I guess you really don't have a sense of humor at all. Maybe you should get off the Internet and go outside for a bit
It is your birthday after all.
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Apple Released the iPhone Eight Years Ago Today
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I guess you really don't have a sense of humor at all. Maybe you should get off the Internet and go outside for a bit
It is your birthday after all.
I still remember those days back with the original iPhone when people used to come up to me in the street and ask me to show them the iPhone! Now virtually everybody have them haha.
I do remember that now but it wasn't officially sold off contract because you were supposed to sign up to a new contract when you activated it to use it.
If it wasn't subsidized, then why did you have to sign a new 2 year contract to use it? I seem to remember that it was a 2 year contract that did not affect your phone subsidy usage, so you could still get another subsidized phone but why the insanity of a contract if you weren't getting it subsidized???
So?
Come on... It's a greedy company making great products. No less, no more.
Anyway, nice work Apple!
I still remember how impressed I was and knew instantly that I'd need one of those (of course not 1st gen
No more greedy than every other company trying to stay in business while providing products people actually want.
There was no official unlocking at that time. However, Apple still thought that it didn't need to rely on the contract, but by technically forcing buyers to use the phone with whatever carriers they want. They didn't require the buyers to sign the two-year contract at purchase time. The jailbreak / unlocking community taught Apple lessons by helping tons of non-AT&T customers with easy access to the phone, at the same $599 (then later $399 price).
Something that is now second nature to us 'pinch to zoom'. In 'short' 8 years we sure have come along way. One of the things that amazed me is how I could watch youtube videos on it.. crazy
I'm still locked to AT&T since the 3G... because I, how did that guy put it?, cling to my grandfathered unlimited plan like its the last chopper out of 'nam.
I'm really not being nitpicky and this isn't Monday morning quarterbacking 8 years later. I upgraded from a Sanyo smartphone that had EVDO support on Sprint and it was a MAJOR speed downgrade. EDGE was theoretically as fast as ISDN, but most of the time performance was more like a 56k dialup modem. The phone UI was often very sluggish in normal use.
It was a neat tech demo but a very immature product. It was hampered by its tech specs. The phone didn't start to become a complete package until the 3GS. That phone was amazing - in fact, while waiting for my 5s to arrive, my 4 broke and I had to revert to the 3GS and it was still a very good experience.
I scoffed at the original iPhone.. oops.
The first time I played with the keyboard I didn't get it, put it down, and claimed it failure. Six iPhones later, I'm hooked to the ecosystem like you wouldn't believe. I got a macbook because I had an iPhone, sort of backwards reasoning at the time...
My recent 5 down to 3GS experience, while I waited for my 6+, was pretty horrible. The lag was soul crushing.
I really wasn't much of an apple user until I saw Steve Jobs keynote about the iPhone. I came home and my 81 year old Dad and I watched it together. We both agreed that this was a huge technology shift in the way people communicated and just the thought of having the Internet in your pocket was astounding! I became a believer in all things apple at that point and have not looked back even once. I'm waiting for the 6s as I've upgraded every 2 years on the 'S' models since the 3GS. We now have in my house 3 iPhones, 3 iPads, a Mac mini, an iMac and an Apple TV. All because my head was turned on the original iPhone. I even remember the astonishment I felt when they dropped the price by $200 and I received my money back from my original purchase from a,savvy manager who understood good customer service. And the crazy thing is I'm still as excited today over my iPhone 5S as I was about the 1st gen model. Well done Apple, well done!
But... but... people want physical keyboards! No one wants touchscreen. This will FAIL!
We had plenty of use cases for unlimited data.
For instance, many of us had Slingboxes so we could watch our home cable channels on our smartphones from anywhere in the world. The iPhone couldn't do that until years later.
We also had music, videos, Shazam, Google Maps, web browsers, music, you name it.
In the US, most if not all carriers require a data plan if you want to activate a smartphone even for voice. That used to be unnecessary before the iPhone changed things.
It's clear that you did not have a smartphone back then. It was only dumbphones that were limited to carrier stores.
Smartphones could download apps from any app store or website.
It was in fact pretty ironic that Steve Jobs complained about carrier walled gardens, when his own intentions turned out to be to build an even higher walled garden.
Because Apple was taking people's subsidy money in addition to charging for the phone purchase. (Instead of setting $12 a month aside for you to use, AT&T made a deal to give that money to Apple as a "monthly royalty".)
Unfortunately for Apple, unlockers made it possible to buy an iPhone to use elsewhere, and Apple would never see that monthly payment from AT&T. So as soon as their first year contract was up, they switched to the usual subsidy model where Apple got paid up front. That's also when Apple turned dead against jailbreaking and lobbied against its legality.
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I remember when it was announced. I was just so happy someone was going to make a phone for people with Macs. I had been using Nokia and Blackberry phones and the backup and syncing process frustrated the hell out of me.
That said, I didn't get the original only because I wasn't ready to give up BBM!! lol. Also, I was a little weirded out about the touchscreen. But I got on board with the next 3G release. After about a week of wanting to throw the it at the wall because I couldn't type on it as fast and everything was full of typos, I had my aha moment of "I can't live without this thing ever." I couldn't believe how good the email looked & worked. I didn't have to carry my iPod around anymore. I loved it.
That said, I didn't get the original only because I wasn't ready to give up BBM!! lol. Also, I was a little weirded out about the touchscreen. But I got on board with the next 3G release. After about a week of wanting to throw the it at the wall because I couldn't type on it as fast and everything was full of typos, I had my aha moment of "I can't live without this thing ever." I couldn't believe how good the email looked & worked. I didn't have to carry my iPod around anymore. I loved it.
Brings back memories... I swore I wasn't going to get an iPhone until a few weeks had gone by, but a couple of hours later I was in line at the Apple Store. As I recall, the wait wasn't bad at all, and it was fun talking to others who were waiting. I still have the original iPhone, box, and bag.
Wow, it's been EIGHT years! At the time that the iPhone was first announced I wasn't wholly impressed or convinced. I thought, "heh, I've got a cell phone that I hardly use now; why would I want one of THOSE things?" ... A few days before the actual launch I watched that same keynote again and this time it really registered with me why I might want "one of those things." It was.....wow, it was a computer in one's pocket! As a result, I found myself in line on Launch Day, waiting to purchase an item still unseen and untouched, but I had this inner urge assuring me that I was doing the Right Thing. While in line, I rang up a friend (on my old cell phone, the last time it was ever used) and told her where I was and what I was about to do. She pronounced that I was crazy. LOL!
Time came, we entered the store, I handed over my plastic card in payment and was handed a bag with the box with the new iPhone inside..... On the way out of the store I paused at a display table to take a look at the display iPhones set up there and to get an idea of what I just just purchased.... Once home, I carefully unboxed my new iPhone, got online and went through the steps to activate it. I marveled at this thing, intrigued with it and with the possibilities inherent in it......
I think it was a couple of weeks later when I was out somewhere that I finally saw someone else with an iPhone "in the wild" and we shared a conspiratorial, knowing smile.....
Last year I was at a party with the friend who had been the first to hear about my iPhone even before I'd actually bought the thing. I looked around at people at the party and smiled -- well, kind of smirked, actually -- as they were all happily snapping photos of each other and the party food and party favors with their iPhones, checking text messages, sending texts and emails and such with their iPhones.....
I guess I wasn't so crazy after all that day eight years ago......
Time came, we entered the store, I handed over my plastic card in payment and was handed a bag with the box with the new iPhone inside..... On the way out of the store I paused at a display table to take a look at the display iPhones set up there and to get an idea of what I just just purchased.... Once home, I carefully unboxed my new iPhone, got online and went through the steps to activate it. I marveled at this thing, intrigued with it and with the possibilities inherent in it......
I think it was a couple of weeks later when I was out somewhere that I finally saw someone else with an iPhone "in the wild" and we shared a conspiratorial, knowing smile.....
Last year I was at a party with the friend who had been the first to hear about my iPhone even before I'd actually bought the thing. I looked around at people at the party and smiled -- well, kind of smirked, actually -- as they were all happily snapping photos of each other and the party food and party favors with their iPhones, checking text messages, sending texts and emails and such with their iPhones.....
I guess I wasn't so crazy after all that day eight years ago......
In a way, while the Windows Mobile devices of the day could access the Internet, it wasn't as intuitive to use as what the iPhone achieved even with the original model from 2007. What the iPhone did was get a lot more people accessing the Internet from their phones--and it came out just when a little program named Twitter just started to become popular.
Today, the iPhone essentially made the idea of a wirelessly connected pocket computer--predicted several times by science fiction writers and movies--a modern reality.
