https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/29/iphone-at-10-how-it-changed-everything?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GU+Today+main+NEW+H+categories&utm_term#2877&subid063383&CMP=EMCNEWEML6619I2
iPhone at 10: how it changed everything
Alex Hern bought the first iPhone a decade ago. As it celebrates its 10th
anniversary, he looks back on how it changed the world â and his life
Alex Hern
Thursday 29 June 2017 06.00 BST
Ten years ago today, the first iPhone hit stores in the US. On paper, the
device was nothing special: it lacked the 3G connectivity which was becoming
standard across much of the world, its battery struggled to last a day, and its
camera resolution was just two megapixels. It also came with an eye-watering
price tag of $499, and a mandatory two-year contract with AT&T. That was for
the smallest version, with 4GB of storage.
But in person, it wasnât the iPhone that looked behind the times. It was
everything else. Looking back now, and the sea change is obvious: the first
iPhone, a 10-year-old device, looks like something that could reasonably be
found in peopleâs pockets today, while its competition look like historical
curiosities.
Right from the start, the device had the full-colour, multi-touch screen which
came to define the smartphone, and it had the same basic interface still in use
today, from pinch-to-zoom to inertial scrolling on lists. It looked like
nothing else, and sold a million units in just over two months.
But there were choppy waters to navigate on the way there. Apple rapidly
reconsidered the launch price, cutting $200 from the cost of the 8GB version
and scrapping the 4GB model altogether, less than three months after release.
While that made the iPhone more appealing to new buyers, it rankled with those
who felt robbed, and the company eventually handed $100 in store credit to
early adopters, accompanied by a personal apology from its chief executive,
Steve Jobs.
The phone was also released with several features strangely absent. Most
notably, it lacked any semblance of an app store. For more than a year, until
iPhone OS 2 came out in July 2008, the only Apple mobile device onto which you
could download and install apps was the old clickwheel iPod, which had a small
selection of games for sale.
It feels bizarre to contemplate in 2017, where Apple launches major ad
campaigns imagining âa world without appsâ, but the phone was originally
released with just 15 native apps â not even enough to fill the home screen.
Apple tried to palm off users and developers with the claim that âwebappsâ
â single-serve websites, which could be saved to the home screen â were the
future. To its credit, the phone shipped with an impressive set of features to
enable just that, including the ability for websites to save data on to the
device and set icons for the home screen. But it was clearly a stopgap solution.
Almost more damaging was the absence of simple features such as the ability to
copy and paste text within or between programs. By the time that was added in,
with iPhone OS 3 in 2009, it had become a major selling point of the
competition. Googleâs Android had supported it from the start, albeit
initially with a clumsy user experience due to its initial conception as a
keyboard-based operating system.
The iPhone 7. Photograph: Regis Duvignau/Reuters
At the time, the iPhone was groundbreaking for a simpler reason: it did what it
said it would do, in a simple, easy manner. While other phones still had a
physical keyboard and required many button presses to navigate menus, Appleâs
touch interface made things simpler.
It wasnât just ease-of-use, though. Appleâs unique position in the industry
â even then, the most desirable consumer electronics company in the business
â gave it extraordinary power over the telecoms companies, multiplied by the
fact that the iPhone launched with an exclusive carrier in most markets. AT&T
in the US, O2 in the UK, Orange in France: all agreed to offer Apple unique
terms in exchange for exclusivity. The iPhone launched with no carrier-mandated
apps cluttering it up, mandatory unlimited data contracts for all users, and a
new âvisual voicemailâ system.
Even those changes that didnât stick in the long term reshaped the market.
Unlimited data contracts are largely now a thing of the past â apart from
those with super-premium deals â but their presence in the early days ensured
that people with an iPhone felt free to use its features to their fullest. This
reversed a vicious cycle of previous generations that saw high data costs
leading to sparse use of data-heavy features, and sparse use of data-heavy
features being used to justify high data costs.
The iPhone changed my life, too. I got one as an 18th birthday present, just a
month or so after it launched in the UK for the first time, and just a couple
of days later had a university interview. Sitting outside the philosophy
department, I suddenly realised I didnât have to limit my last minute
cramming to the books I had in my bag â I could Google the name on the door
of the tutor interviewing me and read their publications directly. Which I did.
I wonât say I understood everything I read in that hurried five minutes, but
they offered me a place anyway.
It took some time for the iPhone to grow into the device we would fully expect
today, though. It wasnât just software features like the app store and cut
and paste that were still to be added: successive hardware releases brought
their own upgrades. The iPhone 3G, released in the summer of 2008, completely
replaced the first phone (it is still the only iPhone which hasnât stayed on
sale once its replacement was released), and brought with it two new features
hard to imagine living without: 3G internet, and GPS.
The former meant that finally, the phone was capable of bearable download
speeds when not connected to wifi networks, which, combined with the
introduction of the App Store, put the iPhone on the road to its current
position glued into the hands of its owners wherever they may be. The latter
replaced an innovative but inaccurate system for guesstimating locations using
a combination of wifi networks and mobile phone towers, allowing the device to
pinpoint its userâs location down to the specific house they were in â
opening the way to Uber, Foursquare and eventually Pokémon Go.
And the iPhone 4, released in 2010, brought its own new features. On the
software side was FaceTime, Appleâs proprietary video-calling service, but
far more important for most was the hardware that came alongside it: a
forward-facing camera. Yes, the iPhone was three years old before you could
take selfies with it.
Itâs harder to think which more recent additions will be similarly
foundational. But it is getting harder and harder to recall the days of a
smartphone without a fingerprint sensor, for instance â introduced as touchID
in the iPhone 5s in 2013. And while mobile payments â introduced as Apple Pay
in 2014âs iPhone 6 â arenât ubiquitous yet, it is already looking fairly
likely that 2027âs version of this story will chuckle as it remembers the
days before you could pay in shops with your mobile phone.
We donât yet know what this autumnâs iPhone will bring â or even what it
will be called, âiPhone 7Sâ, âiPhone 8â or something new altogether
(âiPhone Xâ? Just plain âiPhoneâ?) â but in the steady way the bounds
of what is normal have been pushed so far, it seems likely it will feature some
new facet of its own which will eventually become intrinsic to our lives.
Or maybe it will just shrink the bezels and drop the weird protruding camera of
the past three years. That would be nice, too.
The iPhone at 10: share your stories and memories
Will turning your phone to greyscale really do wonders for your attention?
The iPhone only exists because Steve Jobs âhated this guy at Microsoftâ
Sent from my iPhone
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