10 Years Ago Today, the Original iPhone Officially Launched

[mac4good84]

I actually didn't get the original iPhone, my first one was the 2nd generation one. Before that I never had anything resembling a smart device; they were cheap phones. I had AT&T at the time so the salesmen convinced me to go iPhone after I had asked what phones he recommended. No way I knew then that I would only have iPhone moving forward and now iPhone 7 is my 7th iPhone I've had (my wife took my 6s and I got the 7).

Soon after getting into iPhone and owning one, I started getting more into Apple products and following what was being released each year. I remember in early 2010 hearing about the tablet and watching the presentation of the iPad and how excited I was about it before it was released in April. In short, how times flies from the original iPhone until now...

 

[WatchFromAfar]

Doubling over laughing here!
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Stay tuned till September
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Would anyone else celebrate their birthday or wedding anniversary 3 months after the actual day?

 

[iGeek2014]

Even if other companies had similar ideas before Apple and iPhone you can't deny they changed the face of the mobile world a decade ago.

My first iPhone was iPhone 3G (I'd had a second generation iPod Touch and fifth generation iPod Classic prior)-before that the closest I got to a 'smart phone' was a Nokia 6600 with the Symbian OS.

 

[xitongzou]

A lot of my Canadian friends were Blackberry fans so they constantly derided the iPhone because the first generation lacked a lot of features..namely only a 2MP camera with no video capabilities, no selfie cam back then, you had to jailbreak it to install third party apps (app store wasnt there until 2008), there was no 3G at the time (remember how slow EDGE was?), no copy+paste, you couldnt attach pics in the email, the onscreen keyboard was not as accurate as physical keys at the time etc.
iPhone had a great UI from day one, but the actual functionality didnt catch up to Blackberry & co until around 2009/2010 or so, then not coincidentally Symbian/Blackberry/Windows mobile went downhill from there while iOS and Android gained market share.

 

[PinkyMacGodess]

10 years ago, no one had a smart phone - at least, not one like this one! Now, most people in many countries do. Pretty amazing.

It's like having a Swiss Army Knife in your pocket, or hanging off your belt. It does so much, and has replaced so many other consumer devices that we all have used. It's both simplified and complicated our world. Not much happens today without someone being able to capture it in a picture, or video. That alone has had a major impact on our world.

The simplicity of the iPhone has doomed other, more complicated devices. It's shaped the world...

Love it or hate it, the reverberations rocked the tech world.
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Even if other companies had similar ideas before Apple and iPhone you can't deny they changed the face of the mobile world a decade ago.

My first iPhone was iPhone 3G (I'd had a second generation iPod Touch and fifth generation iPod Classic prior)-before that the closest I got to a 'smart phone' was a Nokia 6600 with the Symbian OS.

I had a Palm Treo, and it was a disaster. Nothing worked. Email? Nope. SMS/texting? Nope. The CS minions at at&t were constantly fixing, or trying to, the damn thing. I lost my contact list so many times, and once lost the one on the Treo, AND on Windows! It was a 'Windows Phone' based piece of total crap. But it had replaceable batteries, and a memory card slot, so in some small ways it was superior to the iPhone, but in total was craptastic. I couldn't wait for the chance to get an iPhone on my locked in contract on at&t.

Funny that years before, I had the amazing Motorola Startac, and they came out with a 'smart' backpack for it that actually worked fairly well. It made the svelte phone look like it was twelve months pregnant, but added great capabilities to it.

 

[attvcks]

The phone that launched a thousand Samsung copies.....

Right!

 

[bytethese]

I was in the market for a smartphone having used Blackberries for work. I was about to get a Samsung Blackjack at the end of 2006 and decided to wait another 1-2mo until Apple's rumored announcement of the iPhone. I then joined Macrumors to keep tabs on the rumors of the device and low and behold, was announced in early 2007, so I wanted another 6mo to get my iPhone.

I am SO glad I waited. And then I physically waited, in line at the AT&T store near my office. I took a half day off, brought a chair and was #5 in line. When the time came, I went in, purchased my phone and was the first person out of the store. I came out to a roaring applause from the others waiting in line, was a pretty cool moment.

I am now anxiously waiting for the "iPhone 8" announcement and can't wait to get my hands on this "anniversary" device.

 

[Steve.P.JobsFan]

It's my birthday!!! But happy birthday iPhone!!!

We're birthday buddies!

 

[Floris]

Good job Steve Jobs & Team.

And nice job from Tim & Team for not making the phones worse.

I hope they one day get to that same level and push the 'computer' into the future, years ahead of the competition. But we all know that won't happen twice in my lifetime.

 

[PinkyMacGodess]

Would anyone else celebrate their birthday or wedding anniversary 3 months after the actual day?

Yeah, I think Apple missed an opportunity here. To have such an important anniversary slip past with no real clue to the future. But anyone remember the twentieth anniversary Mac? Maybe it's for the better.

 

[Steve.P.JobsFan]

Aww! Happy Birthday! And what did you, an eight year old at the time, think of the iPhone?

I begged my parents for one. I moaned and cried like, well, a seven year old (soon to be eight) having a tantrum.

I didn't get one. I was sad.

But, however, when Steve Jobs announced the iPhone 4 on Verizon in January 2011, I played a similar card. I talked about it non-stop until my grandfather went insane (we were on a family share plan at the time) and he told my mom he'd order the phone if I'd just shut up.

I've had an iPhone ever since, but the last few have been paid for by me.


In retrospect, giving eight year old me a (then) $599 iPhone would've been a terrible idea. Absolutely terrible. But man, how I wanted one so bad. Even though AT&T (sorry, Cingular) was "meh" at the time here.

 

[norbinhouston]

I miss Steve!

I got my iphone 10 years ago today. Believed the hype and went to an ATT store to possibly get one instead of the packed Apple Store. After waiting for over an hour, they said they were out. So by chance went to the Apple Store and they had plenty. I snagged 2, one for me and one for my brother. It really was a magical experience using it for the first time. That type of feeling hasn't been replicated since, at least for me. Tech is advancing in incremental steps now, but the original iPhone, wow, ground breaking! Had nothing to do with marketing either. A oft used back handed stab at Jobs.

 

[supertomtom]

Happy birthday iPhone! It’s hard to imagine a world now without one, much has changed over the past decade.

Still remember how amazed I was experiencing multitouch for the first time and also the accelerometer, turning my phone to landscape and flicking through coverflow in wonder, lol.

 

[kdarling]

The big differentiators between the original iPhone and a Palm were the iPhone's keyboard/style-less touch screen, full Internet, and it was more pocketable. Both the Blackberry and Palm had apps. The original iPhone didn't even have SMS or 3G, both which were quite common in 2007.

Actually, in 2006 I was using an SPB full screen keyboard plug-in on my WinMo phone:

As for browsers, my Win CE enterprise phones were running IE 6, which was quite powerful and of course the standard for websites back then.

There were a bunch of browsers available, including an early version of Firefox.

But probably the one that influenced mobile Safari on the iPhone the most was the Picsel document browser dating from 2003, that Samsung had included on some of their smartphones since 2005.

Picsel had full page rendering, flick scrolling with inertia, a tap-to-zoom version with blurred view for speed, and miniature pages for history / bookmarks... all iOS features we're now familiar with.

In fact, Picsel filed a lawsuit against Apple in 2009, which was dropped soon after. My guess is that Apple settled with them. (Because at least one of Apple's zoom patents referenced Picsel as prior art.)

What is amazing is how Steve Jobs singlehandedly changed how cellco's operate. Before the iPhone cellcos decided on the hardware specs, they decided on what software would come loaded. If anyone doesn't like Apple's "walled garden," they would have detested cellco's "iron prison" pre-iPhone. That was the real game changer of the first iPhone.

All Jobs did was change who dictated what software came preloaded on the phone and undeletable. Instead of the carrier, it was now Apple telling us. How many of us spent years wishing we didn't have storage wasted on Stocks and other preloaded apps we never used?

As for app access, while flip phones were locked into carrier vetted and sold programs, carriers back then did NOT block third party software for smartphones. You were free to download apps from anywhere you wanted.

What Jobs did was throw the iPhone back into the old flip phone category of someone else deciding what apps were safe and healthy for you to use. In short, he became the very thing he used to rail against.

 

[actcyclist]

You couldn't get the first iPhone in Australia, we got the 3G first. So I had a mobile and one of these. It did take 2 SD cards was actually quite nice and I thought the iPhone was a bit small and cost a lot. I got the 3G though

 

[s15119]

Too bad steve is not around cause not much has changed..

hahaha. Please tell me that's satire.

 

[Chupa Chupa]

All Jobs did was change who dictated what software came preloaded on the phone and undeletable. Instead of the carrier, it was now Apple telling us. How many of us spent years wishing we didn't have storage wasted on Stocks and other preloaded apps we never used?

As for app access, while flip phones were locked into carrier vetted and sold programs, carriers back then did NOT block third party software for smartphones. You were free to download apps from anywhere you wanted.

What Jobs did was throw the iPhone back into the old flip phone category of someone else deciding what apps were safe and healthy for you to use. In short, he became the very thing he used to rail against.

That's a bit slanted. The Cellcos wanted to control all media on the phone so they could profit from it. If you wanted to watch videos on your Treo you couldn't buy a TV or music streaming app from Palm's app store, you had to buy the extra SprintTV or music package -- VZ, ATT, had them too. I had several Palm phones and they were all locked down pretty good in that regard.

The available Treo apps were not all that sophisticated and the catalog thin because the cellcos didn't support them. There was plenty of Palm s/w that would not load on a Treo because the Cellcos didn't want it on the device. Cell plans before the iPhone were replete with extra options like TV and even GPS. After the iPhone transition we just buy straight data. Even while Apple has it's bloatware on the iPhone you still have the option of installing competing apps. You didn't really have that in 2005. ATT didn't care if you loaded up a tip calculator or something else they couldn't monitize

 

[Clix Pix]

I'd forgotten that, yes, Apple later dropped the price and gave all of us who had already plunked down $$$$ a refund/credit of $200.00. I promptly spent that on the first version of Aperture, which had just been released......

With the announcement of the next iPhone, then mechanisms were set in place so that one could get a new iPhone 2G without having to pay full price, and of course many people, including me, took advantage of that. As a result this turned into a pattern through the years of at each new release, upgrading to the next shiny new iPhone, which undoubtedly benefitted both Apple and AT&T as well as other carriers once they came on board, too.

Looking forward to seeing what Apple has in store for us this coming fall!

 

[Geurt]

Actually, in 2006 I was using an SPB full screen keyboard plug-in on my WinMo phone:

View attachment 706463

As for browsers, my Win CE enterprise phones were running IE 6, which was quite powerful and of course the standard for websites back then.

There were a bunch of browsers available, including an early version of Firefox.

View attachment 706470

But probably the one that influenced mobile Safari on the iPhone the most was the Picsel document browser dating from 2003, that Samsung had included on some of their smartphones since 2005.

Picsel had full page rendering, flick scrolling with inertia, a tap-to-zoom version with blurred view for speed, and miniature pages for history / bookmarks... all iOS features we're now familiar with.

In fact, Picsel filed a lawsuit against Apple in 2009, which was dropped soon after. My guess is that Apple settled with them. (Because at least one of Apple's zoom patents referenced Picsel as prior art.)



All Jobs did was change who dictated what software came preloaded on the phone and undeletable. Instead of the carrier, it was now Apple telling us. How many of us spent years wishing we didn't have storage wasted on Stocks and other preloaded apps we never used?

As for app access, while flip phones were locked into carrier vetted and sold programs, carriers back then did NOT block third party software for smartphones. You were free to download apps from anywhere you wanted.

What Jobs did was throw the iPhone back into the old flip phone category of someone else deciding what apps were safe and healthy for you to use. In short, he became the very thing he used to rail against.

Ahhwwww.... you're not a fan I presume . You came a long way in 10 years, keep up the good work!

 

[jasonklee]

That's a bit slanted. The Cellcos wanted to control all media on the phone so they could profit from it. If you wanted to watch videos on your Treo you couldn't buy a TV or music streaming app from Palm's app store, you had to buy the extra SprintTV or music package -- VZ, ATT, had them too. I had several Palm phones and they were all locked down pretty good in that regard.

The available Treo apps were not all that sophisticated and the catalog thin because the cellcos didn't support them. There was plenty of Palm s/w that would not load on a Treo because the Cellcos didn't want it on the device. Cell plans before the iPhone were replete with extra options like TV and even GPS. After the iPhone transition we just buy straight data. Even while Apple has it's bloatware on the iPhone you still have the option of installing competing apps. You didn't really have that in 2005. ATT didn't care if you loaded up a tip calculator or something else they couldn't monitize

No, no. All Jobs really did with the iPhone was give us a Stocks app that was undeletable.

 

[imnotthewalrus]

I love how so many people are jumping all over that one user even though from what I can see they clearly said 'at least not like this one'. If you're trying to argue that BBs or Treos were 'like' the iPhone then your idea of similar is very different from mine.

Edit: Seriously, I hadn't even gotten through the whole thread when I posted this and it's ridiculous. Some of you completely lack reading comprehension and/or only read his first few words.

It would make more sense to you if you were aware that the OP edited the original statement, adding in "at least not like this one".

 

[kdarling]

That's a bit slanted. The Cellcos wanted to control all media on the phone so they could profit from it. If you wanted to watch videos on your Treo you couldn't buy a TV or music streaming app from Palm's app store, you had to buy the extra SprintTV or music package -- VZ, ATT, had them too. I had several Palm phones and they were all locked down pretty good in that regard.

Ouch. Seriously, Palm OS phones were locked to carrier stores?? That sounds strange to me, since I have plenty of handheld magazines from the time talking about all the Palm apps available from other stores. (I belonged to Handango, which was the top app store of the time.)

My phones were Windows CE or Windows Mobile. The carriers could not lock those down because the OS itself allowed sideloading Windows apps from anywhere. We all installed third party media players, for example.

You could also install a Java runtime and use Java ME apps as well.

I couldn't use iOS at first because it was missing some of my favorite apps. Slingplayer of course, but also medical references, land and air navigation programs, flight planning software, YouTube, and Flash player.

Ahhwwww.... you're not a fan I presume . You came a long way in 10 years, keep up the good work!

Having worked with touch devices since the 1980s and capacitive screens since 1991, I'm very much a fan of anyone who does touch devices. My job offers rocketed after the iPhone came out

However, I don't like history being forgotten either. There was a lot of neat stuff that got ignored over the years.

 

[travoose]

Longtime reader...probably joined in about 2003/2004, rarely comment. But I remember standing in a line of about 12 people at my local ATT store at about 4pm. At about 5pm the store closed down and a third-party security company came in to "control" the 12 of us. The local newspaper showed up and did an article for the front page about the phone, for the next week I was a local hero and had people coming up to me asking me about the phone because of the article. At 6pm they let us in one at a time and locked the door behind us. I remember how excited I was and how fast I drove home to activate it via iTunes. I also remember getting a gift card for iTunes with the purchase of the phone and of course the neat bag it came in. I also remember being very frustrated that it took about 48 hours to activate because of the servers being hammered. But the pure joy I had once it finally worked and now looking at how much this device has evolved and changed our society is simply astonishing.

 

[kerrikins]

It would make more sense to you if you were aware that the OP edited the original statement, adding in "at least not like this one".

A lot of the comments are after the edit, or outright snip out the part I mentioned. People just have poor reading comprehension or want to argue.

 

[Leguna24]

I was an avid PC user back then and didn't care too much for the iPhone until I replaced my BlackBerry with the iPhone 4. Soon platter many more iPhones, iPads, iMacs and MacBooks followed. I still run a gaming rig with win as launcher but for everything else I was happy to switch to Apple.