When Steve Jobs, Apple’s late mercurial founder, unveiled the first iPhone over a decade ago, smartphones were seen as unwieldy, expensive gadgets for overworked assistants and harried businessmen. The iPhone changed that perception forever.
In the intervening years, Apple has sold more than a billion iPhones and has secured its place as the trendsetter of the consumer technology industry. With yesterday’s release of the latest version — iPhone X — we look back at the device that put computers in the pockets of people everywhere.
The first iPhone re-imagined mobile computing devices in various ways, but its most important innovation was its touch screen. At the time, smartphones on the market often featured keyboards with keys so tiny you had to squint to see them, and styluses to interact with the screen.
“Who wants a stylus?” Jobs asked disdainfully as he announced the first iPhone. “You have to get ‘em, put ‘em away, you lose ‘em. Yuck! Nobody wants a stylus. So let’s not use a stylus.”
The iPhone featured a multi-touch interface that allowed users to control the device with a tap, flick or pinch, eliminating the need for a stylus and removing the keyboard to make more room for the screen.
By today’s standards, the early iPhone’s screen resolution was limited. Over time, the screen has continued to increase in both size and sharpness. The new iPhone X is 5.8 inches long and almost all screen.
Considering how often people cover their phones with cases, it is remarkable how much care Apple takes with the back panel design, where its logo sits right in the centre. While the iPhone 3G and 3GS came with a plastic back panel, the iPhone 4 launched with a glass back and a flatter, more minimalistic look and feel.
The next generation improved on the antenna design embedded into the metallic edges. The redesign came after users began complaining that their phones lost signal if placed at a certain angles. The usability failure was so scandalous that people started calling it “antennagate.”
With the exception of the budget iPhone 5C, Apple has since shifted to metal back panels, which have a smoother look.
The original iPhone shook the industry by setting a new design benchmark for smartphones. The iPhone proved the smartphone need not be clunky and uncomfortable to hold in your hand.
iPhones have always been compact, but the old ones were not nearly as slim as the newer models. The first generation iPhone was 11.6mm thick; the iPhone 7, which was launched last year, was 7.1mm, almost half an inch thinner. The Plus versions, released as larger companions to the 6, 6s, and 7, are marginally thicker.
The ubiquity of the smartphone camera has upended the way people interact with their world. Before the smartphone, there were no selfies, no Instagram, no overhead photos of brunch plates.
While Apple has had help from its competitors in bringing high quality cameras to the mass market, the original iPhone was one of the first smartphones to come with a decent camera onboard. Its 2-megapixel resolution was low by today's standards, but it wasn’t grainy or blurry like many of its predecessors’.
With the iPhone 4, Apple joined the front-camera bandwagon, encouraging its owners to photograph themselves. Apple upped the ante with a dual-camera setup on the iPhone 7 that could deliver a DSLR-like “Bokeh” effect — blurring the background but keeping the foreground sharp — that is useful for portrait photography.
Before the iPhone, smartphones had lots of tiny buttons, unfit for all but the tiniest of human fingers. Apple put most of those on the screen itself and instead introduced its trademark home button, which sits beneath the screen. If you were to sketch an iPhone, the home button is likely one of the few features you would draw.
In 2013, Apple revamped the button by introducing a fingerprint sensor, known as TouchID, for biometric authentication. The home button got another upgrade last year with the iPhone 7 that features a pressure-sensitive, stationary button.
With the iPhone X, however, Apple has done away with the home button altogether, replacing much of its functionality with screen interactions and swapping the fingerprint sensor with facial recognition technology.
The first iPhone re-imagined mobile computing devices in various ways, but its most important innovation was its touch screen. At the time, smartphones on the market often featured keyboards with keys so tiny you had to squint to see them, and styluses to interact with the screen.
“Who wants a stylus?” Jobs asked disdainfully as he announced the first iPhone. “You have to get ‘em, put ‘em away, you lose ‘em. Yuck! Nobody wants a stylus. So let’s not use a stylus.”
The iPhone featured a multi-touch interface that allowed users to control the device with a tap, flick or pinch, eliminating the need for a stylus and removing the keyboard to make more room for the screen.
By today’s standards, the early iPhone’s screen resolution was limited. Over time, the screen has continued to increase in both size and sharpness. The new iPhone X is 5.8 inches long and almost all screen.
Considering how often people often cover their phones with cases, it is remarkable how much care Apple takes with the back panel design, where its logo sits right in the centre. While the iPhone 3G and 3GS came with a plastic back panel, the iPhone 4 launched with a glass back and a flatter, more minimalistic look and feel.
The next generation improved on the antenna design embedded into the metallic edges. The redesign came after users began complaining that their phones lost signal if placed at a certain angles. The usability failure was so scandalous that people started calling it “antennagate.”
With the exception of the budget iPhone 5C, Apple has since shifted to metal back panels, which have a smoother look.
The original iPhone shook the industry by setting a new design benchmark for smartphones. The iPhone proved the smartphone need not be clunky and uncomfortable to hold in your hand.
iPhones have always been compact, but the old ones were not nearly as slim as the newer models. The first generation iPhone was 11.6mm thick; the iPhone 7, which was launched last year, was 7.1mm, almost half an inch thinner. The Plus versions, released as larger companions to the 6, 6s, and 7, are marginally thicker.
The ubiquity of the smartphone camera has upended the way people interact with their world. Before the smartphone, there were no selfies, no Instagram, no overhead photos of brunch plates.
While Apple has had help from its competitors in bringing high quality cameras to the mass market, the original iPhone was one of the first smartphones to come with a decent camera onboard. Its 2-megapixel resolution was low by today's standards, but it wasn’t grainy or blurry like many of its predecessors’.
With the iPhone 4, Apple joined the front-camera bandwagon, encouraging its owners to photograph themselves. Apple upped the ante with a dual-camera setup on the iPhone 7 that could deliver a DSLR-like “Bokeh” effect — blurring the background but keeping the foreground sharp — that is useful for portrait photography.
Before the iPhone, smartphones had lots of tiny buttons, unfit for all but the tiniest of human fingers. Apple put most of those on the screen itself and instead introduced its trademark home button, which sits beneath the screen. If you were to sketch an iPhone, the home button is likely one of the few features you would draw.
In 2013, Apple revamped the button by introducing a fingerprint sensor, known as TouchID, for biometric authentication. The home button got another upgrade last year with the iPhone 7 that features a pressure-sensitive, stationary button.
With the iPhone X, however, Apple has done away with the home button altogether, replacing much of its functionality with screen interactions and swapping the fingerprint sensor with facial recognition technology.
Note: For the sake of simplicity, we have shown only one phone version from each year. We have not shown 2013’s iPhone 5c, 2014’s iPhone 6 Plus, 2016’s iPhone SE and iPhone 7 Plus, or this year’s iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus.
