The world sensed something monumental happening on January 9, 2007, when Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced the iPhone, promising not just a fundamentally new design of the cellular phone but a reconsideration of the paradigm of telephony itself. And it was coming from Jobs, the magician behind the Mac, the iPod, and the consumerization of online music; the man who had transformed billion-dollar industries one after another.
This article appears in Issue 30 of Alta Journal.
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That June, in expectation of another such miracle, thousands of people in the United States lined up at stores days before the release to own this little revolution. What they discovered was like nothing anyone had seen before: a rectangular slab of featureless smoked glass. Only when turned on did the iPhone reveal itself, its touchscreen display mostly duplicating the software icons on the Mac, but activated by touch. The actual “Phone” function was almost an afterthought, just one of many novel applications, with thousands more to come. The world of computers and the internet had now made its greatest leap yet: into the human hand. This powerful new platform was a quantum leap for life in the digital age, with the potential for linking everyone—everywhere in the world—to everyone else. The iPhone has nearly accomplished all of that: By the end of 2023, an estimated 17 billion iPhones and their imitators had been sold around the world.•
A veteran newspaper reporter and columnist, magazine editor, and entrepreneur, Michael S Malone is the author or coauthor of more than twenty award-winning books, notably the seminal Silicon Valley history The Big Score, the bestselling The Virtual Corporation, Bill & Dave, and The Intel Trinity. He currently hosts the podcast “The Silicon Insider” and is Dean’s Executive Professor at Santa Clara University.
