On Fifth Avenue in New York City, eager customers camped out for days. At a Southern California mall, an entrepreneurial teen arrived a day in advance and had to outwit security to maintain his spot. This month 18 years ago -- Friday, June 29, 2007, at precisely 6 p.m. local time --Apple debuted the iPhone at Apple Stores and AT&T locations throughout the United States. The smartphone era had arrived.
For all the excitement, early sales figures didn’t quite match the scale of change that was coming. Only about 270,000 phones -- $500 for the basic version or $600 with more memory --were sold that first weekend. Within six months, the iPhone reached 1 million units sold. A year later, when the new models came out, 1 million were sold in its first weekend in 21 countries around the world. At the time, Nokia was selling about 10 million phones a week.
But the iPhone’s cultural impact was enormous. When Apple CEO Steve Jobs first unveiled it at the Macworld conference in San Francisco in January 2007, he called it “a revolutionary and magical product.” Apple's enthusiastic press release provides a window into what mobile calling was like pre-smartphone. “iPhone is a revolutionary new mobile phone that allows users to make calls by simply pointing at a name or number,” it boasted. “iPhone syncs all of your contacts from your PC, Mac or Internet service such as Yahoo!, so that you always have your full list of up-to-date contacts with you.”
Of course, iPhone was -- and is -- much more than a phone. Suddenly, tremendous computing power sat in everyone’s pocket, backed by constant internet access and wrapped in Apple’s characteristic, intuitively easy-to-use operating system. That first press release touted a radically new kind of voicemail that lets you see and choose what messages to hear. There was texting on a full QWERTY keyboard. Photos could be taken with the built-in camera. And the device functioned as “a widescreen iPod with touch controls,” which meant you could listen to music and watch TV and videos on a “stunning 3.5-inch widescreen display.” (The iPad would come in 2010; the iPod would be discontinued in 2022.)
The iPhone helped turn media into a personal product that was consumed not on a big screen but a handheld device.
A year after the iPhone launch came the App Store (and faster 3G connectivity), which in turn created the app-based world we now live in. The iPhone brought us ridesharing and instant payments, Wordle and hookup apps. Social media apps and the constant visual documentation of our lives soon became ubiquitous. In 2009 came video recording. In 2010, the front-facing camera -- and therefore the selfie. Over the years, phones got bigger, cameras and screens got sharper, and the home button disappeared. Headphone jacks, too, went away, and USB ports arrived. And the computers in our pockets kept getting more powerful.
Along the way and powered by the success of the iPhone, Apple became, first, the most valuable company in the world in January 2012, beating out ExxonMobil. Later that year, Apple was designated as the most valuable company of all time. In recent years, it has traded that biggest-market-cap crown with Microsoft and Nvidia, depending on stock price fluctuations (and, sometimes, announced AI ambitions).
Which speaks to what’s now the biggest threat to the iPhone. Testifying at last month's Google search antitrust trial, senior Apple executive Eddy Cue said that, thanks to AI, “you may not need an iPhone 10 years from now.” As he noted, not all technology lasts forever. And it’s fair to say most products don’t change the world either.
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