iPhone

In the mid-2000s, the mobile phone market was dominated by Nokia, BlackBerry from Research In Motion, Palm and Microsoft's Windows Mobile. Their devices relied on physical keyboards and uncongenial interfaces. Apple, revitalised by the return of Steve Jobs in 1997 and by the success of the iPod launched in 2001, had been exploring since 2004 the convergence between digital audio player and telephone. The secret project, initially based on an iPod with a click wheel, was abandoned in favour of a multi-touch approach inherited from the company FingerWorks, acquired by Apple in 2005. Teams led by Scott Forstall for software and by Tony Fadell and then Jony Ive for hardware converged on a device without a physical keyboard, fitted with a 3.5-inch capacitive touchscreen. Steve Jobs publicly unveiled the iPhone on 9 January 2007 at the Macworld conference in San Francisco, announcing "three revolutionary products in one: an iPod, a phone and an Internet communicator". U.S. sales began on 29 June 2007 at 499 and 599 dollars. The device combined an ARM processor, 128 MB of RAM, 4 or 8 GB of flash storage, a 2-megapixel camera and an operating system derived from Mac OS X called iPhone OS. The finger-driven interface, with its scrolling, pinch and zoom gestures, its virtual keyboard and its Safari browser — offering the first standards-compliant mobile Web experience — radically repositioned the smartphone as a mainstream consumer object. The launch of the App Store in July 2008 turned the iPhone into a platform open to hundreds of thousands of independent developers and founded an entire mobile-application economy. By 2024, more than 2.3 billion iPhones had been sold worldwide, generating a major share of Apple's revenues and profits. The iPhone imposed the format of the modern smartphone, forced Google to launch Android in 2008 and opened the mobile-cloud era alongside AWS. It remains, together with the Macintosh, the most visible legacy of Steve Jobs, who died in 2011, and one of the most-sold industrial objects in history.