Beril Çanakcı
29 June 2026•Update: 29 June 2026
Sleeping bags, folding chairs, people who had been waiting on pavements for days.
By the time Apple Store doors opened on June 29, 2007, queues for the first iPhone stretched around city blocks across the United States, including outside Apple and AT&T stores in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago.
Nineteen years later, the iPhone’s influence is hard to overstate. According to industry estimates, Apple has sold well over 2.3 billion iPhones since its launch.
The device people lined up for, a $499 or $599 gadget with no App Store, no 3G, and a two-megapixel camera, helped reshape how billions of people navigate their lives.
'A revolutionary product'
Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the device earlier that year on Jan. 9, 2007, at the Macworld Conference in San Francisco.
“Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything,” he told the audience.
Recalling the Macintosh in 1984 and the iPod in 2001, Jobs said Apple was introducing three revolutionary products: “a widescreen iPod with touch controls,” “a revolutionary mobile phone,” and “a breakthrough Internet communications device.”
He then repeated the list, asking, “Are you getting it?” before revealing they were not three separate products but a single device: the iPhone.
The original iPhone was a 3.5-inch multi-touch screen device running a version of OS X — Apple's desktop operating system, a first for a mobile phone. It had no physical keyboard and ran on the slower EDGE cellular network rather than 3G.
The presentation is now widely regarded as one of the most consequential product launches in technology history.
To understand what the iPhone changed, it helps to remember what existed before it.
In 2007, the mobile phone market was dominated by Nokia, BlackBerry, and Motorola. Nokia alone accounted for more than 50% of global mobile phone sales. Its Symbian operating system, with its drill-down menus and physical buttons, was the world's most widely used smartphone platform until the early 2010s.
BlackBerry had built its business on real-time email and a physical QWERTY keyboard. It controlled roughly 20% of the global smartphone market at its peak in 2009.
By 2013, Nokia's share of the smartphone market had fallen to under 5% and BlackBerry exited in-house handset manufacturing in 2016.
A ripple across industries
The effects of the iPhone's launch extended well beyond the phone market.
The App Store model, which Apple introduced in 2008, created an entirely new industry. Apps now number in the millions across Apple's App Store and Google's Play Store combined, covering health, finance, navigation, entertainment, education, and work.
Today, billions of people rely on smartphones for everyday services and communication.
The smartphone camera — which the iPhone helped normalize as an everyday tool — disrupted consumer photography, leading to the collapse of the compact camera market. The rise of mobile internet access accelerated the decline of print media and changed how advertising worked.
Smartphones have transformed daily life, while also raising debates around privacy, screen time, and the digital divide.
According to GSMA Intelligence, which tracks the global mobile industry, there are now 5.8 billion unique mobile subscribers worldwide — around 70% of the global population.
China, India and the United States account for the highest number of smartphone mobile network subscriptions.
