Fifteen years ago, the original iPhone was officially released, and the Apple Store was full of people, and this scene has continued until the release of the current iPhone.
▲ Image courtesy of wired
Apple always has such a magic, whenever a new product is released, there will always be many people gathered outside the Apple Store around the world. Even in order to win the top spot, they will stay outside the Apple Store a day in advance.
On the morning of June 29, 2007, many of Apple's top executives went to apple stores in different cities to witness this moment in history.
▲ Steve Jobs on the day of the iPhone's first sale is from: paloaltoonline
Phil Schiller (vice president of global marketing) went to Chicago, Jony Ive (lead designer) and the design team went to San Francisco, and Steve Jobs appeared at the Palo Alto Apple Store, just a mile and a half from his home.
Along with Jobs were the souls of former Mac teams, such as co-founder Steve Wozniak and Bill Atkinson.
▲ The image of Steve Jobs on the day of the iPhone's first sale is from: Yahoo
There is no doubt that the iPhone is the most important product in Apple's history, and it is rare for Apple executives or the founders of the iPhone to appear in the Apple Store and witness it with many users.
No one believes the iPhone will succeed
From its launch in January 2007 to its launch at the end of June 2007, it was half a year later.
▲ The iPhone image from Mashable was officially released at the MacWorld Conference in 2007
During this period, not only the development team suffered in order to catch up with the schedule, but also the analysts and senior media outside the world were not idle, but they did not cheer apple up, or give affirmation.
Instead, it is completely on the opposite side, collectively bearish.
Including Microsoft CEO, RIM CEO, Bloomberg, BusinessWeek, etc. all believe that the iPhone can not win at all, in front of BlackBerry, Nokia, Motorola, is the grasshopper shaking the tree.
The reason why the industry issued such an exclamation is basically the appearance and operation logic of the original iPhone.
In the fourth quarter of 2006, a total of 22 million smartphones were sold worldwide, largely divided between Nokia, BlackBerry, Motorola and Palm.
At that time, their phones were basically a rectangular box, with the upper half being the screen and the lower half being the buttons. Moreover, at that time, people had already decided that mobile phones were like this, and getting information from the screen in one direction and typing on the keyboard was also a way of interaction that people were accustomed to.
Before the advent of the iPhone, probably no one knew that you could flip through photos like a book, pinch your fingers to zoom out of pictures, and tap your avatar to make a call.
▲ Image from: vox
At MacWorld in January 2007, when Jobs clicked on Ive's avatar and spoke to Ive in the audience, many people compared the phone call to Bell's call a hundred years ago, a microcosm of the times.
Interestingly, however, when Jobs introduced the iPhone to the world, the iPhone was still an unfinished product, and both the hardware and the iPhone OS had no small problems.
In order to make Jobs's demo smooth, the iPhone development team has developed a strict set of procedures, such as playing only part of the song or video, sending emails before going online, and so on.
▲ People waiting to buy iPhone Image: wired
In the following half a year, even if the industry was opposed, on June 29, Apple still solved many problems and delivered on schedule.
Unexpectedly, the biggest problem the iPhone faced was its overdemulity, which led to the AT&T network nearly collapsing due to excessive data access.
Richard Sprague, Microsoft's senior marketing director at the time, was convinced that the iPhone would not sell more than 100,000 units by 2008. In reality, however, the original iPhone sold more than 1 million units in just 74 days.
▲ Steve Ballmer Image by: gifcen
Steve Ballmer, microsoft's CEO at the time, in an interview with USA Today in April 2007, also believed that the iPhone did not have a chance to achieve good market performance.
Fifteen years later, the iPhone alone accounts for 40% of the global mobile phone market's sales revenue, contributes nearly 60% of Apple's revenue, and has more than 1 billion iPhones in the world.
The iPhone was born, actually for the music business
From the inception of making mobile phones, and finally to the market, but it is only two years. The two years of research and development process is almost a microcosm of Apple's more than thirty years of technology accumulation.
In 2004, the iPod was on its own, almost single-handedly disrupting the traditional recording industry.
▲ iPods Image from: musictech
But Greg Joswiak, Apple's vice president of marketing, was not carried away by the victory, but was monitoring whether other mobile phone manufacturers were ready to integrate music players into mobile phones, thus threatening the status of the iPod.
Instead of waiting, it is better to take the initiative, but at that time, Apple did not want to build mobile phones, because Jobs believed that operators had too many rules and regulations, and could not manufacture and design according to their own ideas, but watching the growth of the mobile phone market did not want to give up this part of the music business.
▲ iTunes Phone with Motorola Image from CultofMac
So Apple approached Motorola and implanted the iTunes Store service into Rokr, which was a compromise for Jobs.
In parallel, Scott Forstall, Apple's vice president of software, also formed a small team to develop the corresponding software for Project Purple.
▲ Jobs loves purple Image from: dialoguereview
In the months that followed, they would report to Jobs in a small room on the 2nd floor of Apple's headquarters, impress Jobs, and then show it to other Apple executives.
In 2005, Motorola Rokr's poor performance, coupled with the apple software team's very advanced interactive ideas, allowed Jobs to advance the Project Purple project.
You can see the shadow of almost all of Apple's products on the iPhone
The multi-touch interactions led by the iPhone have actually existed in Apple for a long time, but they were accidentally obtained by Apple engineer Brian Huppi when he solved the method of controlling computers without a mouse.
Initially, Jobs dismissed the idea, arguing that putting the Mac's interface onto the trackpad looked awkward. And the size of the trackpad is comparable to the desktop, not elegant enough.
▲ Leica T of very Ive
On the side, Ive has a different angle, and if this technology appears on the back of the camera, the keys behind the digital camera can be removed, thus using an entire screen.
The "multi-touch" technology that eventually remained became the basis for the interaction of the iPhone.
As for the idea of a whole screen behind the camera, it eventually appeared in the Leica T, and the integrated CNC cutting, coupled with the interactive logic of the whole screen, was the same as Ive's original idea.
Leica's designer Andreas Kaufmann also said in an interview that as a fan of Ive's design style, he is doing his best to imitate Jony Ive.
▲ Image of Ive in Overseer from iMore
The Apple design team, led by Jony Ive, was once one of the souls of Apple products. As an industrial designer, Ive not only studies lines and curves.
Over the years, he has also been refining his and his team's understanding of industrial materials. Since 2004, he has been working hard to control the black stripes that appear in the manufacture of aluminum, and even went deep into the supply chain to learn how to incorporate quantitative magnesium and iron to maximize the original color and hardness of aluminum.
After the release of the iPhone, Ive's design team grew to include materials experts, and even acquired QuesTek Innovations in Chicago, which holds patents to make the corresponding steel for racing cars and rockets.
To this end, on the original Apple Watch, Apple also launched three different materials in one go, in addition to the aluminum-magnesium alloy, stainless steel and pure gold case appeared.
The birth of the iPhone is Steve Jobs' control of software and Ive's pursuit of industrial design details, and behind the two of them, the person who brought the iPhone from the table on the 2nd floor of Apple headquarters to the Apple Store around the world is Tim Cook.
In December 2006, on the eve of the launch of the iPhone, Ive crossed the Pacific Ocean to Foxconn in Shenzhen, where thirty of the more than 100 iPhones in production were selected and brought to the conference in a conference room.
Ive turned to Nick Forlenza, vice president of design for Communications, and said that any of these could be delivered to Jobs, who were as delicate as canon-made cameras.
Foxconn's production process gives Ive confidence that Apple can build millions of equally exquisite mobile phones, and he does not have to travel thousands of miles to supervise the work.
Tim Cook, the man behind the iPhone
Tim Cook was famous for managing the supply chain before joining Apple, and choosing Shenzhen Foxconn OEM also belongs to Tim Cook's work.
Not only that, but the touch screen of the early iPhone was not glass but plastic, and Jobs stumbled upon it to be easily scratched. Therefore, in the production version, it was decided to use glass.
Jobs then called Corning, and the two companies hit it off, bringing not only solid glass to the iPhone, but also saving Corning.
But behind this, it is not easy to put a technology that has never been mass-produced on the ground in less than 6 months and produce enough glass. Cook and Corning worked together to turn a glass factory in Kentucky into a manufacturer of iPhone screens, catching up with the first sale on time, and completing the almost impossible task.
▲ Apple has also continued to invest in Corning to develop new glass for its picture from: cnet
These jobs are not as glamorous as the software engineers and industrial designers at the front desk, and they are secret jobs that are difficult for ordinary people to see.
"His invisible work became Apple's secret weapon."
In the 1984 Super Bowl final, Apple aired the famous "1984" ad, alluding to the Mac's challenge to the old IBM and re-establishing the PC.
The iPhone, released and launched in 2007, ushered in a new era of "smartphones" and ushered in a new digital lifestyle.
Resources:
《iPhone 的起源（On the Origin of the iPhone）》
Becoming Steve Jobs
《乔布斯之后（After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company）》