When something is as ubiquitous as the iPhone, it can be hard to remember what life was like without it.
Apple’s iPhone, which was introduced 10 years ago today at MacWorld by Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs, is more than a device or expert integration of components, software and design. It’s a cultural object with influence that’s still being felt far and wide.
Apple had smartphone ambitions, but they were entering a market dominated by BlackBerry, Palm, Microsoft and Nokia (for less-smart “feature phones”).
Even so, by 2007, Steve Jobs had already proven he could disrupt and transform a market. Apple’s iPod hijacked the music player industry (and maybe the music industry, too) and laid the groundwork for every pocket-sized device to come, including, of course, the iPhone.
Before the iPhone, there were touchscreen communication devices, but virtually all of them had physical keyboards. Screens were fine for the occasional taps and menu selections, but the real work got done on tiny, plastic keys. Even gaming needed physical controls.
The first iPhone wasn’t an assured homerun:
- It was expensive: $499 to $599.
- It was available on just one carrier: AT&T.
- It had no keyboard.
- Apple had no phone experience at all.
- Apple didn’t own the “iPhone” name. It was a pithy product name coined by Infogear in 1998. By 2007 Cisco owned the brand name. First Cisco sued, but settled before the iPhone shipped.
The great unknown
What the iPhone had going for it in those early days was a mystique. Steve Jobs unveiled the device, demonstrating it on stage in January of 2007, but it would be months before the iPhone went on sale. By June of that year, the unseen, untested, illusive iPhone was the most talked about gadget in the world.
The iPhone was a shot through the heart of BlackBerry, Nokia and Microsoft. None of their smartphone fortunes would ever truly recover. They had their chances, but BlackBerry misunderstood the difference between a button and a touch screen and delivered the abysmal Storm, a touchscreen that worked like a giant button. Microsoft sat on its hands for years and then delivered bad ideas like the dead-on-arrival Kin. Nokia, a company that prided itself on unusual and innovative designs, essentially threw up its hands.
Steam roller
The first iPhone had just one 3.2-megapixel camera, but by 2010, it had two, including a 5-megapixel camera capable of 720p video recording. Almost from the start, consumers used the iPhone camera, especially since the rise of the iPhone coincided with that of mobile social media. Eventually, people started to leave their point-and-shoot cameras at home and share far more images than they ever did with those digital but largely disconnected, devices.
The first iPhone had an iPod inside it, essentially torpedoing the iPod momentum (Apple had already sold millions of them). Even an all-screen iPod could not stop what became a steady decline. Apple doesn’t even hold iPod launch events anymore.
Today, virtually every new smartphone on the market is either a pale imitation of the iPhone or owes its success to the iPhone’s influence on smartphone design.
Apple iPhone’s next 10 years will almost certainly not be like its first 10. The company is now more apt to follow (and improve upon) than lead and its attention is increasingly turning to lucrative services built on the back of the still popular mobile handset.
Courtesy: Mashable
