2007 iphone presentation

IPhone Keynote 2007

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This blockbuster keynote by Steve Jobs (San Francisco, 2007) started a new era of iPhones! Probably, the first smartphones which paved the way for better mobile phones or smart phones. This keynote certainly looked familiar — the famous jeans and black turtleneck, the black background and giant screen. But Jobs did something unique with this speech : He announced, in detail, a major new product six months before its expected availability. However, we all know how successful iPhone is throughout the years and Steve Jobs, always known for powerful speeches and reviews started a new beginning for technology through this keynote. Powerful taglines came up like “Apple re-invents the phone”, “Interplay of hardware and software” and many more features.

The well-known picture of Steve Jobs :

…and some more of the keynote event :

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Steve Jobs’ iPhone 2007 Presentation

July 2, 2017 3:00pm by Barry Ritholtz

On January 9, 2007 Apple introduced the iPhone. The iPhone was a revolutionary product from Apple and it changed the way smart phones look in work. This video is from MacWorld 2007 were Steve Jobs introduced the original iPhone (1st Gen. / 2G).

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• Smartphones

Watch Steve Jobs Unveil the First iPhone 10 Years Ago Today

T oday, our smartphones function like a high-tech Swiss army knife, serving as everything from a communications device to a digital camera to an alarm clock. That multiple-use functionality is exactly how late Apple CEO Steve Jobs teased the first iPhone when he introduced it on stage ten years ago today, on Jan. 9, 2007.

“An iPod, a phone, and an Internet communicator,” Jobs said on stage during the Macworld conference. “Are you getting it? These are not three separate devices. This is one device.”

The first-generation iPhone would be considered primitive by today’s technology standards, with its 2-megapixel camera, iPod Touch-inspired design, and 3.5-inch touchscreen. And it certainly wasn’t the first portable phone capable of connecting to the Internet. But the first iPhone is widely credited with heralding in the modern smartphone era, with nearly all of today’s devices taking design and functionality cues from Apple’s original handset.

Read more: The 50 Most Influential Gadgets of All Time

A decade after its original debut, the iPhone has become Apple’s most popular product, accounting for most of the company’s revenue . Later this year, Apple is expected to unveil a new iPhone with a dramatically different design, potentially adding new characteristics like a curved screen and ditching the home button.

Watch Jobs’ full 2007 keynote below:

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Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone 17 years ago today

Last updated 5 months ago

Steve Jobs with the original iPhone

Context is everything. On Sunday, January 7, 2007, Bill Gates gave the keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Hammering home Microsoft's then buzz phrase 'Digital Decade,' he talked about how great hardware wasn't enough, that we needed connected experiences. "Where people are being productive, doing new creative things, where they're mobile... that is the key element that is missing."

He said that, "Vista and the PC continue to have the central role," though he also claimed that Windows Vista was "the highest quality release that we've ever done."

Two days later and around 400 miles away, Steve Jobs introduced the very device, the very experience that Gates said was missing. He introduced the iPhone at Macworld San Francisco. While Jobs didn't use the term 'post-PC era' then, that's what the iPhone created. This was truly the device for productive, creative people on the move, and as an extra bonus, it ran OS X — now called macOS — rather than Windows Vista.

Many more things

That 2007 keynote is justifiably famous for how well it introduced the iPhone. Jobs opened it by saying that, "We're going to make some history together today" and it is the phone he meant.

His presentation is an example of a really finely produced keynote, and it takes you through the world of cell phones as they were before showing you exactly where they were all going wrong. And then how the iPhone would of course fix all that.

Today the segment showing what phones used to look like is a historical curiosity. But at the time, that wasn't the past, it was the present and these archaic-seeming phones were the best available.

If you dislike Apple, if your personal preference means you buy Androids instead of iPhones, you're still benefiting from that keynote today. During the many times Apple would later go to court over the similarities between iPhone and Android, it would present a graphic demonstrating its position. This is the one it showed when up against Samsung.

Yet the presentation did feature other things, some of which were roundly applauded at the time and one other that we've only truly learned to appreciate in the years since.

Jobs opened the presentation by referring back to what he'd announced the previous year. That 2006 keynote had been when Apple not only announced it was moving from PowerPC to Intel processors, it vowed to complete the transition for all Mac models within 12 months. In 2007, he referred to this as being a "huge heart transplant" and that, "we did it in seven months."

He said that Apple's previous year had been remarkably successful and he also specified that over half of all new Mac buyers were now switching from Windows. It had recently been half of all buyers in Apple Stores, but now it was 50 percent wherever you could buy a Mac.

Next, he showed a quote from a 2004 internal memo at Microsoft where Jim Allchin of the company's Senior Leadership team said, "I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft."

Jobs revealed that Allchin was shortly to retire, so he's "alerted our Seattle stores to keep an eye out for him and give him really good service."

The rest of that Allchin memo, incidentally, included the statement that "Longhorn [codename for Vista] is a pig and I don't see any solution to this problem." Jobs didn't quote that, but he did run a new ad from the Get a Mac campaign specifically aimed at Vista.

"So 2007 is going to be a great year for the Mac," said Steve Jobs, "but this is all we're going to talk about the Mac today. We're going to move on to some other things."

Remember that back in the mid-2000s, there were more rumors about Apple introducing a phone than there are today about it making a car. Vastly more. So with these words, he was surely going to make the big announcement next.

Except he didn't. Instead, Jobs seemed to tease us by talking about Apple's music business. What appeared to be a diversion was just the first part of setting the stage for the day's real purpose.

But for now, Jobs revealed that they had just passed 2 billion song sales and that the iPod had become the world's most popular video player "by a large margin." He revealed that in the then first four months that movies had been available on iTunes, people had bought 1.3 million of them.

At the time, there were only 100 films on the service, but Jobs announced this would increase to 250 because Paramount was coming to iTunes.

Jobs managed to make 250 movies sound good — but there was one figure he didn't even try to put a gloss on. And that was sales of the Zune, Microsoft's iPod killer which had been released the previous November. Only figures for that launch month were available, but they showed that after a big launch, the Zune had managed only 2 percent market share.

"No matter how you try to spin this, ah, what can you say?" said Jobs.

At last the iPhone

Finally, at 24 minutes into the presentation, Jobs paused. "This is a day I've been looking forward to for two-and-a-half years," he said. Later, at the end of the keynote and when it had gone so well, he also confessed on stage: "You know, I didn't sleep a wink last night, I was so excited about today."

It turned out that there were other reasons to not sleep a wink and Apple engineers knew them all. While it was only revealed very much later , Jobs's presentation was attended by iPhone engineers who knew how easily it could all have gone wrong. The software wasn't finished, the whole phone was still being worked on, and if Jobs deviated from the planned demo, it was likely that the phone would crash.

Instead, as you know, the whole presentation went flawlessly. Or rather, most of it did.

My clicker isn't working

Having successfully concluded the demo of the new iPhone, Jobs went on to talk about market share and clicked to move on to his next slide. And clicked. And clicked.

He explained that the clicker wasn't working and picked up a spare — which appeared to also not work. "They're scrambling backstage right now," he told the audience.

This segment is completely forgotten now, yet at a key moment on this most crucial presentation of his Apple career, it went wrong. You can only imagine how nervous it must've made Jobs.

But then you can also admire how he managed to fill for 55 seconds with a story about how Steve Wozniak had built a clicker-like device at college to mess with people's TV reception.

Aiming for 1 percent

Earlier, Jobs had made you think that the Zune's 2 percent market share was disastrous. When he got the slides working, he built up to saying that Apple was aiming for a 1 percent share of the cellphone market — and that this was great.

There was a bit of a difference though. Using the latest 2006 figures available, Jobs said that the cell market had been around one billion phones. Apple was aiming for 10 million iPhones in the first year.

The iPhone didn't actually launch until June, but it then took only 74 days for the company to sell its first million of them.

Different company

It's just that the company was no longer Apple Computer, Inc. The very last thing Steve Jobs announced at this presentation 15 years ago was that the company was changing its name.

Standing in front of a side that showed the Mac, iPod, Apple TV , and iPhone, he pointed out that only the first of those is truly what you'd call a computer. "We've thought about this," he said, talking about how Apple was doing more than just computers, "and we thought maybe our name should reflect this a little bit more than it does."

From this day on, the company would now be known as just Apple, Inc — and it would truly never be the same again.

The iPhone was the first iOS device, a category that now includes the iPod touch, plus all the variations of the iPad.

In September 2018, Tim Cook announced that Apple was close to shipping its 2 billionth iOS device .

At the time, AppleInsider worked the numbers and calculated that the 2 billionth iPhone — specifically iPhone — would be sold in the middle of 2021. No one knew then about the impact of the coronavirus on all phone sales — but it was already true that sales had been declining worldwide.

Apple now doesn't report iPhone sales, and it has not announced crossing the 2 billion figure. However, in January 2021, Apple announced that there were then over 1 billion iPhones in current, active use.

That's not sold, not pre-ordered, but over 1 billion iPhones being used every day. And at the same time, Cook said there were 1.65 billion Apple devices in use worldwide.

The iPhone was an enormous gamble, and it has surely paid off enormously.

Keep up with AppleInsider by downloading the AppleInsider app for iOS, and follow us on YouTube , Twitter @appleinsider and Facebook for live, late-breaking coverage. You can also check out our official Instagram account for exclusive photos.

74 Comments

and that the iPad was now the world's most popular video player "by a large margin". There was a bit of a difference though. Using the latest 2006 figures available, Jobs said that the cell market had been worth a billion dollars. Apple was aiming for 10 million dollars in the first year. Apple's aims for iPhone sales now seem modest I think you mean IPod not iPad in the first reference and clearly the graphic say 1% = 10M Units NOT 10M dollars. 

This day is depressing in retrospect as Steve was proud of his new invention. It was the new iPod and they believed it would be the only one of it's kind and rightfully so. The 62% iPod marketshare should have easily translated to %70 iPhone marketshare. The fact the U.S. and tech companies allowed android to create patent-infringing knockoffs just to make a quick buck for carriers who doubted iPhone is sad. Then came the commercials attacking Apple which created the rabid iKnockoff Knights who shit on everything Apple worked hard for THEM to enjoy!

I don’t think the iPad was the leading video player at the time...

rkla said: and that the iPad was now the world's most popular video player "by a large margin". There was a bit of a difference though. Using the latest 2006 figures available, Jobs said that the cell market had been worth a billion dollars. Apple was aiming for 10 million dollars in the first year. Apple's aims for iPhone sales now seem modest I think you mean IPod not iPad in the first reference and clearly the graphic say 1% = 10M Units NOT 10M dollars. 

I noticed that too. It's confusing but not wrong. 10 million dollars is %1 of a billion. Although I think Jobs was talking about 10M units not $ as that was very little money for such a massive project.

This is quite easily the greatest consumer product I've owned. By far. And, I still can't believe the value that it created for my stock portfolio in the past 12 years, which, in turn, enabled me to do a lot of things that I otherwise could not have.

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Steve jobs’ surprise iphone reveal is still a presentation classic.

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SAN FRANCISCO, CA - JANUARY 9: Apple CEO Steve Jobs holds up the new iPhone that was introduced at ... [+] Macworld on January 9, 2007 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by David Paul Morris/Getty Images)

Apple’s first iPhone went on sale 15 years ago this week. Reporters who were in the auditorium when Steve Jobs took the stage five months earlier still recall the presentation that triggered the smartphone revolution.

Specifically, most people remember one moment that stood out in the 90-minute product launch. Jobs opened the presentation by announcing that Apple would introduce three new products. Jobs, a “master showman” according to CNET, then surprised the audience with the big reveal—the three products were all bundled in one device that would “revolutionize the phone.”

Fifteen years later, Jobs’ surprise reveal still holds up as one of the best presentations ever. The iPhone presentation became an instant classic for three reasons.

Use the Rule of Three

Steve Jobs understood the rule of three, a critical concept in communication theory. The rule simply states that people can recall a list of three points or three messages fairly easily. As the list expands, however, people have a harder remembering the entire list. Three seems to be the magic number.

So Jobs announced three new products. The first, he said, was a widescreen iPod with touch controls. “The second is a revolutionary mobile phone,” Jobs continued. “And the third is a breakthrough internet communications device.”

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To add further emphasis, Jobs repeated the list of three products three times: “So three things: a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone and a breakthrough internet communications device. An iPod, a phone, an internet communicator…”

What happened next was pure presentation genius.

Break a Pattern

Jobs often broke up presentations into three parts or focused on three benefits/features of a product. So it wasn’t unusual for Jobs to tease the audience by introducing three new devices. But Jobs, an exceptional communicator, also knew that breaking a pattern is a sure attention-getter.

The human brain cannot ignore “novelty,” something new and surprising. And breaking a pattern that audiences are expecting is an example of creating a novel presentation.

After Jobs repeated the list of new devices several times, he broke the pattern and said, “An iPod, a phone—are you getting it? These are not three separate devices. This is one device. And we are calling it iPhone,” Jobs finally revealed.

The audience erupted in cheers, partly due to their excitement over seeing a completely new product and because they had fallen for the act. They were ready to see three devices but even more thrilled to see the pattern broken.

Practice the Delivery

Jobs didn’t leave anything to chance. He practiced—a lot.

Former Apple executives who attended Jobs’ rehearsals for the iPhone launch told me that Jobs did not just review slides. He practiced the presentation like an actor prepares for a theatrical performance. Jobs spent days rehearsing every aspect of the presentation—from how he delivered his lines to how he used hand gestures to emphasize the main points.

Memorable business presentations require creativity, but the work is worth it. Jobs made presentations look effortless because he put a lot of effort into making them great.

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The ‘golden path,’ hidden Wi-Fi & cellular tricks behind the iPhone presentation ten years ago

Looking back at Steve Jobs demonstrating the first iPhone in 2007, it all looks so slick that it’s hard to believe just how close it came to falling over. The  Internet History Podcast has done a nice job of pulling together the inside story of how much preparation went into ensuring that the demo worked.

In practice demos, the iPhone – which was nowhere near complete – kept failing in various different ways.

Jobs rehearsed his presentation for six solid days, but at the final hour, the team still couldn’t get the phone to behave through an entire run through. Sometimes it lost internet connection. Sometimes the calls wouldn’t go through. Sometimes the phone just shut down.

Engineers came up with a combination of three things that allowed the prototype iPhone to make it through the demo …

Key to these was the order in which Steve demo’d the features of the phone.

The engineers identified a “golden path,” a specific set of demo actions that Jobs could perform in a specific order that afforded them the best chance of the phone making it through the presentation without a glitch. For example, Jobs could send an email and then surf the web, but if he reversed the order, the phone tended to crash.

Engineers also took steps to ensure that both Wi-Fi and cellular signals would be reliable.

Engineers masked the wifi that Jobs would be using onstage so that audience members couldn’t jump on the same signal. AT&T brought in a portable cell tower to make sure Jobs would have a strong signal when he made his demo phone call.

Even with a cell tower on-site, the team still wasn’t taking any chances.

Just to be on the safe side, the engineers hard-coded all the demo units to display five bars of cell strength, whether that happened to be true or not.

The first-generation iPhone didn’t offer 3G, and while that was partly a technical limitation of the time – 3G chips were not available at the time Apple started development work on the phone – it was also partly a deliberate decision based on both Apple and AT&T expecting it to be a hit.

This was also a purposeful hedge made by AT&T and Apple. They knew they weren’t ready for the amount of bandwidth iPhone users would soon be hoovering up. The decision to stick with EDGE was a decision to play for time. If anything, the iPhone was launched onto AT&T’s network about 18 months too early. The network couldn’t handle the surge in data usage, as early iPhone users could grumblingly attest to, but these early adopters were intended to be sacrificial lambs until the infrastructure could catch up.

Steve Jobs famously resisted the idea of standalone third-party apps, telling developers that they could do everything through the Safari engine.

He told John Markoff of the New York Times: “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers.”

When other Apple execs kept trying to persuade him to change his mind, his capitulation was surprisingly low-key, recalls Eddy Cue.

Oh, hell, just go for it and leave me alone!

As Apple commemorates the 10th anniversary of the iPhone launch, we’d love to hear your own memories. Did you use the first-generation iPhone, or other early models? Do share your memories in the comments.

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Ben Lovejoy is a British technology writer and EU Editor for 9to5Mac. He’s known for his op-eds and diary pieces, exploring his experience of Apple products over time, for a more rounded review. He also writes fiction, with two technothriller novels, a couple of SF shorts and a rom-com!

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Revisiting the iPhone launch keynote, 15 years on

Time has compressed the memory of that historic morning at Macworld, January 9, 2007, like a zip file. When I unpack it, I get a brief flash of filing into the room at the Moscone Center in San Francisco that was already synonymous with Apple Computer Inc. keynotes. I remember sitting to the left of the stage, watching Steve Jobs walking out to the bass rumble of a James Brown bop. I remember putting on what I thought of as my game brain — trying to think like a skeptic, not the wide-eyed Apple fanboy I was underneath. Reporters knew they had to resist the " reality distortion field " that Jobs was famous for erecting around shiny Apple products that wouldn't last long ( Apple Cube , anyone?) with a big assist from his keynote cheering section. So I would try to see the much-ballyhooed iPhone, if it was actually called that, for what it really was. 

And then I remember that game brain being utterly defeated.

With every innovation Jobs unveiled on this marvelous new "multi-touch" device, it became more and more clear that the phone game had been utterly changed; we were witnessing a leap forward at least as great as that of the original Macintosh. The question in 2007, as in 1984, was: would enough people buy this product to make a difference? My final uncompressed memory of that day at Macworld was making my own purchase decision. The iPhone only came in $499 4GB and $599 8GB versions, and would only launch on the Cingular network. So I wouldn’t be ditching my 160GB iPod for one any time soon, even if I could get out of the two-year Verizon contract on my Palm Treo smartphone. (Because yes, that’s what we called phones with tiny physical keyboards back then.)

Watching that keynote again in its entirety, 15 years later, on my sixth model of iPhone, what jumps out is how innocent everyone in that room was — Jobs included. In early 2007, even the great visionary himself couldn’t foresee the wild, weird future of developer-driven iPhone apps. They were called "widgets" back then, and there was only one outside developer, Google. Not even Google CEO Eric Schmidt, bounding on stage to shake Jobs’ hand, had a clue that the two companies would soon be locked in fierce competition over a vast new touchscreen market. Twice, Jobs mentions how much of the iPhone has been patented, so perhaps he did anticipate a lawsuit like the one that dragged on for years with Samsung . But nobody foresaw the rise of Twitter, Facebook, or the vast circus of disinformation and division that would soon fill these supremely easy-to-use screens. 

But that's just the tip of the iPhone iceberg. All sorts of intriguing historical notes jump out from a rewatch of this famous keynote in 2022, starting with one that has nothing to do with the iPhone at all. 

Oh, the rivalry!

In an Android vs. iPhone world, it's hard to recall that Apple once defined itself primarily in opposition to Microsoft. But most of the first 20 iPhone-free minutes of the keynote are filled with  deft, stinging swipes at Apple's giant Seattle rival — so much so that you kind of want to grab the popcorn. A Microsoft executive, Jim Allchin, is called out by name for saying he'd prefer to buy a Mac if he wasn't at Microsoft. The launch of the Zune, a would-be iPod competitor now most famous for its cameo in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2 , is demolished in a single pie chart. A new Mac vs. PC ad, where the PC (John Hodgman) has to go in for major surgery to have Vista installed , is debuted. "If I don’t make it," Hodgman tells the Mac, "I want you to have all my peripherals." Peripherals ? How very 2007. 

Oh, the humor! 

Now that it is on top of the world and chasing a $3 trillion market capitalization , Apple doesn't go after rivals by name anymore. The opening chunks of Tim Cook's keynotes are taken up by less popular products (even I, an Apple Watch owner, snooze through the Apple Watch segment) rather than the entertaining battle of a tech underdog hungry for relevance. So it's refreshing to re-experience the sly sense of humor that Jobs displays throughout this keynote — one that both stood in opposition to his reputation as a hardass and complemented it, by poking fun at himself. 

One of those self-deprecating digs stood out to me at the time. I'd recently moved from being a writer at Time , where Jobs would actually call me to pitch stories, to being an editor at sister publication Business 2.0 , where Jobs wouldn't even allow Apple ads to be placed (despite some of those ads having quotes from my reviews in them). The reason? Jobs was pissed at a Business 2.0 cover story, years earlier, for speculating on what an iPhone might one day look like, and blacklisted the publication. So when Jobs put up a fake iPhone image — an iPod with a rotary dial on it, basically — I found myself laughing harder than most. 

Oh, the name!

On a rewatch in 2022, it seems bizarre that Jobs pauses a moment before introducing the name of the iPhone. Didn’t we already suspect that's what it was going to be called? We did, but we also knew that another Silicon Valley company, Cisco, had the trademark on the name. Jobs was being more than a little honey badger-ish (to use an anachronistic meme) by publicly naming his device the iPhone; Cisco would file a lawsuit against Apple for using the name two days later. A settlement with undisclosed terms would be reached in February 2007, and in June Cisco would license another name it owned to Apple: iOS. 

Oh, the OS?  

In the absence of the iOS name, it's jarring at 15 years' distance to see Jobs say "iPhone runs OS X," the Mac operating system, with "real desktop class applications." It’s true that the iPhone OS and Mac OS X share a kernel, but they were, and still are, fundamentally incompatible. Anyone expecting to run their OS X apps on the iPhone would soon be disappointed. 

Oh, your daughter. 

The iPod stood astride the world in early 2007; so much so that Jobs' first job was to sell the iPhone as a larger-screen version of the famous music and video machine. He accomplished this with the help of a playlist of "favorites" on shuffle. Perhaps this genuinely was his favorite music, or perhaps like the Mac iPhoto app slideshow he'd claimed earlier to have made himself (featuring models on a day out at Mammoth), it was in fact put together for him. 

Regardless, it’s notable that the first song played in public on an iPhone, selected at random, was "Daughters" by John Meyer (a friend of Jobs' and a Macworld veteran who would end the keynote with a live performance). Jobs clicked away from the song pretty quickly. Now that we have the autobiography of Lisa Brennan-Jobs , the daughter he denied for many years and had a complicated relationship with until the very end of his life, we can see why. "Fathers be good to your daughters" was not a lyric that really filtered through in the Jobs household. 

Oh, the dinosaurs …

Apple and Google were about to find themselves on top of the world, thanks largely to the iPhone's introduction. The two other companies on stage that day did not fare so well. "You can't think about the internet without thinking about Yahoo," Jobs said, introducing Yahoo co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang. To which many 2022 denizens would be forgiven for responding: Ya- who ? 

Sure, the media brand still exists, having been purchased by Verizon in 2017 for $4.5 billion. But that's a fraction of what the company was worth when the iPhone launched; a year after he was on-stage with Jobs, Yang would turn down a $44.6 billion offer from Microsoft. Both Yahoo and Microsoft would struggle to stay relevant thereafter; not even offering free email to compete with Gmail in 2007 nor buying Tumblr for $1 billion under former Googler Marissa Mayer in 2013 would help Yahoo survive in its original form. 

The other dinosaur on stage that day: Stan Sigman, CEO of Cingular Wireless, a company he had just sold to AT&T. Speaking haltingly from cue cards, Sigman was the epitome of the old-school CEO from an era where media presence wasn't everything. He would retire later that year, leaving the iPhone exclusively in AT&T's hands until the Verizon version launched two years later. 

By then, Apple had flipped the wireless industry's business model on its head; the makers of handsets and handset software would be in charge of our brave new world, not the providers of networks on which they ran. 

Oh, how easy we were to please!

It's quite a delight to see the audience gasp at "pinching" and "zooming" on a smartphone screen for the first time. Or to hear cheers for a 3.5 inch display size, which would seem minuscule today. (The smallest iPhone now sold by Apple, the SE, has a 4.7-inch screen, with displays running as large as 6.7 inches in the iPhone 13 Pro Max.) Jobs is delighted to show off the utterly un-optimized New York Times front page on the Safari browser; these days we'd run screaming from such a tiny text-filled mess. 

And when Jobs introduces "visual voicemail," it takes a second to remember that he's not talking about the automatic transcript version in today's iOS; merely being able to choose which voicemail to listen to first was enough to wow the inhabitants of 2007. (For younger iPhone users, a "voicemail" is like when you leave someone a voice memo in iMessage, but for some reason you decide to do it after "calling" their "number" in the phone app.)   

Oh, no 'one more thing?'

A surprise at the end became so traditional at Jobs' keynotes that he would forever be associated with the catchphrase "one more thing." But he didn't use it in 2007, despite having two mics to drop: Firstly, the fact that Apple was officially changing its name (from Apple Computer Inc. to Apple Inc., a prescient change for the iPhone era) and secondly, a John Meyer performance. Instead, Jobs calls the musician's appearance "a really special treat." Little did he know that a decade and a half later, the keynote itself — indeed, the very idea of a Steve Jobs keynote — would become more iconic than the beloved singer ever was. 

Topics iPhone

Chris is a veteran tech, entertainment and culture journalist, author of 'How Star Wars Conquered the Universe,' and co-host of the Doctor Who podcast 'Pull to Open.' Hailing from the U.K., Chris got his start as a sub editor on national newspapers. He moved to the U.S. in 1996, and became senior news writer for Time.com a year later. In 2000, he was named San Francisco bureau chief for Time magazine. He has served as senior editor for Business 2.0, and West Coast editor for Fortune Small Business and Fast Company. Chris is a graduate of Merton College, Oxford and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is also a long-time volunteer at 826 Valencia, the nationwide after-school program co-founded by author Dave Eggers. His book on the history of Star Wars is an international bestseller and has been translated into 11 languages.

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This Day In History : January 9

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Steve Jobs debuts the iPhone

On January 9, 2007, Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs unveils the iPhone —a touchscreen mobile phone with an iPod, camera and Web-browsing capabilities, among other features—at the Macworld convention in San Francisco . Jobs, dressed in his customary jeans and black mock turtleneck, called the iPhone a “revolutionary and magical product that is literally five years ahead of any other mobile phone.” When it went on sale in the United States six months later, on June 29, amidst huge hype, thousands of customers lined up at Apple stores across the country to be among the first to purchase an iPhone.

In November 2007—by which point more than 1.4 million iPhones had been sold—Time magazine named the sleek, 4.8-ounce device, originally available in a 4GB, $499 model and an 8GB, $599 model, its invention of the year. The iPhone went on sale in parts of Europe in late 2007, and in parts of Asia in 2008. In July 2008, Apple launched its online App Store, enabling people to download software applications that let them use their iPhones for games, social networking, travel planning and an every growing laundry list of other activities. Apple went on to over 10 updated models of the iPhone.

The iPhone helped turned Apple, which Jobs (1955-2011) co-founded with his friend Stephen Wozniak in California in 1976, into one of the planet’s most valuable corporations. In 2012, five years after the iPhone’s debut, more than 200 million had been sold. The iPhone joined a list of innovative Apple products, including the Macintosh (launched in 1984, it was one of the first personal computers to feature a graphical user interface, which allowed people to navigate by pointing and clicking a mouse rather than typing commands) and the iPod portable music player (launched in 2001), that became part of everyday modern life.

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5 Reasons Why Steve Jobs's iPhone Keynote Is Still the Best Presentation of All Time

The original iphone presentation had all the elements of a great story..

Today the iPhone celebrates its 10th anniversary as one of the best-selling products of all time. As a communication specialist, I mark the event for a slightly different reason. The launch of the iPhone was accompanied by one of the best business presentations in corporate history.

Here are five techniques that Steve Jobs used to make the iPhone launch magical and memorable, tips that you can use in your very next pitch or presentation.

1. The Setup

A good story--and nearly every successful Hollywood movie--follows the three-act structure: setup, conflict, and resolution. The setup is key. It introduces the characters and provides the background to move the action forward.

In the 2007 iPhone presentation, Jobs built up the narrative before he even mentioned a new product.

"This is a day I've been looking forward to for two and a half years," Jobs began.

"Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything ... Apple has been very fortunate. It's 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. It didn't just change the way we all listen to music; it changed the entire music industry. Well, today, we are introducing three revolutionary products of this class."

The setup does not have to take long. Jobs delivered the previous paragraph in less than two minutes.

2. The Surprise

The brain loves novelty. It gets bored easily and craves something surprising and new. Jobs was famous for adding "one more thing" at the end of his keynotes. That was his version of the twist you expect to find in a movie. In the 2007 iPhone presentation, he put the twist at the beginning.

The following excerpt is the most viewed--and the most memorable--part of the iPhone presentation:

"Today, we're introducing three revolutionary products. The first one is a widescreen iPod with touch controls. The second is a revolutionary mobile phone. 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--are you getting it? These are not three separate devices. This is one device, and we are calling it ... iPhone."

3. The Headline

Jobs never introduced a product without a short, simple summary that described the product in one sentence. Consider it the headline that anchors the story, the catchy title that makes you want to read or hear more.

"Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone," Jobs proclaimed. That's the headline. It's easy to spot the headline, because it's the line repeated five times throughout the presentation. It's also the headline to Apple's press release on the day of the launch.

4. The Villain

Every great story has a villain or a conflict in need of a resolution. In the 2007 iPhone keynote, Jobs showed several competing smartphones and pointed out their weaknesses. "The problem is that they're not so smart and they're not so easy to use. What we want to do is make a leapfrog product that is way smarter than any mobile device has ever been, and super easy to use," Jobs said.

As he described the problems of his competitors at the time, even the words he used positioned them as villains in the narrative, calling existing smartphones "the usual suspects."

Your customer doesn't care about a product or an idea unless it solves a real world problem. Jobs never introduced a new product without first describing the conflict--the problem he set out to solve.

5. The Humor

It's easy to forget how funny Jobs could be onstage. He elicited a laugh from the audience 51 times. During the demo of the Maps feature, Jobs placed a crank call to a Starbucks location, ordering 4,000 lattes before hanging up. Later, his presentation remote stopped working. As it was being fixed, Jobs told a story about the day he and Steve Wozniak created a "TV jammer" and played a prank on Woz's dorm buddies.

The original iPhone presentation had all the elements of a great story: heroes and villains, twists and turns, and humorous sidebars. Delivering great presentations will help you build a company, sell more products, and inspire your teams. Use the iPhone keynote as a guide.

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