iPhone 10th anniversary: looking back at how Apple changed the mobile landscape

This week was the iPhone’s 10th birthday, but if I’m going to be completely honest, I was one of the holdouts who didn’t get one until two years ago.

For years after the iPhone was released in 2007, I was a hermit who believed that I didn’t need material, worldly possessions. When my dad asked multiple times if I wanted to upgrade my dated LG VX5200 flip phone, I said no. My reasoning was that since it had a camera in it, my phone was already pretty cool.

With all this 10th anniversary talk of the iPhone going on sale, I can't help but look back at all the devices disrupted by that rectangular slab of software and silicon, with one notable exception. The list includes wristwatches and bedside alarm clocks; remote controls and light switches; point-and-shoot cameras; printed maps and calendars; and home stereos and MP3 players, including Apple's own iPod. In retrospect, the changes were as swift as they were decisive. But there's one holdout that's still ripe for disruption: cars.

The rise of the iPhone, eclipsed by an even higher summit scaled by Android, has set the baseline expectation for how we listen to audio, communicate with others, and interact with the devices around us. Three billion people now use smartphones globally, after all, compared to about 1 billion autos on the road. But stepping into a new car today is like being asked to use a Nokia E62 as your daily driver. The experience is shockingly archaic, as if the last 10 years of progress never happened. Our ScreenDrive car reviews should have made this point abundantly clear by now.

The phone is dead. The iPhone killed it.

It’s hard to say when exactly the inflection point came. Was there was a single point in time that the devices in our pockets became computers first and phones as a distant second? Was it the original iPhone, released 10 years ago today? Perhaps it was the iPhone 3G, which added faster internet, or the iPhone 5, which supported LTE. Or maybe it was iPhone OS 2, which opened up the App Store for developers to create their own communication platforms outside of SMS and voice calls.

One of the most stunning elements of the first iPhone, which turns 10 years old today, is that it jettisoned the idea of a physical keyboard in favor of a software one. The idea, in hindsight, feels like a no-brainer. But during the iPhone’s development more than a decade ago, the idea of an on-screen keyboard was a radical concept that ultimately had a colossal impact on the future of software interface and smartphone design.

To commemorate the event, the creator of that software keyboard, human interface designer Ken Kocienda, posted a photo of two early iPhone prototypes he used to develop the keyboard. In a neat little tidbit of tech history, it appears Apple’s Project Purple team, the clandestine division responsible for early iPhone development, called these units “Wallabies,” for reasons unknown.

The iPhone, which turns 10 years old today, is arguably one of the most transformative pieces of consumer technology ever created. It kicked off the smartphone boom by putting the first accessible and easy-to-use computer in our pockets, helped usher in entire software industries in just a few years’ time, and obviated the need for scores of single-purpose gadgets, from point-and-shoot cameras to GPS units to MP3 players.

Yet for all the benefits that the iPhone helped deliver, our current level of unprecedented digital connection has left quite a few critics dismayed and concerned over our screen addiction and our inability to go even a few minutes without unlocking our devices. The most surprising among this group happens to be the iPhone’s original creators.

About two minutes and 30 seconds into “Future,” the final track on Paramore’s 2013 self-titled album, you can hear it: a small chime that sounds like an iPhone notification. The same thing happens in Rihanna’s “Pose” at around 1:07: the sound of an iMessage being sent. And in Childish Gambino’s “Telegraph Ave” and Frank Ocean’s “Start”: an iMessage received.

Whether you like it or not, the iPhone’s SMS bleep and jittery ringtones have become as recognizable as the MGM lion’s roar or the 1-800-Mattress jingle. For Apple, these sounds are an immediate callback to the brand. For the producers who turn them into the backbone of a beat, they’re a way to anchor the song in a particular setting, or a way to poke fun at our obsession with our phones.

It’s easy to see how the iPhone changed the world 10 years ago — now pretty much every public place is packed with people peering into their palms in a way that would have been difficult to imagine before 2007. But as Steve Jobs pointed out during his famous introduction to the product, Apple was entering a market where the existing competitors weren’t all that great; they were either somewhat hard to use and dumb, or hard to use and somewhat dumb. 

What if Apple had entered a market with a complex, entrenched ecosystem based on advanced infrastructure and services, where devices offered an endless array of features that people actually made use of? And what if it actually succeeded in overturning this market and brought many of its advantages to the rest of the world?

I like to play a game on the subway where I look around and try to find someone not on their phone. I like seeing a person reading a book, or, in an ultimate win, someone staring into space without headphones. It’s a rare find.

These check-ins remind me that we, as a society, rely on our phones to distract and entertain us. Yet still, even as a hyper-aware person, I can’t even force myself to get off my own iPhone while riding the train. I try, but always think of something I have to do immediately: reply to an email, respond to my friend’s text, double-check a date in my calendar, read an article, adjust my music. Apparently everyone has something to do, too. In the 10 years since the iPhone debuted, it’s slowly eaten our personal space. Few places exist without cell service or Wi-Fi. We’re connected in locations that once seemed far removed from the busyness of the world, like on subways, airplanes, and cruise ships. NASA even sent iPhones into space.

When I was a teenager, this time of year would be insufferable. My bedroom would be nearly 90 degrees Fahrenheit without air conditioning, but it wasn’t even particularly hot outside. I had at least five tower PCs running inside my bedroom, all contributing a lot of heat to my tiny little room. Each performed its own role in my home network, with a file server, domain server, Exchange server, and media center PC among them. All of those tower PCs are now inside my pocket, thanks to the iPhone.

I used to run a full Active Directory with individual organizational units and push out group policies to manage my family’s local PCs. I had a proxy server set up to control web access, and revoked administrator rights to ensure my family never installed malicious software. All of our email went through my Exchange server, and I had a custom app that pulled mail from ISP and Hotmail POP3 accounts and filtered it through an assortment of anti-spam tools before it was allowed to hit an Exchange inbox. All of my family’s important documents were stored on a file server, backed up in a RAID array. I even used Zip drives for the really important stuff. I was a true IT administrator, and I was only 15.

The iPhone is 10 years old, which means, if I am being totally honest with you, that I do not remember a time in which it didn’t exist. However, I do remember a time in which I didn’t have one! In the summer of 2014, I moved to New York City for an internship at a now-defunct literary magazine run out of an apartment in Washington Heights, and I still had a generic, sliding camera phone. I looked up directions to any place that I needed to go on Google Maps on my laptop before I left the house and took photos of them.

To be honest, my life was fine. Who cares? If you get a little lost in New York City, whatever. It’s like being in a Lorde song or a 30-minute dramedy, and afterwards maybe you have a good story. My life now — iPhone included — doesn’t involve extreme time-wasters such as walking 45 blocks to get on a train, but it does involve something worse: a lot more passive-aggression. It’s hard to believe I used to wander around this city, subway map in hand, completely unaware that people were using sleek little rectangles to absolutely bludgeon each other with subtle but pointed cruelties.

In the binary world of online communications, companies like Apple and Google are either valorized for their highly influential products and actions or vilified for the same reasons. Take the iPhone, which turns 10 years old this week, as the most obvious and polarizing example. You can either think of it as Apple’s revolutionary gadget that redefined an industry and most of our lives, or you can deem it to be the overhyped foam atop the more democratic and important Google Android wave. I think there’s truth to both perspectives, but more interesting to me are the nuances and shades of gray in between the extremes.

For a great many people, the iPhone has served as the physical conduit of a revelatory technological experience. My first taste of that came in 2009 when I first used Google Maps (then known as just Maps) and Safari on the iPhone 3GS. The fluidity of scrolling and navigating in both was so far ahead of any other phone I’d tried up to that point that I had to question why we even bothered to review other phones.

This week marks the 10th anniversary of the iPhone, and what better way to celebrate than by taking a look back at how the hardware in Apple’s iconic smartphone has changed and evolved over time?

We’ve gone back and tabulated the specs on all 10 generations of iPhones (plus a couple of spinoffs) for your viewing pleasure. Obviously, the modern iPhone 7 and 7 Plus win out across the board when it comes to almost any metric, but this is less of a competition and more a retrospective — one that highlights what’s become one of the key components of Apple’s success.

The first iPhone I bought was not for me, but for my mother whom I was living away from while in college — four and half hours from home. It was the first time we’d lived apart since immigrating to the United States together, which naturally meant there was a lot of calling to make sure I was doing okay in the cold, snowy hills of upstate New York.

My mom worked long hours as a restaurant chef so the only time she could call was after closing around 11PM, otherwise known as late-night cramming sessions, or prime collegiate party hour. There was a lot of guilty silencing her incoming calls. At the time my mom didn’t know how to type (and certainly not in English), so emails and texts weren’t exactly plan B. The more I prioritized life away from home, the more my mother and I lost touch.

Ten years ago today Steve Jobs introduced the very first iPhone. He described it as three devices in one: “A widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communications device.” But since its first unveiling, the iPhone has become much more than that. It’s a symbol of the tech industry, of the modern era as a whole, and has made Apple the largest company in the world in terms of market capitalization, with some even speculating it’s the most profitable product ever. A decade on, and it’s still making headlines. Let’s take a look at how the iPhone has changed over the years: