Steve Jobs unveiled the original iPhone to the world 15 years ago, igniting a wave of innovation that permanently transformed the mobile phone market.
During the launch, Steve Jobs famously said, “Today, Apple is going to redefine the phone.”
Nokia handsets and competitors such as BlackBerry, LG, and Sony Ericsson dominated the mobile phone industry at the time. Apple, on the other hand, had made its initial try, and it looked completely different.
On January 9, 2007, Apple unveiled the first iPhone at the Macworld Conference. It wouldn’t be available to buy until June 29 of the next year in the United States, and November in the United Kingdom.
What did the first iPhone offer?
But it wasn’t all there to begin with. The original iPhone received a four-star rating from TechRadar. “Elegant, intuitive, and speedy,” our reviewer said, but added that “the iPhone should do more.”
It has a 3.5-inch screen with a 320 x 480 resolution. To put things in perspective, the most recent iPhone 13 has a 6.1-inch display with a resolution of 1170 x 2532 pixels.
The original iPhone was 115 x 61 x 11.6mm in size and weighed 135 grams. It just had one camera, which was a 2MP snapper (no selfies here). It ran the iPhone OS operating system, which didn’t gain its moniker until 2008, until being renamed iOS in 2010.
Because the initial software didn’t have an App Store, you were only able to use the built-in apps. Camera, Maps, Calculator, iTunes, Calendar, YouTube, Weather, Notes, Phone, Mail, Photos, Stocks, Clock, Settings, and Safari were among those. You could choose between 4GB and 8GB of storage, with a 16GB version arriving in 2008. There was 128MB of RAM in each of those devices.
It came with a 1,400mAh battery, which our reviewer thought was quite impressive. It lasted seven hours and fifteen minutes in our continuous speaking test, and it could also play videos for six hours and fifteen minutes.
It also wasn’t inexpensive. In the United States, the phone priced $499 for a 4GB model and $599 for an 8GB model, plus you had to sign a two-year commitment to receive it. In its first year, it sold over six million units and gave birth to one of the most popular smartphone franchises in the world.
Want to discover how much technology has changed in the previous 15 years and see the initial iPhone launch? In the video below, Steve Jobs takes the stage to announce Apple’s next big thing in 2007.