This is part of our package about Apple’s 50th anniversary. Read more here.
The thing about the iPhone is that everyone knew it was going to be a big deal, and then it was an even bigger deal. Hey, it’s still the greatest thing ever.
It’s hard to remember, but Apple’s first iPhone from nearly 20 years ago was actually that good. The trick that Steve Jobs and Jony Ive used in that era was to turn the limitations of available technology into the center point of the products they created. The first iMac was built around a big, heavy CRT display — but I wrapped a translucent case around it, turning the interior into a design feature. The iPod was a portable hard drive, Toshiba didn’t know what to do with it – but John Rubinstein and Tony Fadell figured it out, and once Phil Schiller came up with the scroll wheel the design became “inevitable”, as Ive liked to say.
The first iPhone was nothing but limitations, but those limitations became opportunities
The first iPhone was nothing But Limitations, but because Jobs and Apple were able to make difficult compromises, those limitations became opportunities. There was an internal battle at Apple over whether to build the phone on the expanded iPod platform or on the pared-down Mac OS
There was no app store, just apps pre-installed on the device. Apple even created its own Google Maps and YouTube apps to make sure the experiences were exactly how it wanted them. This meant that Apple was free to focus on making sure those features Did The ships were far from perfect – especially the multitouch displays and touchscreen keyboards, which were a huge risk at the time.
Most importantly, the first iPhone ran only on AT&T’s old EDGE 2G network — but that exclusivity arrangement allowed Apple to emphasize full-featured Wi-Fi support and a real Web browser, a combination not allowed on any other smartphone on any other network at the time. Wi-Fi was disabled in most smartphones to force costly mobile data usage, but web browsers were also limited to avoid overloading those networks.
To this day, it’s fun to watch the audience react to Jobs’s famous “It’s not three devices” iPhone keynote speech – what with obvious cheering for the “widescreen iPod with touch controls”, enthusiastic applause and hooting for the “revolutionary mobile phone” and then confused, muffled applause for the “breakthrough Internet communications device”.
what was He? Well, that’s what it turned out to be in the end. The entire world has reorganized itself around this pioneering Internet communication tool. iPod and phone may also have been forgotten.
Publicly, the industry immediately reacted: Everyone saw the famous clip of then-Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, in which he described the iPhone as too expensive and missing a hardware keyboard. But privately it was clear that things had turned upside down. BlackBerry inventor Mike Lazaridis watched the iPhone’s introduction from his treadmill at home and was astonished that the iPhone was destined to compete not with phones, but with laptops.
According to the definitive book on the collapse of RIM, he told his co-CEO, Jim Balsillie, the next morning, “They put a full Web browser on that thing.” “The carriers are not allowing us to put full browsers on their products.”
Limitations in features, challenges in opportunities. Anyone who used an iPhone could immediately imagine how it could do more, how it could do Everything. Competitors’ half-baked devices were rushed to market on the bet that a long list of unpolished features would lure consumers away from the iPhone’s limitations, but were repeatedly pushed to the margins. Do you know what a Droid does? It was discontinued because no one cared.
It’s important to remember that Apple was the underdog of this period – the company spent most of its existence fighting for survival against larger competitors like Microsoft and IBM, which owned the dominant computing platforms of their time. Even with Jobs’ return and the all-time run of hit products that followed, the company was still small compared to its peers — you could compare Apple’s business to BMW and Mercedes, profitable luxury brands with outsized influence but smaller market share.
The iPhone changed all that. Apple can reliably increase sales for many years by allowing more carriers to sell iPhones in more countries. Everyone wanted an iPhone, and to keep it going Apple simply had to focus on increasing the features with the level of polish and care that made that first iPhone such a clear glimpse of the future.
Somewhere along the way, Apple literally ran out of people to sell iPhones to.
This is when things really started to change – when the iPhone and then the scale of the smartphone market started to impress the entire world. Equipping everyone with a camera and a worldwide media distribution platform changed media, changed culture, and changed our politics forever. Apple and Meta have the worst relationship of all the tech giants, but both parties understand that they are linked forever. Without the iPhone there would be no trials about social media addiction, just as without Instagram there would be no heated debates about banning phones in schools.
Somewhere along the way Apple literally ran out of people to sell iPhones to. It shifted its focus to making more money from everyone who already had iPhones, changing the software economy forever and resetting the antitrust policy landscape around the world in dramatic ways.
The company gained a reputation for strong-arming developers into adding subscription features and blocking app updates, which allowed any relief from the 30 percent fee that generated ever-higher numbers on quarterly earnings reports. App developers would admit in hushed tones that they were intimidated by the app review process, but never went on the record for fear of retribution. In-app purchases in free-to-play games began printing money so dramatically that Apple’s decade-long relationship with TV finally had a clear purpose: ensuring that beautiful Hollywood celebrities were the face of the service business, not candy crush whale. (candy crush has distorted the industry in many ways; Microsoft was so desperate for relevance in mobile games that it bought its owner Activision Blizzard, an acquisition that has completely turned Xbox around.)
Apple’s sheer scale and supply chain excellence operate hand in hand: The company needed to produce millions of new iPhones on schedule every year, and that it did so without a hitch is a testament to the machine Tim Cook built. That machine created a technology manufacturing base in China that the world still struggles to compete with, and a supply chain that has transformed the core components of phones so much that almost everything is now a smartphone. Laptops run ARM chips. Smart TVs are just big Android tablets. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips are everywhere, in everything. CMOS camera sensors are a revolution of their own, mass-produced for the smartphone industry that came into existence with the iPhone. Our world is shaped every day by people with their phones – with their cameras.
Even the AI boom, as overhyped as it is, operates in the context of smartphones – the iPhone. OpenAI’s Sam Altman may believe he can displace smartphones with new AI-native hardware, but he turned to Jony Ive to do it, because no one else has the credibility to even try. It’s not clear whether Altman and Ive can adopt the same trick and turn limitations into features, since experience with modern AI systems denies any limitations, but they’re going to try. Apple certainly doesn’t seem concerned. “They don’t have an iPhone, and so they’re struggling with what to do,” the company’s Greg Joswiak recently told Steven Levy. “Most of the things they talk about end up being accessories for the iPhone.”
In the meantime, there’s just going to be this year’s iPhone, and then next year’s, and the one after that. It will still be a music player, a phone, and a successful Internet communication device. The question is who We Will be formed in reaction.
<a href