The world changed 14 years ago today when Apple launched the OG iPhone
The OG Apple iPhone was launched on this date 14 years ago
To say that the iPhone was universally praised following Jobs’ introduction of the device would be a falsehood. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer laughed at the device noting that there was only a virtual QWERTY making it useless for businessmen who use their smartphones to write and send emails. Famously, Ballmer called the OG iPhone the most expensive phone in the world and spoke about the great Windows Phone handsets that Microsoft was working to deliver.
Not everyone in the tech industry had the ability to foresee what the launch of the Apple iPhone in 2007 would lead to
You can easily understand how the iPhone launch led to the collapse of BlackBerry by going through some of the comments that Lazaridis and Balsillie made in response to the competition it faced from the iPhone. As late as May 2008, Lazaridis said, “The most exciting mobile trend is full Qwerty keyboards. I’m sorry, it really is. I’m not making this up.”
According to Statista, for the period between June 29th, 2007 and the rest of the year, Apple sold 1.9 million iPhone handsets. And while the company stopped releasing iPhone sales data in 2018, the latest available information shows that in 2017, 216.76 million iPhone units were sold. And last year Apple started selling its first 5G capable iPhone models.
And the very first iPhone launch took place fourteen years ago today and it would not be an exaggeration at all to say that the world changed on that date.
