The Apple will soon be releasing what people are calling “the 10th Anniversary iPhone”. It was in 2007 that Apple changed the world forever by releasing the original iPhone. At the time there was nothing like it. Every other phone had buttons. Even the most popular “smart phone” at the time, the Blackberry, had a face filled with tiny buttons. When the iPhone was released, it was revolutionary. It changed the technology world forever. If you look at pictures of phones before and after the iPhone you will see the dramatic change; from a collection of phones all with many, many buttons, to the single touch-screen interface which we have on all of our phones now.
But as obvious at it all seems now, it wasn’t a foregone conclusion. In his book, “The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone”, author Brian Merchant explains the intense level of uncertainty at Apple about the best way to proceed forward with the plan. They actually had two separate projects running in parallel and competing against each other for how the phone should be designed. There was the team which built the iPod trying to created a click-wheel interface to dial the phone! And there was the Mac OSX team lead by Scott Forstall which was trying to reduce a giant touch screen and the entire Mac OSX operating system onto a tiny phone-like device.
Thankfully for us all, they figured it out, and combined the software developed by Forstall’s team with the hardware developed by the iPod team, and the miraculous little iPhone was born.
On a side note, I was one of the crazies in line during that very first iPhone launch in 2007. I was the second person in southern MN at the time to own an iPhone. And my friends and family thought I was crazy to spend $700 for a phone! But it was well worth it. Because of Steve Jobs and the team at Apple, the world of mobile computing and smart phones got its start.
Now, thanks to them, we can even put FileMaker Pro on our phone using the FileMaker Go app. Thank you Steve!
And thanks to the great people at FileMaker, Inc, for making such a powerful piece of software as FM Go.
The ability to be able to see any needed company data at any time on my iPhone is beautiful.
So, in this 10th year of one of the greatest technologies to come along, I just wanted to fill you in on this bit of history.
Hope you enjoyed it.