On June 29, 2007 C.E., people lined up outside Apple stores across the United States for hours — some for days — to spend $499 on a device that had no physical keyboard, no stylus, and no instruction manual. What they were buying was a small glass rectangle that could make calls, play music, browse the web, and send email. Within a few years, it would reshape how billions of people communicate, navigate, shop, learn, and see themselves in the world.
Key facts
- iPhone release: Apple officially launched the first iPhone on June 29, 2007 C.E., following Steve Jobs’s public announcement at the Macworld convention on January 9, 2007 C.E. — an event that generated extraordinary media coverage months before a single unit shipped.
- Multi-touch screen: The iPhone’s all-screen design, credited to Chief Design Officer Jonathan Ive, replaced physical buttons with a capacitive touchscreen — a departure so radical that rivals initially dismissed it as impractical for everyday use.
- Gorilla Glass: To protect the screen, Apple approached Corning in 2005 C.E. to develop a thin, scratch-resistant material. Corning revived decades-old research to produce what became Gorilla Glass, now standard on billions of devices worldwide.
Years in the making
The iPhone did not arrive suddenly. Internal development at Apple began in earnest in late 2004 C.E., when Steve Jobs tasked hardware engineer Tony Fadell, software engineer Scott Forstall, and designer Jonathan Ive with building a confidential project known as “Project Purple.”
The deeper origin goes back further. Jobs had watched Americans carry separate BlackBerrys, iPods, and cell phones and concluded that one device could do everything. A frustrating collaboration with Motorola on the ROKR E1 phone — which launched in 2005 C.E. but capped iTunes storage at 100 songs to protect iPod sales — confirmed that Apple needed to build its own phone entirely. By 2006 C.E., the company had quietly struck a deal with AT&T and was deep into development.
Several enabling technologies had to mature at the same time: lithium-ion batteries small and powerful enough to run a mobile computer, ARM-based processors that could handle complex tasks without draining a battery in an hour, reliable cellular data networks, and mobile web browsers capable of rendering real web pages. The iPhone did not invent any of these — it combined them in a way no one had managed before.
What the announcement meant
When Jobs walked onto the Macworld stage in January 2007 C.E. and said Apple was releasing “an iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator” — all in one device — the audience laughed, thinking he was joking. He was not.
The announcement triggered one of the largest consumer technology launches in history. By the end of 2009 C.E., iPhone models had reached every major global market. Developers quickly discovered that the iPhone’s mobile Safari browser could run web applications, and Apple launched the App Store in 2008 C.E., opening the platform to third-party software. Within years, the App Store had become a global marketplace generating hundreds of billions of dollars in transactions and giving individuals in any country the tools to build software businesses from a laptop.
The iPhone’s influence extended well beyond Apple. Pew Research Center data shows that smartphone ownership in the U.S. climbed from around 35% of adults in 2011 C.E. to over 85% by the early 2020s. Global smartphone penetration followed a similar curve. The device’s design philosophy — a large touchscreen, app-based interface, and always-on connectivity — became the template for virtually every smartphone built afterward.
A milestone with global ripple effects
The iPhone’s impact spread unevenly but widely. In countries where desktop computer ownership was low, smartphones became the primary — sometimes only — way people accessed the internet. Mobile banking platforms like M-Pesa in Kenya, which predated the iPhone but expanded enormously alongside smartphone adoption, brought basic financial services to populations that traditional banks had never reached.
Journalists, activists, and citizens in dozens of countries used smartphone cameras and mobile internet access to document events in real time, shifting how news was gathered and shared. Health workers in remote areas used apps to track disease outbreaks, deliver diagnostic guidance, and coordinate care. Students gained access to educational resources that previously required institutional infrastructure.
International Telecommunication Union data estimates that by 2023 C.E., roughly 5.4 billion people — more than two-thirds of the world’s population — owned a mobile phone. The smartphone era that the iPhone helped inaugurate is one of the fastest expansions of a communications technology in human history, comparable in scope to the spread of radio and television in the 20th century.
Lasting impact
The iPhone did not just change phones. It changed how people orient themselves in physical space (GPS navigation), how they document their lives (camera quality has become a primary purchase driver), how they consume long-form media, and how they relate to one another across distance.
The App Store model created an entirely new category of software distribution and launched industries — ride-hailing, food delivery, short-form video, mobile gaming — that did not exist in their current form before 2008 C.E. Statista projects global mobile app revenue will exceed $600 billion by 2025 C.E. The iPhone also accelerated a transformation in how people learn: platforms like Duolingo, Khan Academy, and Coursera were built for or dramatically expanded through mobile, putting structured learning in the hands of anyone with a data connection.
Corning’s Gorilla Glass, developed specifically for the first iPhone, is now used in more than eight billion devices made by over 45 manufacturers. The collaboration between a tech company and a materials science firm to solve a single design problem produced a global industrial standard — a reminder of how one product decision can ripple outward across supply chains and industries for decades.
Blindspots and limits
The iPhone’s story is also one of concentrated power. Apple’s exclusive early partnership with AT&T drew antitrust lawsuits almost immediately, and critics noted that the company’s tight control over its ecosystem — hardware, software, and the App Store — limited competition and gave Apple significant leverage over developers and consumers alike. The smartphone era it helped define has also been linked to rising rates of anxiety and social comparison, reduced attention spans, and the spread of misinformation at a scale that earlier media could not match. The supply chains that produce iPhones and similar devices rely on mineral extraction and manufacturing labor in conditions that have drawn sustained scrutiny from human rights organizations. None of this cancels the genuine expansion of human capability the device enabled — but the full picture requires holding both.
Read more
For more on this story, see: History of the iPhone — Wikipedia
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
- Renewables now make up at least 49% of global power capacity
- Alzheimer’s risk cut in half by drug in landmark prevention trial
- The Good News for Humankind archive on technology
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