released on 31 March in the US, Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore and the UK among others—Japan in the first wave. It reused the four-inch iPhone 5s shell almost unchanged and fitted the then-current A9 and M9 with a 12-megapixel rear camera. It was not a 6s in a small body: there was no 3D Touch, the front camera was 1.2 megapixels, and Touch ID was the older 5s-generation sensor. Two configurations, 16GB and 64GB, from $399 in the US. Aimed both at users unwilling to follow the move to larger screens and at emerging markets wanting a lower entry price, it established a permanent slot in Apple's lineup: inexpensive, but current-generation inside.
Maurizio Pesce (Flickr, via Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY 2.0 · Commons ↗ Announced on 7 September and released on 16 September in more than 25 countries and regions including Japan, in 32/128/256GB from $649 in the US. Apple removed the 3.5 mm headphone jack from the iPhone. The 3.5 mm connector was designed in the 1950s for transistor-radio earpieces and became the de facto standard for portable audio after the Walkman; its 6.35 mm ancestor goes back to telephone switchboards of the 1870s. Onstage, Phil Schiller reduced the decision to one word—'courage'—which was widely mocked as emblematic of Apple's hubris. The iPhone 7 was not the first phone without a jack, but it had incomparably more influence, pushing wireless earbuds into the consumer-electronics mainstream. AirPods, shown at the same event, did not ship alongside it: Apple first said late October, then slipped, and orders opened on 13 December 2016. Japanese models added FeliCa, making this the first iPhone to work with Suica and the iD and QuicPay networks.
Gregory Varnum (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Commons ↗ Ten 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.
Fastily · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Commons ↗ The '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.
Ralph Emmerich (Bungert55) · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Commons ↗ The 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.
2020s
KKPCW · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Commons ↗ Apple'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.
Tatsuo Yamashita (Flickr, via Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY 2.0 · Commons ↗ Announced on 14 September and released on 24 September in more than 30 countries and regions including Japan. The TrueDepth notch, essentially untouched since the iPhone X, shrank—Apple described the housing area as 20 percent smaller. The two Pro models were the first iPhones with ProMotion, a variable-refresh display running from 10 to 120 Hz, and the difference in scrolling and animation was immediately obvious; the standard 13 and 13 mini stayed at 60 Hz. On battery, Apple claimed up to two and a half hours more per day for the iPhone 13 than the 12, and up to an hour and a half more for the 13 mini than the 12 mini. An unflashy generation, but a broadly better one.
Dick Thomas Johnson (Flickr, via Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY 2.0 · Commons ↗ Announced on 7 September and released on 16 September in 45 countries and regions including Japan; the iPhone 14 Plus followed on 7 October. The notch, unchanged in outline for five years since the iPhone X, gave way on the two Pro models to a pair of cutouts whose black region the OS stretched and contracted as an interactive UI element: the Dynamic Island. A hardware constraint—where the front camera and sensors sit—was presented as a feature rather than hidden as a flaw. The always-on display, new to iPhone that year, was likewise Pro-only; the standard iPhone 14 and 14 Plus kept the old notch and a 60 Hz screen. The Dynamic Island did not reach the standard models until the iPhone 15 generation in 2023.
Kyu3a (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Commons ↗ The 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).
Kyu3a (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Commons ↗ Announced on 9 September and released on 20 September, Japan included. The generation was built around Apple Intelligence, Apple's own generative-AI suite—which was not on the phone at launch. The first features arrived as a beta on 28 October with iOS 18.1, and initially only where the device and Siri language were set to US English. Japanese did not follow until iOS 18.4 on 31 March 2025. Nor was it exclusive to the iPhone 16: the previous year's iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max were supported too. 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 framed as keeping the AI surface from being ceded to others. That framing was only partly borne out: iOS 18.2 in December 2024 let Siri hand queries to OpenAI's ChatGPT. The headline feature, a Siri aware of personal context, was publicly delayed in March 2025 and never shipped within this generation.