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iPhone Turning Five Years Old with 250 Million Units Sold, $150 Billion in Revenue
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He had a point with the price though.
I mean, the price of the original iPhone was just astronomical.
Yup. I feel the same way. When I first got my iPhone, it was OK. It was cool. But it wasn't till the app store came out that I realized it's life changing power. It's just amazing to have the powerful little computer in my shirt pocket.
No one was doing touch screen like they are now before the iPhone.
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I joined 2007.
Anyways, I kind want to get one of the originals just to have.
My Longest Post Ever
Since everybody is getting sentimental and reminiscing, I might as well do the same thing. I remember watching some comedian on SNL talking about YouTube, so I checked it out and made an account. A few months before the first iPhone was released, I saw a YouTube video of some new Google project called Android. It was running on a Blackberry phone and looked like the standard OS except it had a Google search bar, which I thought was the most pointless thing ever. Then the iPhone was released, and I wanted it more than anything. There was just something awesome about all the things it could do. The next time I saw Android, it was a touchscreen OS competing with iOS, and I was amazed at how much they'd stolen from Apple.
Since everybody is getting sentimental and reminiscing, I might as well do the same thing. I remember watching some comedian on SNL talking about YouTube, so I checked it out and made an account. A few months before the first iPhone was released, I saw a YouTube video of some new Google project called Android. It was running on a Blackberry phone and looked like the standard OS except it had a Google search bar, which I thought was the most pointless thing ever. Then the iPhone was released, and I wanted it more than anything. There was just something awesome about all the things it could do. The next time I saw Android, it was a touchscreen OS competing with iOS, and I was amazed at how much they'd stolen from Apple.
Me too.... and it was recently unlocked by AT&T. Use it as a backup phone on T-Mobile.
Can't part with it. At the same time it is amazing to see how far things have come. Heck, we didn't even have apps back then--only web apps. No cut and paste! I wondered how I could give up those things that I had on my "trusty" Treo (it could be trusted to spontaneously hard-reset monthly). But something about the iPhone would not let me give it up, even though it was missing features. Glad I stuck with it!
Michael
You know what is funny to me? All the criticism back then for the unremovable battery. We were all supposed to be going crazy in 2 years time as our batteries wore out.
Here we are 5-years-later and my original iPhone's battery is not much different, that I can notice, from back then. And that iPhone got a heckuva lot of use.
Michael
Does anyone remember what it was like to be on line June 29? I missed that whol eexperience, I came in late 
(2009)
(2009)
Nobody fails as well as Apple.
True... A total failure with only $ 150 Billion in revenue in 5 years.
That's terrible!!!
Hm. Funny. The iPhone I found the least appealing & most disappointing accounts for nearly half the total iPhone sales of all time.
Guess it's a good thing I'm not in the phone business.
Guess it's a good thing I'm not in the phone business.
Apple has introduced new concepts that a lot of people didn't want to accept at first but eventually assimilated. Now nobody complains about it having a non-removable battery.
I wonder if Apple truly thought that "apps" weren't needed, and gave in to the public outcry to create an SDK, or if they had this plan all along and just withheld it at the beginning to generate excitement and rumor mill traffic.
Certainly the apps are what carried the iPhone (and modern smartphones) to their current levels of success. An iPhone without apps was (and still would be today) pretty boring.
If Apple truly thought that app SDKs were unnecessary then that would have been a huge mistake -- one that they corrected, thankfully, and in doing so reaped billions of dollars in return.
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wow.. those images remind me of just how amazed I was when the iPhone was released. It seemed so revolutionary...
The thing that really sticks in my mind was when Steve Jobs used Maps to find local starbucks and then called by simply tapping the number... Something we take so for granted now, but at the time I was like
For a fun look back at history... this phone was announced a mere 2 days before the iPhone. Ouch!
Apple was definitely thinking different!
It just proves how easily consumers are "tricked" by lower apparent prices.
The original iPhone prices were without subsidies. Apple was going to break the mold of "$0 phone with 2-year contract on a data plan" and just charge up front for the phone, but nobody liked that. They wanted to see $0 or $199 or whatever, and they didn't care about the contract (which is even worse here in Canada, it's all 3-year contracts over here).
To buy an unlocked iPhone 4S today still costs about $600, the same as what Steve initially said the first iPhone would sell for.
Note: Only when a company comes along and drives the direction does the industry explode with new ``me too'' drivers do we see jumps in technology.
Apple is never satisfied with their own success and thus assures they continue to push forward which guarantees other corporations do the same or go bankrupt.
For a fun look back at history... this phone was announced a mere 2 days before the iPhone. Ouch!
Apple was definitely thinking different!
palm...............more like facepalm
- That's a pretty stupid comparison. It's like comparing the sales of all Windows computers to the sales of the MacBook Pro...
Your logic is severely flawed.
The original iPhone debuted on AT&T at an unsubsidized price, yes. But you still needed a two-year contract commitment to AT&T. Also, Apple wanted to reap additional revenue from the carriers, in return for them not having pay for the subsidy. That plan did not work out.
Michael
Doing the math... $150B in revenue divided by 250M units sold... $600 of revenue per phone!?
When the first-gen iPhone came out, I was intrigued. I used a SonyEricsson feature phone with special firmware so I could run unsigned Java applets. I had Opera Mini, SSH client software, and FREE TETHERING (albeit at 2G speeds) which the first iPhone didn't have.
I waited until the iPhone 3G came out and had the applications I wanted before I upgraded that poor, beat-up (but reliable!) SonyEricsson phone. I'm still loving my iPhone 4... waiting for the iPhone 5!
When the first-gen iPhone came out, I was intrigued. I used a SonyEricsson feature phone with special firmware so I could run unsigned Java applets. I had Opera Mini, SSH client software, and FREE TETHERING (albeit at 2G speeds) which the first iPhone didn't have.
I waited until the iPhone 3G came out and had the applications I wanted before I upgraded that poor, beat-up (but reliable!) SonyEricsson phone. I'm still loving my iPhone 4... waiting for the iPhone 5!