Apple's iPhone goes on sale; thousands who camped for days outside stores are first in line
The mobile phone market in early 2007 was dominated by devices with physical keyboards, closed software, and single-purpose hardware. On January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs walked onto the Macworld stage in San Francisco and introduced a 3.5-inch touchscreen device he described as "an iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator" in one. When the first-generation iPhone went on sale June 29, 2007, thousands had already camped outside Apple and AT&T stores for days. It sold 270,000 units in its first week and reached a million within 74 days.
The iPhone launched the app economy — a market that did not exist before Apple opened the App Store in 2008. It transformed AT&T's subscriber base overnight, reshaped how American consumers interacted with the internet, and drove Apple's rise into one of the most profitable companies in U.S. corporate history. The device redrew the boundaries between personal computer, phone, and media player in ways that American tech and media industries are still sorting out.
QWhy did Apple partner with Cingular instead of a larger carrier like Verizon for the iPhone's launch?
Verizon reportedly declined Apple's terms, which required the carrier to surrender control over the device's software and user interface — standard demands from carriers at the time who customized handsets with their own branding and apps. Cingular, then in the middle of its merger into AT&T, agreed to Apple's conditions: no carrier branding on the device, no carrier-controlled software, and Apple retaining full design authority. The exclusivity deal ran for several years and gave AT&T a subscriber surge it had not anticipated. Verizon did not carry the iPhone until 2011, four years after launch.
QWhat did the original iPhone not include that made some early users resort to jailbreaking their devices?
The first-generation iPhone shipped without MMS messaging, third-party app support, copy-paste functionality, or a native App Store. Users who wanted to install outside software had to jailbreak — a process that exploited security vulnerabilities to gain root access to the operating system. Apple initially pushed back against the practice, but the scale of demand made the case that users wanted software extensibility. The App Store launched in July 2008 alongside the iPhone 3G, directly acknowledging what jailbreakers had been demonstrating since 2007: the phone's value was only partly in its hardware.
QHow much did an unopened original iPhone sell for at auction in 2023, and why was the box critical to that price?
An unopened first-edition 4 GB iPhone sold at auction in July 2023 for $190,372.80 — nearly 400 times its original $499 retail price. The sealed condition was essential: once opened, the device depreciated dramatically in collector value because the hardware itself is too outdated for practical use and too common among opened units to be rare. The auction result reflected both the cultural weight of the original launch moment and the scarcity of factory-sealed examples. For context, the original iPhone's total production run ended at 6,124,000 units — most of which were opened the day they were purchased.
