GoKawiilThis 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 than that. Hell, it’s still the biggest thing going.
It’s hard to remember, but almost 20 years ago Apple’s first iPhone really was that good. The trick that Steve Jobs and Jony Ive kept pulling off in that era was turning the limitations of the available technology into focal points of the products they made. The first iMac was built around a big, heavy CRT display — but Ive made the translucent case wrap around it, transforming the internals into a design feature. The iPod was a portable hard drive Toshiba didn’t know what to do with — but Jon Rubinstein and Tony Fadell figured it out, and once Phil Schiller came up with the scroll wheel the design became “inevitable,” as Ive was fond of saying.
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 so capable of making hard tradeoffs, those limitations became opportunities. There had been an internal battle inside Apple over whether to build a phone on an expanded iPod platform or a cut-down Mac OS X foundation — and when OS X won, the team ruthlessly eliminated features to make it work. Hell, the first iPhone couldn’t even copy and paste, which didn’t arrive until iPhone OS 3.0 two years later.
There was no app store, just the apps preinstalled on the device. Apple even built its own Google Maps and YouTube apps to make sure the experiences were exactly what it wanted them to be. All of this meant that Apple was free to focus on making sure the features that did ship were perfect — most notably the multitouch display and the touchscreen keyboard, which were huge risks at the time.
Most importantly, the first iPhone only ran on AT&T’s aging EDGE 2G network — but that exclusivity arrangement allowed Apple to insist upon full-featured Wi-Fi support and a real web browser, a combination no other smartphone on any other network allowed at the time. Most smartphones had neutered Wi-Fi to force expensive mobile data usage, but also had viciously limited web browsers to protect those networks from being overloaded.
To this day, it’s funny to watch the audience react to Jobs’ famous “this is not three devices” iPhone keynote bit — there are obvious cheers for “widescreen iPod with touch controls,” rapturous applause and hooting for “revolutionary mobile phone,” and then what amounts to confused, muffled applause for “breakthrough internet communications device.”
What was that? Well, that turned out to be everything, in the end. The whole world has reorganized itself around this breakthrough internet communications device. The iPod and phone might as well have been forgotten.
Publicly, the industry immediately bumbled its response: Everyone’s seen the famous clip of Microsoft’s then-CEO Steve Ballmer dismissing the iPhone as too expensive and missing a hardware keyboard. But in private it was clear that things had been upended. BlackBerry inventor Mike Lazaridis watched the iPhone introduction from his treadmill at home and realized in shock that the iPhone was destined to compete with laptops, not phones.
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