On January 9, 2007, at the Macworld conference in San Francisco, Steve Jobs walked on stage and introduced the iPhone. He framed it as not one device but three, telling the audience Apple was shipping an iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator - and then revealing that these were a single product. Apple’s accompanying press release captured the same idea in print, describing the iPhone as “combining three products - a revolutionary mobile phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet communications device with desktop-class email, web browsing, searching and maps - into one small and lightweight handheld device.”
The announcement was deliberately staged as a watershed. Jobs declared that “iPhone is a revolutionary and magical product that is literally five years ahead of any other mobile phone,” and argued that the multi-touch interface was “the most revolutionary user interface since the mouse.” The press release titled itself “Apple Reinvents the Phone with iPhone,” signaling that Apple intended the device to redefine an entire product category rather than merely enter it.
The technical centerpiece was multi-touch. The iPhone replaced the physical keyboards and styluses of contemporary smartphones with a large capacitive glass screen controlled directly by fingers. The press release described “an entirely new user interface based on a large multi-touch display and pioneering new software,” and the live demonstration of pinch-to-zoom, inertial scrolling, and a full desktop-class Safari browser made the interaction model concrete for a watching industry.
The keynote did not announce an app store. At launch Apple positioned third-party software as web applications running inside Safari, and the device shipped in June 2007 as a closed system. The opening of the iPhone SDK in March 2008 and the App Store in July 2008 came later, but the January 2007 introduction set the stage by establishing the hardware and interface on which that ecosystem would be built.
The 2007 announcement is widely treated as one of the defining moments in computing history. It launched the device that made the touchscreen smartphone mainstream, reset competitors’ roadmaps, and, through the platform it became, gave rise to the mobile-app economy. The combination of a primary-source press release and the archived launch pages makes it one of the best-documented product introductions of the modern era.