Steve Jobs Unveils the iPhone and Reinvents the Phone
On January 9, 2007, at Macworld in San Francisco, Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone — an iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator in one touchscreen device that reshaped modern life.
On the morning of January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs took the stage at a packed auditorium in San Francisco's Moscone Center and said, "This is a day I've been looking forward to for two and a half years." The crowd at the Macworld Conference & Expo had no idea they were about to watch the phone get reinvented in front of them.
Jobs, in his trademark black turtleneck, opened with a line that has since become legend: "Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything." Apple, he said, had been lucky enough to do it twice before — the Macintosh in 1984, the iPod in 2001. "Well today, we're introducing THREE revolutionary new products," he continued. "The first one is a widescreen iPod with touch controls. The second is a revolutionary new mobile phone. And the third is a breakthrough internet communications device."
Then the pause, the repetition, and the punchline: "An iPod, a phone, an internet mobile communicator. An iPod, a phone, an internet mobile communicator… these are NOT three separate devices! And we are calling it iPhone!"
What followed was a two-hour demo that felt like science fiction. The iPhone had a 3.5-inch glass touchscreen and almost no buttons — just one "home" button. No stylus, no plastic keyboard. "We're going to use the best pointing device in the world — our fingers," Jobs said, showing off "multi-touch": pinch to zoom, swipe to scroll, tap to open. It ran a version of Apple's OS X, carried a 2-megapixel camera, connected over Wi-Fi, and synced with iTunes. The price: $499 for 4GB, $599 for 8GB, with a two-year contract on Cingular (soon AT&T), Apple's exclusive U.S. carrier. It would go on sale June 29, 2007. (Jobs also used the keynote to unveil Apple TV, a $299 box for the living room shipping in February.)
Not everyone was impressed. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer laughed at the $499 price tag and predicted Apple would capture 2 or 3 percent of the phone market. BlackBerry's co-CEO shrugged it off as just one more entrant. But when the iPhone finally went on sale in June, lines wrapped around Apple stores, the media dubbed it the "Jesus phone," and Apple sold 1.39 million of them before the year was out.
The original iPhone looks primitive today — no App Store (that arrived in 2008), no video recording, no copy-and-paste. Yet its ideas conquered everything: the touchscreen, the app grid, the phone as a pocket computer. Within a decade, the smartphone it defined had remade photography, music, maps, banking, and how billions of people spend their days. Ballmer later admitted he was wrong. He was not the only one.
Photo: the first-generation iPhone on display at Macworld 2007, by ArnoldReinhold (CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons.
