Believe it or not, it was 19 years ago today, on the 29th of June 2007, that the very first iPhone actually went on sale. Nearly two decades. Let that sink in for a second.
It’s genuinely mad to think about, because the device that’s now in basically everyone’s pocket, the thing we use to do, well, everything, started life as this slightly unbelievable gadget that plenty of people weren’t even sure would catch on. Let me take you back.
Steve Jobs first showed the iPhone off back in January 2007 at Macworld, in what’s now one of the most famous keynotes ever. The pitch was simple but kind of audacious. He said Apple was reinventing the phone, and that this one device was three things in one: a widescreen iPod, a phone, and a breakthrough internet communicator. People in that room thought he was listing three separate products. He wasn’t. It was all one thing. Big moment.
Then on the 29th of June, after months of hype, it finally landed in stores. And people queued. Properly queued, for hours, outside Apple Stores to be among the first to get one. The original iPhone started at $499 for the 4GB model and $599 for the 8GB, and that was on top of a two-year contract with AT&T in the US. Not exactly cheap money for 2007.
Now here’s the part that’s wild to look back on. By today’s standards, that first iPhone was almost laughably basic. It had a 3.5-inch screen, a 2-megapixel camera on the back, no front-facing camera at all, so no selfies and no FaceTime. It ran on slow EDGE data, not even proper 3G. There was no copy and paste at launch. And get this, there was no App Store. That didn’t arrive until 2008 with the iPhone 3G. The thing that arguably made the iPhone the iPhone wasn’t even there on day one.
And yet, none of that mattered, because the bit Apple absolutely nailed was the experience. That big capacitive touchscreen you controlled with your fingers instead of a stylus or a keyboard full of tiny plastic buttons. Pinch to zoom. Smooth scrolling that flicked and bounced. A web browser that showed you the actual internet rather than some stripped-back mobile version. It just felt like the future in a way nothing else did at the time.
The competition, frankly, didn’t see it coming. The big players back then were BlackBerry, Nokia, and Windows Mobile, all built around physical keyboards and the idea that “serious” phones needed buttons. Some of them openly dismissed the iPhone. A few years later, most of them basically didn’t exist anymore. That’s how big the shift was.
And the knock-on effects went way beyond Apple. The iPhone kicked off the entire smartphone era as we know it. It pushed Google to completely rethink Android, which had originally been heading in a much more BlackBerry-style direction. It created the app economy, an entire industry that didn’t exist before, worth a frankly staggering amount of money now. It changed photography, gaming, social media, how we navigate, how we shop, how we, honestly, just live day to day.
So fast forward to 2026 and the contrast is almost funny. We’re now sitting here talking about iPhones with chips more powerful than the laptops of that era, displays that the original couldn’t have dreamed of, and, yeah, price tags that have gone in a very different direction lately. That first iPhone packed 4GB of storage. Some people upgrade their phone’s RAM by more than that now.
But here’s the thing. Strip all of that away, and the core idea Apple shipped 19 years ago today, a powerful computer that lives in your pocket and is genuinely a joy to use, is still the exact blueprint every single smartphone follows in 2026. Nobody’s really moved past it. They’ve just refined it.
Not bad for a gadget plenty of people swore wouldn’t last. Happy 19th, iPhone. The smartphone world you’ll find on its 20th birthday next year owes you basically everything.
