Everything for iPhone now | Edge

This is part of our Apple 50th Anniversary package, read more here.

The thing about the iPhone is that everyone knew it was going to be a big deal, and then it was an even bigger deal. Hell, the biggest thing is still happening.

It’s hard to remember, but nearly 20 years ago, Apple’s first iPhone was really good. The trick that Steve Jobs and Jony Ive continued to pull in that era was to turn the limitations of available technology into focal points for the products they made. The first iMac It’s designed around a large, heavy CRT screen — but I made the transparent chassis wrap around it, turning the internals into a design feature. The iPod was a portable hard drive that Toshiba didn’t know what to do with—but John Rubinstein and Tony Fadell figured it out, and once Phil Schiller came up with the scroll wheel, the design became “inevitable,” as I was fond of saying.

The first iPhone was nothing but Constraints, but because Jobs and Apple were so able to make difficult trade-offs, those constraints became opportunities. He was there An internal battle within Apple about whether to build a phone on an expanded iPod platform or abbreviated Mac OS Hell, the first iPhone couldn’t even copy and paste, which didn’t arrive until iPhone OS 3.0 two years later.

There was no app store, only apps pre-installed on the device. Apple even built its own Google Maps and YouTube apps to make sure the experiences were exactly how they wanted them to be. All of this means that Apple was free to focus on making sure of the features it provided an act The ship was perfect – most notably the multi-touch screen and touch keyboard, which were major risks at the time.

Importantly, the first iPhone only worked on AT&T’s legacy EDGE 2G network, but this exclusive arrangement allowed Apple to insist on full-featured WiFi support and a real web browser, a combination that no other smartphone allowed on any other network at the time. Most smartphones had network neutral WiFi to enforce the use of expensive mobile data, but they also had very limited web browsers to protect those networks from overload.

To this day, it’s funny Watch the audience reaction To Jobs’ famous catchphrase “This isn’t three devices” on the iPhone – there are clear cheers for “the wide-screen iPod with touch controls”, enthusiastic applause and shouts of “a revolutionary mobile phone”, and then what amounts to confused, muffled applause for “an innovative Internet communications device”.

What was it? Which? Well, that turned out to be it in the end. The whole world has reorganized itself around this advanced Internet communications device. Maybe your iPod and phone were forgotten.

Publicly, the industry immediately stuttered in its response: Everyone watched The famous clip From then-Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who dismissed the iPhone as too expensive and lacking a hardware keyboard. But in secret, it was clear that things had turned upside down. BlackBerry inventor Mike Lazaridis watched the introduction of the iPhone from his treadmill at home and realized with a jolt that the iPhone was destined to compete with laptops, not phones.

“They put an entire web browser on this thing,” he told his co-CEO Jim Balsillie the next morning. The definitive book about the downfall of RIM. “Carriers don’t allow us to put a full browser on our products.”

Limitations into features, challenges into opportunities. Anyone who uses an iPhone can immediately imagine how much more they could do, and how much more they could do Everything. Unfinished devices from competitors were sent to market on the bet that a long list of unpolished features would lure consumers away from the iPhone’s limitations, only to fall by the wayside time and time again. Do you know what a robot does? It would be discontinued, because no one cared.

It’s important to remember that Apple in this period was the underdog – the company spent most of its existence fighting for survival against larger competitors like Microsoft and IBM, which had the dominant computing platforms of its era. Even when Jobs returned and afterwards Continuous operation of successful productsthe company was still small compared to its peers — you can read piece by piece comparing Apple’s business to BMW and Mercedes, profitable luxury brands with huge influence but a small market share.

The iPhone has changed all that. For a fair number of years, Apple could only reliably increase its sales by allowing more carriers in more countries to sell iPhones. Everyone wanted an iPhone, and all Apple had to do to keep it was to continue to focus on integrating features with the level of polish and care that made the first iPhone a clear glimpse into the future.

This is when things really started to change – when the size of the iPhone and thus the smartphone market as a whole started to distort the entire world. Arming everyone with a camera and a global media distribution platform changed media, changed culture, and changed our politics forever. Apple and Meta have an unhappy relationship among all the tech giants, but both sides realize that they are forever linked. There are no trials about social media addiction without the iPhone, and there are no heated debates about banning phones in schools without Instagram.

Somewhere along the way, Apple literally ran out of people to sell iPhones to. It shifted its focus to making more money from all the people who already had iPhones, changing the software economy forever and resetting the antitrust policy landscape around the world in dramatic ways.

The company has gained a good reputation Strong-armed developers In adding subscription features and blocking app updates that allowed any respite from the 30 percent fee produced consistently higher numbers in the quarterly earnings report. App developers will faintly admit that they were terrified by the app review process, but they never go on record for fear of retaliation. In-app purchases in free-to-play games are starting to print money in such dramatic ways that Apple’s decade-long tinkering with TV finally has a clear purpose: making sure beautiful Hollywood celebrities are the face of the services business, rather than Candy Crush whales. (Candy Crush It has distorted the industry in multiple ways. Microsoft was desperate for relevance in mobile gaming Its owner bought Activision Blizzardan acquisition that appears to have completely upended Xbox.)

Apple’s sheer size and supply chain excellence went hand-in-hand: The company needed to produce millions of new iPhones on schedule every year, and it did so without a hitch, a testament to the machine that Tim Cook created. This machine spawned a technological manufacturing base in China that the world still strives to compete with, and a supply chain that has commoditized the basic components of a phone to the point that almost everything is now a smartphone. Laptops are powered by ARM chips. Smart TVs are just big tablets that run Android. WiFi and Bluetooth chips are everywhere and in everything. CMOS camera sensors are a revolution of their kind, mass-produced for the smartphone industry that came into being with the iPhone. Our world is shaped every day by people with their phones and cameras.

Even the AI ​​boom, although overrated, operates in the context of the smartphone – in the context of the iPhone. OpenAI’s Sam Altman may think he can replace the smartphone with new AI-driven devices, but he turned to Jony Ive to do it because there’s no one else credible to even try. It’s not clear whether Altman and Ive can pull off the same trick and turn limitations into advantages, because the experience of modern AI systems stubbornly denies any limitations at all, but they will try. Apple certainly doesn’t seem worried. “They don’t have an iPhone, so they’re scrambling to figure out what to do,” said Greg Jozwiak, of the company Stephen told Levy recently. “A lot of what they talk about ends up being accessories for the iPhone.”

Meanwhile, there will only be an iPhone this year, and then next year, and the year after that. It will still be a cutting-edge music player, phone, and Internet communications device. The question is who will we Become a response.