We all knew he was coming.
Journalists, analysts, industry experts and fans had been speculating on making an Apple phone for nearly a year when Steve Jobs took to the stage at the Macworld Expo on a cold January morning to San Francisco in 2007.
“Thank you for coming,” Jobs said, with his Levi’s trademark and a black high-necked skirt. “Today we will make history together.”
Apple’s Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone on January 9, 2007, calling it a “revolutionary and magical product.” The phone went on sale on June 29, 2007.
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Despite the accumulation of months, the CEO of Apple managed to surprise the world when he finally introduced the iPhone: the big and risky move of the company in the mobile phone market.
“This is a day I’ve been waiting for for two and a half years,” he told the 4,000-person audience. “From time to time a revolutionary product appears that changes everything … One is very lucky if you get to work on just one of these in your career. Apple has been very lucky. It has been able to introduce some. world.
“We introduced the Macintosh in 1984. It not only changed Apple, it changed the entire computer industry.
“In 2001 we introduced the first iPod and it not only changed the way we listen to music. It changed the whole music industry. Well, today we present three revolutionary products of this kind.
“The first is a widescreen iPod with touch controls,” Jobs said amid shouts and applause as I, sitting on the floor near one of the aisle’s rare power outlets, furiously posted Jobs ’83-character comments . capitalized headlines for Bloomberg News, where I worked as an Apple reporter.
“The second is a revolutionary mobile phone. And the third is an innovative Internet communications device. So three things: a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and an innovative Internet communications device.
“An iPod, a phone and an internet communicator. An iPod, a phone, are you grabbing it?” He asked the excited audience.
“These are not separate devices. This is a device. And we call it iPhone.
“Today Apple will reinvent the phone … We want to make a leapfrog product that is much smarter than any mobile device and very easy to use.”
Fifteen years later, we know Jobs was right. Apple made history on January 9, 2007, when it introduced one of the most iconic products in the history of consumer electronics and changed its name to Apple Computer Inc. to Apple Inc. to indicate that it would no longer just be known for the Mac. More than 2 billion iPhone models have been sold since it went on sale on June 29, 2007, and it has become the favorite phone for people around the world, and many anticipate a new model every September. He redesigned the design of the mobile phone and changed the entire telephony industry.
And it practically brought to the end of standalone music players, GPS receivers and low- and mid-range digital cameras. Just last month, Apple announced that it would stop making the iPod Touch after 21 years, saying that “the spirit of the iPod lives on” its other devices, including the iPhone and iPad.
Master showman
People always queued for days outside San Francisco’s Moscone Center to make sure they would have a seat for Macworld’s master class conference. And as they camped on Howard Street, they saw the press, analysts, Apple executives and other VIPs escorted to Moscone West, where we waited on the top floor of the conference center.
At the time, Apple did not open the doors of the room until 10 minutes before the start of the event, securing a frantic horde of people looking for prime locations. I guess it takes two minutes for 4,000 people to get to a conference room and grab a seat. Let’s just say Jobs already had a pretty receptive audience.
And I certainly knew how to play in a room.
A master of the show, Jobs kept the crowd of journalists, analysts, developers, employees and Apple fans in a state of anticipation and wonder during the nearly two-hour presentation.
He first talked about the move to Intel chips in Macs the year before, saying Mac sales proved that the switch to the new architecture was a success. And it welcomed a bunch of “changers,” who had abandoned Windows-based computers for the Mac.
He promoted the iPod, introduced more than five years earlier, calling it the most popular music player in the world and the most popular video player in the world (I was also there at the launch of the iPod). a joke about the mediocre launch of Microsoft’s rival Zune player two months earlier. He played the latest iPod TV commercial with neon silhouettes of dancers dancing in Flathead, from Glasgow independent band The Fratellis.
Oh, and introduced Apple TV.
All the while I sat on the floor and wrote a steady stream of short, capitalized headlines – a kind of primitive Twitter story. When Jobs reached the pinnacle of his presentation, my headline only needed 19 characters: “Apple introduces the phone.” I had been on stage for 20 minutes.
Apple’s stock chart looked like a hockey stick a few seconds after the news.
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Aha moment
Apple has always been a magnet for speculation. Almost a year before Jobs entered that scenario, rumors began to fly that Apple had planned to enter the crowded mobile phone market with a fantastic new device.
The conversation went from “yes” to “when” in July 2006, after Peter Oppenheimer, then Apple’s chief financial officer, virtually confirmed the effort during a earnings call with financial analysts. “We are very confident in our ability to compete in the marketplace and we are very excited about what we have in the product portfolio,” Oppenheimer said when asked how the company planned to compete against Sony and other rivals.
“When it comes to cell phones, we don’t think the phones that are available today are the best music players. We think the iPod does. But over time, that is likely to change and we’re not sitting idle. “.
It was a time for financial types, mostly because Apple doesn’t comment on anything it’s working on. The aha became “soon” three months later, when news broke that Apple had filed a trademark application for the iPhone. (Curious fact: Cisco, the networking giant, owned the rights to the iPhone’s name when Apple launched the phone, but let Jobs have the trademark after reaching a legal agreement a few weeks later .)
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Bold promises
It’s hard for many to remember now, but back then few people could have imagined how the 3.5-inch touchscreen and sleek design of the iPhone would change a market ruled by Nokia and BlackBerry. The maker of BlackBerry, then known as Research In Motion, later admitted that it had underestimated the iPhone, belittling it for its eight-hour battery and belittling it because the phone only worked on the second-generation wireless network. AT&T’s oldest and slowest.
“For all intents and purposes, the product should have failed,” David Yach, director of technology at RIM, told The Wall Street Journal in May 2015.
I remember the iPhone was a big problem because it was a very big risk for Apple. Until that day, Apple Computer Inc. she was known for her Mac and iPod. Jobs knew he was betting on Apple’s future to get an even bigger share of the consumer electronics market. He reinforced this idea when he announced at the end of his conference that the company was removing “Computer” from its name and would only be called Apple Inc.
An original Apple iPhone exhibited during the MacWorld in San Francisco, California, on Tuesday, January 9, 2007.
Eric Slomanson / Bloomberg via Getty Images
And he promised that the iPhone, which he called a “revolutionary and magical product that is literally five years ahead of any other mobile phone,” would be a success if Apple could capture even a 1% market share. mobile in 2008. That would mean selling 10 million iPhones.
The crowd went wild. A financial analyst told me that the iPhone, with its widescreen display, full Safari web browser, visual voicemail, and music, photo, and video features courtesy of the iPod, was a “complete surprise.” . Another told me that the 2008 sales figure of 10 million “sounds low”.
Apple exceeded the 10 million target in September 2008, three months ahead of schedule. In July 2016, Apple announced that it had sold 1 billion phones since the phone’s launch.
“The iPhone set the standard for …