iPhone Turning Five Years Old with 250 Million Units Sold, $150 Billion in Revenue

[marksman]

Only in USA and maybe Europe. I see in my neighbourhood more Nokia Ashas and chinese TV-Phones than multitask phones.

Oh, wait... iPhone 1 wasn't multitask but older Symbian-based phones was. It was innovative in marketing, perhaps.

Uh no. It created the entire foundation of mobile computing. It was a complete game changer.

 

[Macdick]

iPhone

I still have my original iPhone and it still works and without a scratch looks like brand new!!!! i love it but i will give it to my doughter now ))))

 

[brdeveloper]

Uh no. It created the entire foundation of mobile computing. It was a complete game changer.

No, it was not. Except if changing mobile computing equals to creating a touchscreen monotask phone.

 

[speedyg256]

Back in 2008, when I bought my iPhone 3G for $200 with a $30 data plan, my friends laughed at me. Boy they were on the wrong side of history..

HAHAHA my friends laughed too

 

[speedyg256]

Looking at the screen caps on the original iPhone, it's amazing that the interface has hardly changed at all.

I think this is testament to how much Apple got right with their initial design. We still have the same phone, music, and (basically) home screens, not to mention the hardware design (screen size, types and locations of buttons) are the same as well.

phone and music UI's are different in iOS 6...

 

[Oletros]

Happy birthday.

An impressive product

 

[Sackvillenb]

Five years, my how time flies... I wonder what the phone will be like another 5 years from now...

 

[Genetheninja]

Happy Birthday to us!
June 29 is also my birthday, as well as the year I got married. My wife and I bought each other iPhones in Chicago as wedding presents... As well as a trip to Tiffanies...
For that reason I will always have an iPhone. We've upgraded ever since...
My first gen iPhone now belongs to my 3 year old as a very limited iPod touch.

 

[knewsom]

Seriously, what's the source of this graphic? Those aren't any iPhones I've ever seen before. Not 4s, 4, 3GS, 3G, or original. Soooo.....????????

 

[haruhiko]

Happy Birthday iPhone

 

[kdarling]

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.

It was not planned. Steve Jobs wanted full control over his iPhone, and was therefore against third party native apps.

"... Jobs initially resisted (apps). He didn't want outsiders to create applications for the iPhone that could mess it up, infect it with viruses, or pollute its integrity." -- Biography (pg 501, hardback)

“I don’t want people to think of this as a computer,” he said. “I think of it as reinventing the phone.”

“We define everything that is on the phone,” he said. “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers.”

--New York Times (1/11/2007)

“You don’t want your phone to be an open platform,” meaning that anyone can write applications for it and potentially gum up the provider's network, says Jobs.

“You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up.”

-- Newsweek (1/11/2007)

Ironically, while Jobs made headlines railing against the carrier walled gardens of controlled apps for dumbphones, he ended up adopting the same walled garden approach but even tighter. On carriers, smartphones had always been able to download third party apps from anywhere.

 

[elistan]

Still got it, works perfectly as an iPod. (The 4S is my actual phone now.)

 

[kdarling]

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.

Correct.

Apple not only wanted full price with its commensurate profit, they also wanted the monthly subsidy that usually went to the customer.

Since AT&T would be spending the same that they usually did for subsidized phones, they agreed and gave Apple the $10-15 a month per user that would normally have helped the customer pay for the phone.

However, iPhone sales stalled within a couple of months and Apple had to radically drop the price (which, as some of us recall, caused the most incredible outcry ever seen on the official Apple forums... the poor Apple mods deleted literally hundreds of early buyer angry posts before giving up, and Jobs issued an apology and a coupon).

It was a marketing misstep, one of several that clearly pointed out that Apple was still feeling its way around the phone arena. (Judging from Jobs' remarks, they seemed to think it'd be like the iPod market.)

So at the end of the first year, AT&T and Apple dropped the royalty contract, and wrote up a new one for the iPhone 3G which went back to the normal subsidy method that every other phone maker used:

"The new agreement between Apple and AT&T eliminates the revenue-sharing model under which AT&T shared a portion of monthly service revenue with Apple. Under the revised agreement, which is consistent with traditional equipment manufacturer-carrier arrangements, there is no revenue sharing and both iPhone 3G models will be offered at attractive prices to broaden the market potential and accelerate subscriber volumes. " - AT&T June 2008

 

[Abazigal]

I find it funny how Steve brought up the then 4 dominant phone companies of that time - Nokia, Blackberry, Motorola and Palm, and I am like "Where are those 4 companies today?"

How quickly one's fortunes can reverse in today's tech world.