And We’re Calling it iPhone

It's been fifteen years since Steve Jobs spoke those words. A lot of grand claims were made at MacWorld 2007 at the iPhone's unveiling. Some were seen as laughable. Some were seen as revolutionary. Nearly all of it came true.

I (among many others) believe this was Jobs' pinnacle performance on stage. I remember watching it and being floored over and over with the (LIVE!!) demo. Something as simple as the Slide to Unlock feature garnered amazed reactions. If you didn't experience the event, even remotely, at the time it is hard to put into words how important it felt.

Fast-forward to 2021 and a world without the iPhone is impossible to imagine. We all live in a society where it's mandatory to have your metal & glass slab in your pocket. Whether it runs iOS, Android, or any other OS out there, the iPhone is the reason it's all become normalized. The iPhone's debut is a rare time in modern history where we can delineate a "before" and "after" of an event. Sure, you can shift it to June 29th of that year when it actually went on sale. And that's okay. Hell, we can just delineate 2007 itself to it.

The six month hype leading up to the day Apple put it on sale was a constant barrage of free promotion for the product. Never have I seen that before and I haven't seen it since. Jobs certainly made a lot of bold and silly claims over his years but he was on the mark (and at his best) on January 9, 2007.

The full presentation lives on at YouTube, of course. It clocks in at just under an hour and twenty minutes. It's worth watching every moment of it.

PS: A funny fact about the iPhone's announcement was the also-announcement of the Apple TV device that morning. Jobs talked about that before the iPhone. It took that a lot longer to gain traction into the marketplace.