“The Apple iPhone is a great first try from Apple,” PCMag’s Sascha Segan and Tim Gideon wrote in their original review. Then came the line that has aged best: “Think of this as the 128K Mac of the 21st century—a vanguard product, maybe not perfect or the most usable machine ever…but heralding some insanely great products to come.”
Nineteen years on, PCMag has pulled that review back out as part of its “An Apple a Day” series, which shares Apple stories and video from its archives daily through late September. Sibling sites CNET, Lifehacker, Mashable and Popular Science contribute pieces too.
The industry wrote it off
Steve Jobs held the iPhone up on stage at Macworld in January 2007. Apple announced it in San Francisco on January 9, while most of the industry was in Las Vegas for CES. The phone reached Apple and AT&T stores in June. The six months in between felt like an eternity, and the device was loved and reviled equally. Some called it the “Jesus phone.” Others judged it by what it lacked.
The next day, at the Hilton in Las Vegas, a joint Apple and AT&T press briefing turned contentious. Segan, PCMag’s lead phone reviewer then, loudly questioned why Apple shipped with EDGE (2.5G) instead of UMTS or CDMA (3G), which was catching on in rival phones.
On paper, the iPhone looked like a loser to the tech-obsessed. No 3G. No stereo Bluetooth. No third-party apps. The stated one-day battery life was under half what others offered. The 2MP camera did one thing at a time while Nokia was shipping 5MP cameras with multiple modes. It could not send picture messages or record video at launch. Critics also hit its thin support for enterprise email, which mattered enormously to the traveling professionals who carried smartphones then. “What sort of smartphone doesn’t have corporate email?” they quipped.
Microsoft’s CEO at the time, Steve Ballmer, said: “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share.” Apple needed 74 days to sell 1 million of them.
What the spec sheet missed
In person, the thing was remarkable. It was the first phone with only a finger-touch interface. Until then, most devices used resistive screens that took stylus input yet still needed directional buttons or scroll wheels. The iPhone was not the first phone to support multi-point touch, up to 10 fingers at a time, but it put the feature to work, with swipes and pinches to move through the home screen and menus. People still use that approach every day.
The iPod app was colorful and fun beside the text-heavy, folder-based menus everywhere else. Safari, with its broader HTML and image support, was a different world from the text-heavy WAP browsers on many phones.
Segan and Gideon caught it. “The seamless integration of the internet, iPod, Maps, Phone, and email functions flaunted in the commercials is no exaggeration,” they wrote. “The iPhone is intuitive, interconnected, and impossible to get lost in—just hit the home button to get to the main screen.” They did not go easy on the flaws: “It isn’t a very good phone. Call quality was the worst we’ve heard on a high-end device in years.”
It did change everything, though. For the next year LG, Motorola and Samsung tripped over themselves building “iPhone killers,” and all failed. Nokia, RIM and Microsoft hardly bothered to respond. A truly competitive platform arrived only when Google launched Android in October 2008. This week Apple introduced the iPhone 18 Pro, the 18 Pro Max and its first foldable, the Duo.
