Cold Open

It’s January 9th, 2007, at the MacWorld conference in San Francisco.

Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple, leans over the basin in a private bathroom backstage at the Moscone West arena, minutes before he is due to give today’s Keynote speech. He lets the water run through his fingers and pool into the sink.

Steve cups the water in his hands and splashes it onto his face… before taking a series of deep and calming breaths. Steve fights against the adrenaline coursing through his veins. And once he’s found some semblance of peace, he opens his eyes, clips his glasses back on his face… and stares back at himself in the bathroom mirror. He’s ready.

Steve leaves the bathroom.

And as he travels the short walk back to the main arena and the stage that will showcase his performance, Steve retains a sense of calm for what he’s about to present which is remarkable because Steve and his team at Apple have put everything into their latest product release - a revolutionary new communication device they’ve dubbed the iPhone.

And now, the moment has come for Steve to present this device to the world.

Steve stops at the side of the stage and with only a thin, black curtain separating him from the audience, he can hear the whispers of anticipation for the crowd. The lights begin to dim in the room, signaling it’s time for Steve’s address to begin.

To the sound of thunderous applause, Steve steps out onto the stage.

For the past two and half years, Steve Jobs has pushed himself and his Apple team to their breaking points in order to perfect the iPhone. He’s commandeered parts of the technology company for his own ends, pulled developers off other projects, and thrown a shroud of secrecy over every element of the product.

And with his usual meticulous attention to detail and an inability to settle for second best, Steve has personally had a hand in every aspect of the iPhone’s creation. But what Steve Jobs can’t control is how the world will react to it. In a few short minutes, he will find out if all the effort was worth it when he publicly reveals the iPhone for the very first time on January 9th, 2007.

Introduction

From Noiser and Airship, I’m Lindsay Graham and this is History Daily.

History is made every day. On this podcast—every day—we tell the true stories of the people and events that shaped our world.

Today is January 9th, 2007: Steve Jobs Unveils the iPhone.

Act One: An Idea

It’s July 2004, inside Steve Jobs’ home in Palo Alto, California, two and a half years before the iPhone will be presented at the MacWorld Conference.

Though it’s a workday, Steve is lying in bed. He recently had surgery to remove a cancerous tumor found in his pancreas, and his doctor has ordered him to rest. Steve does, but begrudgingly.

Because though the surgery was a major one, Steve is frustrated by being bed-bound. After all, the prognosis following his surgery was positive. The cancer they found is a rare, less deadly form, and he won’t need chemotherapy or radiation treatment. And with that all behind him, Steve wants nothing more than to get back to work as soon as possible.

So gingerly, he starts to sit up. He attempts to pull over his Apple laptop, coined the iBook, to draft an email to his staff. Steve wants to tell them that he’s putting Tim Cook in charge temporarily and reassure his troops that he’ll be back soon and stronger than ever. But just the movement for the laptop is too much and the weight of the machine on his body only a few pounds is painful. 

So instead, Steve pulls out his mobile phone - a Motorola RAZR - and begins to write his company update on that. But quickly, Steve becomes frustrated with the device. The QWERTY keypad is finicky, and the screen is too small. As with many things in Steve’s life, he knows there must be a better way to do this. So, from his sickbed, Steve gives the official command for work to begin on a mobile phone, made and designed by Apple.

Apple’s move into the phone market is a long time coming. Steve had talked to journalists about the idea as far back as 1997. But it was only something Steve was reluctant to do. He hates the idea of working with telecom carriers. And in the mid-2000s, that’s the only option available to him.

But as much as he may want to ignore the growing telephone market, Steve can’t deny the gargantuan numbers any longer. Worldwide sales of cell phones have reached nearly half a billion, outselling the total number of computers, iPods, and tablets combined. And more importantly for Steve, he’s convinced his team at Apple can do a better job than any other cell phone company out there today.

So Steve begins to plan. First, he sends his right-hand man at Apple, Eddy Cue, out to talk to the telecom giants. If Steve is going to cozy up to a carrier, he has to be assured that the design will be all Apple. He doesn't want anyone telling him what he can or can’t do.

Because Steve has big plans for the Apple phone. He doesn’t just want it to be a phone. He wants it to deliver music in the same way as the iPod. He wants it to be designed with the Internet in mind. And he wants it to have the same user experience as any Mac.

To do any of these things, Steve quickly determines that he needs to do away with the cumbersome QWERTY keypad that takes up nearly half the space on rival phones from Motorola, Nokia, and Blackberry. ‘Just One Button’ becomes a phrase Steve repeatedly uses when discussing the design with his team.

But the only way for ‘Just One Button’ to work is to make the entire phone have a multi-touch interface — a technological leap that’s still in its early stages of development, and nowhere near ready for mass-market production.

And to find a telecom partner ready to take on this sort of risk takes time. Eddy and Steve meet with Verizon, but they want too much input on the phone’s user interface. It’s only after a meeting at AT&T, where Steve pitches the allure of selling data to customers, that the Apple team finds their partner. The cherry on top for Steve is that AT&T are more than happy to leave Apple alone when it comes to the phone’s design.

So, with a carrier in place and the Apple team on board with his early concepts, Steve begins to reinvent the telephone.

Over the next two and half years, Steve and his team will work tirelessly, forgoing holidays with their families, and evenings with friends, all to put everything they have into making the iPhone. Engineers will have to work under total secrecy. Even a simple screw will need redesigning so that the iPhone will live up to Steve’s obsessive demands. The process will be arduous and complicated, but for Steve, the work will all be worth it, when the iPhone finally debuts and shocks Silicon Valley.

Act Two: The Launch

It’s January 9th, 2007, inside an exhibition hall at the MacWorld conference in San Francisco.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs takes the stage. Wearing his trademark uniform of a black turtleneck, blue jeans, and white sneakers, he stands in front of a 20-foot high screen emblazoned with the Apple Logo. Then, he starts his presentation to an audience of 4,000.

STEVE: "This is a day I’ve been looking forward to for two and a half years."

Today, Steve is going to give the world its first glimpse of the iPhone – a feat that even internally once seemed impossible, thanks to the technological challenges, and Steve’s meticulous eye.

Just six months ago, Steve asked his team to completely redesign the product they’d spent the past two years creating. He’d noticed that the screen for the prototype iPhone he was carrying around kept getting scratched when it was in his pocket with his keys. And to Steve, the device he’d created was a thing of beauty. He couldn’t stand to see it marked so badly so quickly. And he knew that - with a sizable price tag attached - his customers would feel as frustrated as he did to see their phone become cosmetically ruined.

Feeling that a plastic screen was cheap looking too, Steve set his team to work on replacing it with a different type of glass. But that came with a different type of challenge. Where the plastic scratched, glass broke. And what Steve needed was unbreakable glass.

With the MacWorld conference looming as a deadline, Steve received word that his team had found a solution in "Gorilla Glass", a product made by Corning Incorporated, the company behind Pyrex dishes. Steve ordered Corning to make as much of the super-strength glass as they could.

And once, installed on the iPhone, it gives the device a sleek minimalist design, making it completely different from anything else on the market. After holding it in his hands for the first time, Steve could hardly wait to share it with the world. He's going to today.

Onstage, Steve clutches tightly to a clicker hooked up to the display. Then, with dramatic pauses and precision, he begins his presentation. He reminds the attendees that Apple has already changed the computer industry with the Apple Macintosh and revolutionized the music industry with the iPod. But it’s what Apple has been working on in secret that will change the way we communicate.

He announces three products. First, a widescreen iPod with touch controls. Second, a revolutionary mobile phone. And third, Apple has invented a breakthrough internet communication device. Then Steve repeats the list, then repeats it again.

STEVE: "An iPod. A phone. And an internet communicator. An iPod. A phone… are you getting it? These are not three separate devices. This is one device. And we are calling it iPhone."

With a wink, Steve announces that he’s ready to unveil what they’ve all been waiting for. He clicks over to the next slide and the audience hoots with laughter. What Steve shows is a technophobe’s version of what he’s just described, an old iPod with a rotary wheel on the front. The joke goes down well and only adds to the suspense of the unveiling.

As the crowd waits tentatively for their first glimpse of Apple’s new phone, Steve explains what he sees as the problem with modern phones today and their User Interface. They’re static, governed only by what their keypad lets them do. So now, Steve says, the only way to get a better user experience is to lose the keyboard completely.

Then finally he shows the world what he and his team have devoted the last thirty months of their lives to. Displayed on the huge screen behind him is the world’s first iPhone. A black block of metal and glass with curved edges and a multi-touch screen. As Steve runs through the device's various tricks and capabilities, the crowd reacts with glee.

But before Steve leaves the stage, he makes two more announcements. The first is that Apple will soon launch into the screen entertainment sphere with Apple TV. And secondly, Apple Computing will no longer be the official name of the company. After all, with the Mac and the iPod, and now Apple TV and the iPhone, only one of their big hitters is actually a computer. From now on the company Steve founded back in 1976 will simply be known as Apple Inc.

Inside the exhibition hall, Steve’s presentation will ignite a feverish level of excitement. But elsewhere, tech journalists and industry experts will be less than convinced. Some will question whether the iPhone truly has the capability to do all Steve has promised. Others will denounce the whole idea of Apple making a phone, labeling it ‘Steve’s folly.’ But in a few months, its consumers that will determine the future of Apple’s newest venture.

Act Three: The Release

It’s just before 6 P.M., on June 29th, 2007, in Palo Alto, six months after Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone to a global audience at MacWorld.

Steve and his wife walk along the street, headed to their local Apple store. Today, the iPhone hits shelves, and Steve wants to see the public’s reaction firsthand.

All of the company’s stores have been closed for the last four hours, as Apple readies itself for what it’s calling the event of the new century. But the closer hasn’t stopped hordes of customers from flocking to the shops.

Despite the high price tag, iPhone start at $499, lines of customers snake around the block. And when they see Steve, they react as if he’s a global pop star. Fans rush over to congratulate him. Someone asks if Steve has heard about the guy in New York who’s been waiting 109 hours outside the Fifth Avenue store, just to be the first to get his hands on the iPhone.

Making his way through the line, Steve finds two of his colleagues from the early days at Apple. He asks why they’re waiting here. Just yesterday, Steve announced that all full-time Apple employees would receive a free iPhone. But they inform him that they’re not here for themselves. They think the product is so great they want to buy some for their friends, too.

Their enthusiasm will be shared by the thousands of consumers across the nation who rush to pick up the bold new phone. On the first day of its release, the iPhone will sell 240,000 units in the US. It will only take Apple 74 days before it sells one million.

The iPhone's success will transform Steve Jobs into an almost messianic figure within the tech world. But the cancer that Steve had removed in 2004 will return and ultimately take his life on October 5th, 2011.

But though Steve won’t live to see it, the iPhone’s popularity will continue to surge. In the first year of its release, the iPhone sells over 1.4 million units. By the year 2022, Apple will shift over 232 million iPhones a year – a testament to the revolutionary impact that followed the product’s unveiling on January 9th, 2007.

Outro

If you’re interested in more of the story of Steve Jobs and the iPhone, listen to Season Five of my other podcast Business Movers: The Enlightenment of Steve Jobs.

Next on History Daily. January 10th, 49 BCE. Julius Caesar marches his army across the Rubicon River, invading Italy and plunging the Roman Republic into civil war.

From Noiser and Airship, this is History Daily, hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Lindsay Graham.

Audio editing by Muhammad Shahzaib.

Sound design by Mischa Stanton.

Music by Lindsay Graham.

This episode is written and researched by Owen Paul Nicholls.

Executive Producers are Alexandra Currie-Buckner for Airship, and Pascal Hughes for Noiser.