“Apple – remarked Steve Jobs at the launch of the iPhone on January 9, 2007 – was very lucky. In 1984 we introduced the Macintosh, which changed not just Apple, but the entire computer industry. In 2001 we launched the iPod, which has not only changed the way we listen to music, but has transformed the entire music industry (…). And now let’s reinvent the telephone ”. The Apple smartphone arrived in stores almost six months later, on June 29: fifteen years later, it is one of the few inventions to have truly changed the world, and not just that of telephony.
Innovation Almanac – January 9, 2007
The speech with which Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone, word for word
by Riccardo Luna
Changes
“It’s a big screen iPod, a telephone, a device that allows you to communicate over the internet,” Steve Jobs told the audience at MacWorld in San Francisco. The media echo was enormous, but not all opinions were unanimous: the iPhone was not compatible with the Flash software, the battery was not removable, MMS could not be sent and received, the skeptics said. How little those objections counted, and how different the world of technology is today: in Cupertino they expected to sell one million units by the end of 2007; not even ten years later, in July 2016, Tim Cook announced the billionth iPhone sold. By way of comparison, it took 131 years to get a billion cars, and 27 years to get to the billionth computer. Today there are over two billion iPhones sold, and more than half are in operation. So the success of the Apple smartphone is even more surprising, also considering that not everyone was able to grasp the revolutionary significance of the announcement: 2007 really seems like another era, not so much and not only because technology has made enormous progress, but also because the protagonists of the hi-tech world are very different.
Google is a giant (thanks also to Android, which would not have existed without the iPhone), Nokia has disappeared and now it’s all different again, BlackBerry is just a name, Samsung dominates the market, Samsung is in first place, while Chinese manufacturers fight for conquer the space left free by Huawei. And Microsoft, excluded from the smartphone market, has changed its skin and business model. Steve Ballmer, CEO of the Seattle company at the time, commented skeptically on the news: “There is no way the iPhone will have a significant market share,” he said. He seems to have regretted it.
The analysis
What’s behind Apple’s 3 trillion billion
by Bruno Ruffilli
The ecosystem
The hardware, however, was not everything, and in full Apple spirit, the Apple smartphone was conceived as the center of an ecosystem of software and services. The first iPhone did not allow you to install real apps and was linked to a single operator, AT&T: unlocking it was not an easy task, because it risked making it unusable forever. Yet many tried, and many succeeded, and even managed to install other programs besides those provided by Apple. Jobs had the merit of soon realizing this trend: formally he fought it with updates and blocks, but in reality, with the next model, he made it his own. The App Store was born, and the real app revolution began. Which today is a new economy, with giants like Facebook, disruptive ideas like Airbnb and Uber, Pokémon Go, which has brought augmented reality to the general public and a thousand other applications to come.
With the iPhone, Jobs said at launch, Apple was five years ahead of everyone else. And it is true that Apple’s smartphone at the beginning was without competitors. A constant success, with sales always growing, at least until the second quarter of 2016, when the first decline was recorded. Over time, Tim Cook has been able to make a potential limitation a strength: if it is true that Apple’s turnover largely depends on the iPhone, it is also true that there are more and more services related to the iPhone. So, even if the latest models do not sell as expected, there is still a steady stream of revenue guaranteed by those who use Apple Music, iCloud, App Store, Apple TV and so on. But instead the iPhone sells very well, and if it were not for the lack of chips that afflicts the entire electronics industry it would also sell better: in the Christmas quarter alone, estimates Daniel Ives, an analyst at Wedbush, about 40 million units were marketed globally. , against a quantifiable demand of 52 million.
Future
From the metaverse to the Melaverse: Apple prepares a headset for augmented reality
by Andrea Nepori
A paradigm
As had already happened with the iPod, the iPhone did not invent anything, but completely redefined the smartphone market. “The iPhone will be a success – we wrote on the occasion of the Italian debut in 2008 – and the era of mobile internet will also open in Italy: for those who buy it and will no longer be able to do without it, but also for those who choose a mobile phone. from other manufacturers “. And so it was: Apple did not invent a new product, but completely redefined the smartphone sector, so much so that fifteen years later even the most advanced of competitors is still recognizable as a descendant of the first iPhone.
Tech Parade
Smart and cheap, the best phones of 2021
by Bruno Ruffilli
.