The First iPhone Went on Sale 19 Years Ago

It's Monday, June twenty ninth. I watched The Furious on my phone the other night, which is basically Kill Bill meets Taken but with Asian martial arts, and it was great. But afterward I realized something kind of funny: I just watched a full movie on a device that, nineteen years ago today, couldn't play a full song without crashing. June 29, 2007 is the day the first iPhone went on sale. And the behind-the-scenes story of how it got to that point is one of the wildest things I've ever read, because the device that changed the world was barely functional on the day it was introduced to the public. The demo Steve Jobs gave five months before launch was held together by faked signal bars, a hidden cell tower, and a script so precise that tapping the wrong app would crash the phone on live television. The most important product launch of the twenty first century was basically a magic trick performed by a guy in a turtleneck who rehearsed it for five straight days. On January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs walked onto the stage at Macworld in San Francisco and introduced the iPhone. The audience saw a seamless, confident demonstration of a revolutionary device. What was actually happening behind the curtain was closer to controlled chaos.

The prototype had 128 megabytes of memory. For context, the phone in your pocket right now probably has about fifty times that. The apps on the demo units were incomplete and bloated. If Jobs tried to play a full song or a full video, the phone would crash. If he opened apps in the wrong order, the phone would freeze. The engineers discovered through trial and error that there was exactly one sequence of actions, one specific path through the demo, where the phone would survive the full presentation without crashing. They called it the golden path. Email first, then Safari. Not the other way around. One wrong tap and the whole thing goes dark on stage in front of the global press.

Jobs wanted to make a live phone call during the demo, which meant AT&T had to install a portable cell tower inside the auditorium. Even with a cell tower ten feet away, the team wasn't confident the phone would connect reliably, so they hard-coded every demo unit to display five bars of signal strength regardless of the actual connection. The signal bars were fake. The phone might not have been connected at all. But on the projection screen, it looked perfect.

Multiple backup iPhones were staged on a table so Jobs could quietly swap devices if one crashed mid-demo. The camera was set up to never film the iPhone's screen directly because the engineers had built custom circuit boards to extract the video signal and send it straight to the projector, avoiding any chance of the audience seeing a glitch, a loading screen, or a reboot.

And the engineers? They were in the fifth row doing shots of Scotch. Andy Grignon, the senior engineer in charge of all the phone's wireless features, told the New York Times that after each section of the demo, whoever was responsible for that piece would take a shot. By the time Jobs got to the finale, where he played music, took a call, put it on hold, took a second call, emailed a photo, and looked something up online, all in sequence, without switching devices, the engineering team had drained the flask. The demo worked. It shouldn't have. But it did. Here's the part that messes with my head when I think about it: the device that changed the world launched without most of the features we now consider essential.

No App Store. The apps that came on the phone were the only apps you had. Steve Jobs was initially against third-party apps entirely. He told developers they could build web apps that ran in Safari, and when his own executives pushed him to allow native apps, his response was reportedly: "Oh, hell, just go for it and leave me alone." The App Store launched a full year later, in July 2008, with 500 apps. Today there are over two million.

No copy and paste. You could not select text and copy it on the original iPhone. That feature didn't arrive until 2009, two years after launch. No video recording. The camera could take photos but couldn't shoot video. No GPS turn-by-turn navigation. No MMS, you couldn't send a picture in a text message. No multitasking. You couldn't run two apps at the same time.

The phone cost $499 and required a two-year contract with AT&T, the only carrier that would carry it. Two months after launch, Apple dropped the price by $200, and the backlash from early buyers was so intense that Jobs had to issue a public apology and offer partial refunds.

And yet. People lined up around the block for it. Apple sold 6.1 million units in the first year. Not because of what the phone could do on day one, but because of what it felt like to hold it. The touch screen was unlike anything else on the market. Scrolling with your finger and watching the screen bounce at the bottom of a list felt like the future. Jobs was selling a vision, and people bought the vision even though the product wasn't finished. The engineers who faked the signal bars and rehearsed the golden path had created just enough magic to make people believe. When the iPhone launched, Nokia controlled 51 percent of the global mobile phone market. BlackBerry was the phone every business professional carried. Palm made the Treo. Microsoft had Windows Mobile. All of them had physical keyboards. All of them thought the iPhone was a toy. All of them are either dead or irrelevant.

By 2013, six years after the iPhone launched, Nokia's smartphone market share had collapsed to below 3 percent. The company that sold 463 million phones in 2007 sold 4.4 million in 2013. BlackBerry went from the phone every executive needed to the phone nobody wanted. Both companies saw the iPhone and concluded it would fail because it didn't have a keyboard, the battery life was bad, and it was locked to one carrier. They were right about all three criticisms and wrong about everything that mattered.

The ripple effects went far beyond the phone industry. Gum sales dropped 15 percent after 2007 because people stopped looking around at checkout lines, they were looking at their phones instead. Over a trillion digital photos are now taken every year, 85 percent on phones. GPS location plus mobile internet created Uber, Lyft, and every food delivery app that exists. The iPhone's camera created Instagram. Its app ecosystem created the entire app economy, which generates hundreds of billions in revenue annually. The phone replaced maps, flashlights, alarm clocks, scanners, video cameras, calculators, iPods, and physical wallets. Apple has sold over 3 billion iPhones. 1.5 billion people actively use one.

And here's the connection to last week's QWERTY episode that I can't stop thinking about: when Apple designed the iPhone's keyboard, the most advanced touchscreen device ever created, they put the exact same 1870s QWERTY layout on it. They had a completely blank canvas. No physical keys. No mechanical constraints. Total freedom to rethink how humans interact with letters on a screen. And they chose the layout that was designed to prevent typewriter jams 130 years earlier. Path dependency followed us all the way from Remington's factory to Steve Jobs' stage. The most revolutionary product of the century kept the most outdated input system in technology because that's what people already knew. So if this comes up in conversation, here's how to think about it. Nineteen years ago today, the first iPhone went on sale. The demo five months earlier was held together by faked signal bars, a hidden cell tower, backup devices, and a script so precise that one wrong tap would crash the phone on live television. The engineers were doing shots of Scotch in the fifth row. The phone launched without an App Store, without copy and paste, without video recording, and without GPS navigation. It cost $499 on a single carrier. Steve Jobs was initially against allowing third-party apps at all. Nokia had 51 percent of the phone market and thought the iPhone was a joke. Six years later their market share was below 3 percent. Apple has since sold over 3 billion iPhones. Gum sales dropped 15 percent because people stopped looking up at checkout. And the keyboard on the most advanced device ever made uses the same layout that was designed to prevent typewriter jams in the 1870s. The most important product launch of the century was a magic trick performed on a broken phone. The trick worked. And the world hasn't been the same since.

Stay informed, stay curious, and we'll see you tomorrow.