The iPhone was released 20 years ago today
Happy birthday to the iPhone, as she officially turns 20 today.
It’s hard to believe that two decades ago, on June 29, Steve Jobs' invention first hit the shelves taking the world by storm.
And every year, like clockwork, the mobile system has major upgrades, thanks to Apple reinventing the OS, adding new features.
Pretty soon, we’re sure iDevices will have the option to drive an actual car.
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Yes, the future is here, folks.
However, it seems like only yesterday; the Apple CEO first introduced the iPhone and iPhone OS 1 along with it.
And once he did, soon everyone had their chocolate bar-thick devices unveiling a grid of apps - all designed to make our lives easier.
The following year marked the release of the iPhone OS 2, with a new incarnation every year after that.
And while the iPhone is Apple’s most successful product, did you know Jobs almost prevented its release?
Yes, that’s right. Once upon a time, according to author and Motherboard senior editor Brian Merchant, the late inventor wasn’t so confident that his mobile phone would go on to change the world.
“Jobs was a powerful source of inspiration, a fierce curator of good ideas and rejector of bad ones, and a savvy and potent negotiator,” Merchant told CNBC Make It.
“But the iPhone began as an experimental project undertaken without his knowledge, became an official project at the prodding of his executive staff and was engineered into being by a team of brilliant, unfathomably hard-working programmers and hardware experts.”
Merchant revealed that Jobs was resistant to the idea of his company creating it because he, like many other Apple engineers and executives, believed that mobile phones ‘sucked’.
However, ultimately the American business magnate rolled the dice as he knew that the company needed ‘an interface that might be intuitive and exciting to lay-users before he’d be sold on the idea that Apple should get into the phone market’.
“The issue was never with faith in his staff, and while there were certainly technical concerns - the embryo of the iPhone was basically a prototyped research project for a long, long time - it was with whether entering the market at all was worth the risk,” he describes.
Well, it’s safe to say it was.
And the rest is history..
Topics: News, Technology, iPhone, Apple
Charisa Bossinakis