CES 2025 is well underway, and though we’re not attending the event in person this year, we are following along the various announcements, such as the new Nvidia RTX 5090 and other 50-series GPUs. As I was browsing through YouTube, finding more CES related videos to watch, the all-knowing Google recommendation system showed me a video about the announcement of the first iPhone, and it reminded me that it was today, January 9, back in 2007, when Steve Jobs revealed the device that would take the smartphone world by storm.
Naturally, I started thinking about the first iPhone, and the truly groundbreaking things it offered back in the day. Down the rabbit-hole I went, reading up on news coverage of the iPhone announcement, and it inspired me to pen down this story.
It All Started 18 Years Ago
Well, for Apple it definitely started earlier than that, what with R&D, design, and everything else that must have gone into the first iPhone becoming a reality. But for us, as consumers and technology enthusiasts (and a bit of an addict for new gadgets), it was 18 years ago today, when we got the first glimpse at what Apple envisoned the future of smartphones to be like.
It was this.
It was a Groundbreaking Device
Looking at it now, especially from the perspective of viewers who are too young to remember the first iPhone, this device doesn’t look very special. In fact, compared to what Apple has turned the iPhone into, the first iPhone looks decidedly bulky, small, and weird.
And it is, by today’s standards.
However, when it was announced (and later launched in June 2007), the iPhone changed pretty much everything we knew or expected from a mobile phone. The design that looks primitive now, was something unheard and unthought of, and entirely unseen across the industry. Instead of the keyboard and tiny screen combo that you’d have found in phones of that time (think the LG Viewty, the Nokia N95, or the Moto RAZR), the iPhone brought along a touch screen — and at 3.5 inches, it was actually large for the time. It definitely wasn’t the first smartphone with a touch screen (that honor goes to the IBM Simon), but it was the first smartphone with a touch screen UI that was easy to understand and use.
The iPhone was also the first device to have multi-touch support on its touch screen. It didn’t have an overcrowded keyboard or multiple buttons, with Apple only chucking in four buttons on the phone — the Home button, Power button, and volume buttons, along with a mute/ringer switch (one that we had on all iPhones up until the iPhone 15 Pro). The software keyboard that popped up when you needed to enter text was basically magic for it’s time.
As Steve Jobs famously said during the reveal of the iPhone at Macworld 2007, “An iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator […] Are you getting it? These are not three devices, this is one device.”
Everything about the iPhone was exciting and new, and presented in a way that made it look even newer and more exciting. The multi-touch, the easy scrolling, the swipe to adjust volume, and rate albums — all things we take for granted on our phones now, were revolutionalised by the iPhone.
The Reactions
I don’t put faith in reactions from the audiences at Apple events, or any tech events for that matter. However, one of our editors forwarded a Macrumors thread from back in 2007 discussing the first iPhone launch, and it had some truly amazing reactions from people on the forum.
The pricing was obviously a huge point of contention for most people — after all, at $499 for a 4GB model, the iPhone was priced well out of the price range of existing smartphones of the time.
There were other “issues” as well on these forums. However, a large number of people were simply, very excited about the iPhone — and they should have been. It was, truly, a device that was ahead of its time, and would soon usher in the era of the proper smartphone as we know it today.
Apple’s sales numbers spoke for the iPhone’s success as well. In the first week of its launch, the company is reported to have sold 270,000 units in the US. From that point, it took 74 days for the iPhone to reach its 1 millionth unit sold to customers. And by January 2008, 1 year since its reveal and six months since its actual launch in June 2007, Apple reported (source) having sold 4 million units of the iPhone.
Sure, the iPhone didn’t do too well in Europe when it finally crossed the pond, but, as per Wired’s article (source) on iPhone sales from 2007, in the UK “consumer electronics are still inexplicably regarded as luxuries and priced accordingly”. The iPhone’s rather hefty price tag, therefore, caused many in UK and in Europe, generally, to avoid buying the first iPhone.
That, however, doesn’t change the fact that the iPhone was a brilliant device — one that put the competition to shame in a lot of ways, and that made people truly want a $500 smartphone in an era when “smartphones” were priced at around $200.
That is an achievement in its own right, especially when you consider that the iPhone 1 was only available as a contract purchase with Cingular (AT&T), and as per the discussion on Macrumors’ forums, people really disliked Cingular.
We’ve Gotten Jaded with Smartphones
All the things that the iPhone basically introduced to the world of smartphones, and the hype that surrounded a device like that, has got me wondering how we got to a point in time where we seem to be pretty jaded with smartphones in general.
Year after year, companies launch smartphones with better performance, better displays, better cameras, faster storage and RAM, and even AI. And yet, all we seem to be focused on are the problems — and that is, if we are even bothered with the new launches at all.
Being in the line of work that I am in, I have to be bothered with the new launches, whether they excite me or not — but our focus seems to have shifted from what’s being improved in these devices, to what’s not being fixed.
A few pixels less on a display? That’s unacceptable now. Though I doubt any of us can really tell, in normal usage, the difference between a high quality FHD+ display on a phone and a regular 1.5K display on another. UFS 4.0 instead of UFS 4.1? That’s a deal-breaker for some.
Truth be told, the performance levels we have reached with processors like the Snapdragon 8 Elite, the Dimensity 9400, and the A18 Pro are so high, that we can’t really use all the power they offer in our regular usage. Regardless of which game you’re playing, what videos you’re editing in Premiere Rush, or the 4K and 8K videos you’re shooting, these processors still have enough overhead to do more.
So why are we no longer excited by new smartphones? One reason could be the sheer number of phones that are launched these days. Forget Xiaomi, Oppo, and other such brands that launch so many phones every year that it’s nearly impossible to keep them straight in your head, but even brands like Apple and Samsung now launch quite a lot of smartphones. It used to just be one iPhone a year. Then we started getting the Plus models. Then we started getting the Pro and Pro Max models, and the SE models, and it’s just a lot. Samsung, too, used to launch one flagship a year, and now we get a whole series of S-phones; and, up until a few years ago, we used to get the Note series too. Google is no different. The Pixel series in 2024 got the Pixel 9, the Pixel 9 Pro, the Pixel 9 Pro XL, and the Pixel 9 Pro Fold.
It could also be that there’s just not much left to do, as far as innovation goes for smartphones. But that was also probably true for people back in 2007, who thought that smartphones were the best they could be, until Apple came along with the first iPhone and changed everything.
What’s Next for iPhone?
The iPhone has seen several iterations over the years. It went from the first iPhone which didn’t have 3G, didn’t have MMS support, didn’t even have copy and paste features, to the iPhone 16 series, with their extremely thin bezels, powerful processors, and Apple Intelligence, not to mention a camera system that’s one of the best in the world. The iPhone 17 will, once again, improve upon these things. We’ll get better processors, better cameras, better everything.
But no matter what we do, we simply can’t seem to bring back the groundbreaking shift that was brought along by the first ever iPhone with it’s 3.5-inch touch display, it’s 4GB of flash storage, and the Samsung S5L8900 SoC (which was, by the way, underclocked to 412MHz for better battery life).
The first iPhone was a moment in time unlike no other, at least as far as smartphones are concerned. It shifted the image of what a smartphone can, and maybe should be, in the minds of customers. Even those that disliked the pricing, didn’t really dislike the phone itself because that’s just what it was — a product that showcased Apple’s vision for the smartphone. And boy, was it a vision to behold.
Anshuman Jain
