The Lines Around the Block: The First iPhone Goes on Sale

For days, they had waited — sleeping on sidewalks, tailgating in parking lots, holding umbrellas over friends at the front of the line. The product they wanted cost $499 for the small one and $599 for the big one, and it required a two-year contract. On June 29, 2007, at 6 p.m. local time, Apple finally opened its doors and sold the first iPhones.

The hype had been building since January 9, when Steve Jobs unveiled the device at the Macworld convention in San Francisco's Moscone Center. Apple had spent 30 months and an estimated $150 million developing it in secret with AT&T — then called Cingular — which had agreed to carry the phone exclusively in the United States. Some in the media were already calling it the "Jesus phone."

The launch was choreographed down to the minute. Apple closed its retail stores at 2 p.m. to prepare, then let the lines in at 6. Hundreds of customers queued at stores across the country, and many shops reported selling out within an hour. Six in ten Americans surveyed said they had known the iPhone was coming before it arrived. In the first weekend, AT&T said 146,000 phones were activated — below the 250,000 to 700,000 that analysts had guessed, though that figure didn't count phones bought for resale. About 95 percent of buyers chose the 8 GB model.

What they were buying looked nothing like the phones of 2007. The iPhone was the first phone with a multi-touch screen — no physical keyboard, no stylus, just fingers for tapping, swiping, and pinching to zoom. It combined an iPod, a 2-megapixel camera, visual voicemail, and a full web browser in one aluminum-and-glass slab. There was no App Store at launch; that wouldn't arrive for another year.

Apple went on to sell 6.1 million first-generation iPhones over five quarters, and Time magazine named the device its Invention of the Year for 2007, citing its design, its software platform, and its innovative touchscreen interface. More importantly, every other phone maker suddenly had to answer it — and within a few years, the entire industry had abandoned buttons for glass.

The phone in your pocket, the apps you open a hundred times a day, the camera roll that replaced your photo albums — the lineage runs straight back to those lines outside the Apple Stores on June 29, 2007.

Photo: Pavel Ševela — CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.