iPhone Announcement Anniversary

January 10, 2007

The first iPhone was announced 17 years ago, today, approximately 41 minutes into Steve Jobs's MacWorld Keynote address. This is the reason that Apple ads display 9:41 AM in their marketing materials. 

At the time, I was working as a software engineer at the Apple Online Store. Like everyone else, I was surprised and amazed at the product announcement. 

The next day, I printed out a color image of the iPhone, glued it to corrugated cardboard, and sent photos of me holding it to friends joking that I had an actual iPhone and pointing out that the photo wasn't photoshopped. (The iPhone wouldn't ship until six months later.) My coworker and I even took photos of us holding the cardboard cutout in front of 1 Infinite Loop.

I wouldn't see an actual iPhone in the wild until sometime later when I was in a meeting and Tim Cook walked in, pulled it out of his pocket and flashed it at us while saying, "This is so cool." We were all champing at the bit to get our hands on one.