iPhone Launched
Apple unveiled the first iPhone
January 09, 2007
The Day the Phone Changed
On January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs walked onto a stage in San Francisco and announced that Apple was introducing three revolutionary products: a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communicator. "These are not three separate devices," he said. "This is one device." The audience went wild. The iPhone went on sale six months later. By the end of 2007, Apple had sold 1.4 million of them.
What Made It Different
Before the iPhone, most mobile phones had physical keyboards and ran software from the carrier, not the user. The iPhone had a full touchscreen, ran a real operating system (a stripped-down version of Mac OS X), and connected to the real internet. When Apple opened the App Store in 2008, it handed developers the ability to put software into hundreds of millions of pockets. Within years, apps had transformed banking, navigation, shopping, dating, and how people get their news.
The Ripple Effects
The iPhone killed entire industries — GPS devices, point-and-shoot cameras, MP3 players, physical maps — and created new ones. Competitors like Samsung and Google rushed out touchscreen alternatives, producing the Android ecosystem that now powers most smartphones globally. Today there are over 6 billion smartphone users worldwide. The date calculator can show how quickly this transformation happened — less than two decades from zero to universal.