On the afternoon of June 29, 2007, at 6:00 p.m. sharp, Apple stores across the United States opened their doors and the first customers walked in carrying nothing but excitement and credit cards. Some had been camped out on the sidewalk for days, wrapped in blankets and pizza boxes. What they were about to buy was a small black-and-silver slab of glass and metal that Apple's chief executive, Steve Jobs, had unveiled six months earlier. He had called it three things in one: a widescreen iPod, a phone, and an internet device. It was the first iPhone.
The iPhone was not the first cell phone, or even the first phone with a touchscreen. But it changed the game by combining a high-quality camera, a real web browser, music, video, email, and an easy-to-poke touchscreen into one pocket-sized device with almost no buttons. The very first iPhone had no app store yet - that came a year later, in 2008. It cost $499 for the small model and $599 for the larger one, a lot of money for a phone in 2007. By the end of opening weekend, Apple had sold around 270,000 of them. Within five years, it had sold hundreds of millions.
The iPhone helped kick off the smartphone age. Cameras, MP3 players, paper maps, address books, alarm clocks, video cameras, and even flashlights all slowly moved into your pocket. Today there are more than five billion smartphones in the world - more phones than toothbrushes. Whatever you think about screens, those long sidewalk lines on a hot Friday in June 2007 marked the beginning of how the 2000s would feel: tap, swipe, scroll, repeat.
