It seems like yesterday but More than 15 years have passed since that mythical one more thing by Steve Jobs, when he introduced the first iPhone on January 9, 2007 at the Macworld Conference & Expo. It was the penultimate big announcement starring Jobs (the iPad was still left), but we didn’t know that yet, that day we could only think that the world of mobile telephony was about to change forever, although at that time many still thought that a phone without a physical keyboard had no future.
It took almost six months, however, for the amazing device presented by Jobs to reach the points of sale, something that happened on a day like today fifteen years ago. A fairly limited arrival on the market, yes, because unlike later models, it only went on sale in the United States, and only through the operator AT&T, which substantially encouraged orders from friends and acquaintances who traveled, in that time, to the country of stars and stripes.
It was that, therefore, a tremendously limited release, probably raised as a test on the fit that the iPhone would have in the market. And it is that what I mentioned before, the absence of a keyboard, may now sound surprising, but at that time, and for many, it was a difficult entry barrier. We were used, “forever” (that is, 10-15 years before) to phones with buttons, and although we had already seen some experiment with touch screen or stylus, that of eliminating it completely was too strange.
With a 3.5-inch screen with a resolution of 320 x 480 pointsthe specifications of the first iPhone seen now seem like a joke: 412 megahertz CPU, 128 megabytes of RAMfrom four gigabytes of storage, two megapixel camera… but, again, it is important to remember that we are talking about a device from 15 years ago, and that these specifications that today would be unacceptable even in a terminal of less than 100 euros, in that moment they were simply spectacular.
The first iPhone would last just over a year on the market, since the second generation, the iPhone 3G, went on sale on July 30, 2008 and, on this occasion, already as a much broader launch, once Apple was able to verify that they had succeeded with the proposal, and that already in its debut the iPhone s had become the object of desire for millions of people throughout and wide of the world.
What came next is history, and I’m sure you know it well. Today it is rare to see a week in which there is not at least one rumor related to the future generation of the iPhone, and although reviled by many, it still has a huge legion of users and defenders, who do not hesitate to proclaim to the four winds that it is the best smartphone on the market.
