On January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs gave the keynote address at the Macworld Conference & Expo in San Francisco. Jobs had given many such addresses in the past, and gave many more after that, but the speech he gave five years ago today was the best and most important presentation that Steve Jobs ever made: the introduction of the iPhone. Here is how Jobs introduced the iPhone to the world:
This is a day I've been looking forward to for two and a half years. Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. And Apple has been, well, first of all, one is very fortunate if you get to work on just one of these in your career. Apple has been very fortunate. It has been able to introduce a few of these into the world. In 1984, we introduced the Macintosh. It didn't just change Apple, it changed the whole computer industry. In 2001, we introduced the first iPod. And it didn't just change the way we all listen to music, it changed the entire music industry.
Well, today, we're introducing three revolutionary products of this class. The first one is a widescreen iPod with touch controls. [Crowd cheers] The second is a revolutionary mobile phone. [Crowd cheers even louder] And the third is a breakthrough Internet communications device. So, three things. A widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough Internet communications device. An iPod, a phone and an Internet communicator. An iPod, a phone... [Crowd goes wild] Are you getting it? These are not three separate devices. This is one device. And we are calling it iPhone. Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone.
Right after Jobs said that, he then joked "And here it is" and showed this slide:
Obviously, Apple didn't just slap a phone dial onto an iPod, and today the look and feel of the iPhone is so well-know that it may seem obvious. But at the time, smartphones looked nothing like the iPhone. During his speech five years ago, Steve Jobs showed a slide of what the best smartphones on the market at the time looked like:
Jobs said that Apple wanted to do something completely different, something that was both smart and easy to use. "What we want to do is make a leapfrog product that is way smarter than any mobile device that has ever been and super easy to use. ... We're going to reinvent the phone."
Apple certainly did reinvent the phone in 2007, and in the five years since then it has frequently reinvented the iPhone, adding great new hardware and software features.
If you have never seen the Steve Jobs iPhone introduction, it really is worth watching. Even if you have seen it before, it is worth watching again, not only because it is fun to see how revolutionary the iPhone was back in 2007, but also because it is interesting to compare the iPhone that was introduced five years ago to the iPhone of today.
Here is the Jobs presentation in two parts, the first of which is 41 minutes and the second of which is 38 minutes:
Here's looking forward to the next five years of the iPhone!
