The iPhone

The iPhone is the touch-screen phone that Steve Jobs, Apple's chief executive, unveiled on 9 January 2007 at the Macworld show in San Francisco, and that went on sale in the United States on 29 June 2007. Jobs presented it as three products in one: a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone and a breakthrough internet communicator. Instead of buttons and a plastic keyboard it had a single 3.5-inch glass screen that you worked with your fingers, tapping, flicking and pinching. It ran a version of Apple's Mac OS X, showed whole web pages in the Safari browser, had Google Maps, email, visual voicemail and a 2-megapixel camera, and sensors that turned the picture when you turned the phone. It cost $499 for 4 GB or $599 for 8 GB, with a two-year plan from AT&T (Cingular, renamed AT&T that year), Apple's only carrier in the United States.

Apple had grown strong again on the iPod and the iTunes Store, which showed that it could make a hit gadget and join hardware, software and an online shop into one system. Its first step into phones, in September 2005, was iTunes on somebody else's phone: the Motorola ROKR, sold by Cingular, which held only 100 songs. By then Apple was already building a phone of its own in deep secrecy, more than two years of work in all. Tony Fadell, who had designed the first iPod, led the hardware and Scott Forstall the software. Forstall later told the Computer History Museum that the push for a screen worked by fingers rather than a pen came after a Microsoft engineer boasted to Jobs that pen tablets would rule computing: 'let's show them how it's really done.' The touch work also drew on FingerWorks, a small Delaware company whose patents passed to Apple and whose co-founder Wayne Westerman is named, with Jobs and two dozen others, on Apple's touch-screen patent.

Even the name had to be fought for: Cisco owned the 'iPhone' trademark, sued the day after the keynote, and settled in February, when the two companies agreed that both could use it. The first iPhone had clear limits. It used AT&T's slow EDGE data network rather than 3G, had no GPS, and ran only Apple's own programs: in June 2007 Jobs told outside developers to write web applications instead. Even so, people queued for the 6 p.m. start of sales, Apple sold its millionth iPhone after 74 days, and in September it cut the price of the 8 GB model to $399. In October Jobs promised a software kit for outside developers; it came in March 2008 together with the App Store, where developers set their own price and kept 70 percent. The store opened on 10 July 2008 with more than 500 apps, and the next day the iPhone 3G, with fast 3G data and GPS for $199 with a contract, went on sale in 21 countries. It sold a million in three days, and users downloaded 10 million apps in the first weekend.

The iPhone changed what a phone is. In 2006 smartphones were a niche led by Nokia and its Symbian software, BlackBerry's email devices for business and the Palm Treo; after the iPhone, the smartphone became a computer in everyone's pocket. Google answered with Android, announced in November 2007 with a group of phone makers and carriers, and the first Android phone, T-Mobile's G1, was presented in September 2008. Nokia, Palm and BlackBerry, whose systems were built for a world of scarce memory and slow networks, lost out. Powered by the iPhone, Apple became the world's most valuable company in August 2012, and in July 2016 it sold its billionth iPhone.

Almost every smartphone today works like it, as the Computer History Museum puts it: a slab of glass with few buttons, software that fills the screen, and an app store to install programs from. The App Store created an 'app economy' that the Computer History Museum's 2017 panel put at 1.3 trillion dollars of revenue in 2016, helped services from rides to reviews take off, and gave Apple its biggest business, more than 60 percent of its revenue a decade after the launch. The line printed on the box, 'Designed by Apple in California, Assembled in China', sums up how it was made.