Apple’s iPhone turns 10

By Barry Eitel

SAN FRANCISCO (AA) –The iPhone turned 10 years old Thursday.

The touchscreen-powered device baffled critics on June 29, 2007, because it lacked a physical keyboard and seemed to change the very concept of a mobile phone.

Ten years later, it’s clear the gadget ushered in a new era of technology and changed how billions of people interact with the world.

The device renewed the global celebrity of Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple who was later fired from the company before returning in the late 1990s amid financial strife at the firm.

“Here's to the iPhone that changed the world, to the man who dreamed it & the people at Apple who have never stopped looking to its future,” current Apple CEO and Jobs’ successor, Tim Cook, tweeted Tuesday.

In a presentation that set the tone for new product unveilings for years, Jobs mentioned how he never really heard people talk about how much they liked their mobile phones. He set out to change that with one "truly magical product" that combined a phone, a computer and an iPod.

The specs of the first iPhone are almost comically basic compared to Apple’s current offerings. The 3.5-inch (8.9-centimeter) screen of the first iPhone has grown 5 centimeters in the ensuing years.

Users had just eight hours of talk time and six hours of Internet use on the first version, while the iPhone 7 boasts about double that.

Storage on an iPhone 1 was limited to 8 gigabytes – now the phones have as much as 256 gigabytes. There was no way to send pictures nor did the iPhone 1’s camera have a flash, and the ability to record video was years away.

Jobs died in 2011 and never saw the maturation of the smartphone, with companies like Uber, Airbnb, Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat boasting multi-billion dollar valuations off smartphone apps.