Apple announced the new iPhone 17 line last week. The iPhone is the pinnacle of Apple’s near-half-century of evenly distributing the Future. To pretty much the entire world. There is so much to say about the iPhone that it will likely take until Apple’s half-century anniversary (April 1, 2026) to say even close to half of it. But let’s get started.
Alan of course got an iPhone 1 on day one, June 29, 2007. It cost $642 ($1000 in today’s dollars) and had 8GB of memory (the iPhone 17 has up to 2TB).
Alan’s had quite a few iPhones since 2007.
As hard to believe as it might seem now, the original iPhone did not support “apps.” Both the word “app” and the app concept was already here in 2007 (Alan had a Nokia “smart phone” that could run apps), but it took until 2008 and the iPhone before the app Future would begin to get evenly distributed.
But once Apple started on apps, the world really changed, for its 7 billion people (8 billion now) and for Alan specifically. As soon as Apple announced that the iPhone would run apps, Alan and his partner-in-crime Jim Teece immediately started trying to figure out what their first app should be.
We literally threw a whole bunch of ideas up on the wall. The one that stuck was an iPhone version of Open Door’s Envision.
The iPhone App Store opened on July 10, 2008. One of its 500 initial apps was our iEnvision. 500 apps seemed like an awful lot at the time. Even Steve Jobs’ in the announcement touted “a vibrant third party developer community with potentially thousands of native applications.” Little did we know…