5 Fascinating Facts from 15 Years of iPhone History

Within the first 30 minutes of Apple’s speech at Macworld 2007 in early January, Steve Jobs unveiled the first ever iPhone. Within an hour, however, members of the tech press and eager fans learned that they would have to wait until June to get their hands on the smartphone. Today, fifteen years ago, the first iPhone was introduced.

Since June 29, 2007 marked a major milestone in the history of not only smartphones, but consumer technology in general, it would be interesting to see how this gadget evolved into the most famous smartphone on the planet by presenting a few facts from the iPhone’s 15-year history.

iPhone missed its first sales target

During a presentation in 2007, Jobs stated that the company’s goal was to sell 10 million units, which was equivalent to 1% of the mobile phone market at the time.

Despite its timely market launch and generally positive reviews, the original iPhone in 2007 was sold in the amount of only 1.39 million units, and in total before being discontinued in July 2008, 6.2 million units were sold.

Apple did not own the “iPhone” trademark at the time of the company’s launch

Apple was reportedly in talks with networking giant Cisco for several years before the iPhone was unveiled in an attempt to secure the rights to the brand name. Cisco became the owner of the iPhone name when it acquired InfoGear in 2000, which in turn patented the “iPhone” name in 1996.

According to TechRadar US Editor-in-Chief Lance Ulanoff, speculation began to emerge at the time about possible alternatives that Apple would have to take if it failed to strike a deal with Cisco. Proposals such as “Apple Phone” and even “Steve Phone” have been put forward. However, Apple and Cisco settled their dispute at the end of February 2007, just four months before the smartphone hit the market.

The iPhone was released without the App Store and selfie camera

It’s impossible to imagine an iPhone without the App Store these days, but that’s how the original device came to market. Only on July 10, 2008, a company store was opened, in which at that time there were only 500 applications.

Today in the App Store there are 1.96 million apps, after Apple removed all 32-bit versions no longer compatible with iOS.

Other important elements of the iPhone also took time: the iPhone 4 was the first in the line to feature a front-facing camera; Siri appeared only in 2011 as part of iOS 5; and the proprietary Lightning port replaced the 30-pin connector popular on iPods only on the iPhone 5 in 2012.

iPhone 13 is 3.2 times more expensive than the original iPhone, but at least 53 times more powerful

The original 4GB iPhone cost $499 on AT&T’s two-year plan in the US (the 8GB model was $599), while the current iPhone 13 line runs from $699 to $1,599 – that’s for the base iPhone 13 Mini with 128GB and top iPhone 13 Pro Max with 1 TB, respectively. In terms of price increases, that’s not too bad, especially considering how far features and performance have come.

Speaking of performance, data GadgetVersus, the A15 Bionic chip found in the iPhone 13 is about 53 times more powerful in a single-core test than the overclocked RISC ARM 1176JZ(F)-S v1.0 SoC in the original iPhone.

Apple has sold over 2.8 billion iPhones to date.

While Apple has not officially released worldwide iPhone sales since November 2018, when the total was officially 2.2 billion, multiple sources evaluate the number of devices shipped at the end of 2021 at 2.8 billion iPhones.

By data Counterpoint Research, Apple also holds 62% of the premium smartphone market and the top four most popular smartphones in the market (as of April 2022) globally.

It remains now to see how successful the successor, the iPhone 14, will be. Although we have no doubt that it will also be a great success. What do you think?

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