The Decade That Built the iPhone X

[Voiceover] The next iPhone

marks the 10th anniversary of the first iPhone.

It's not just a big design change,

or a nifty new camera,

it's the culmination of so many things

Apple's been working on for years.

This is the iPhone they've been trying to build

all this time.

One telling sign of how important

the iPhone has been to the last decade,

is that it's almost hard to remember

life before the iPhone.

Let's go back in time.

It's January 2007.

All the best selling phones are feature phones,

made by Nokia,

which did calling and texting and Snake,

and not much else.

The most popular smartphone was the Blackberry Pearl.

Apple had kind of released a phone already, with Motorola,

called the Rokr.

But, that didn't go so great.

Smartphones were novelties, really.

They had hardware keyboards,

and were for people who needed to email a lot.

Then, on January 9th, 2007,

Steve Jobs got up on the stage at the Mac World Conference,

and blew it all up.

A widescreen iPod with touch controls,

a revolutionary mobile phone,

and a breakthrough internet communications device.

(audience claps)

Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone.

(funky music)

[Voiceover] When that first iPhone shipped,

in June of 2007,

it caused kind of a ruckus.

It sold 270,000 models in the first two days,

and a million in the course of the summer.

And that was even with some serious activation problems

on AT&T,

the iPhone's exclusive carrier,

and that high $599 price.

It was already clear, at least to a few people,

that the iPhone was going to be big.

You could make the case, though,

that the iPhone 3G, the second model,

was actually the most important one.

First of all,

you could buy it for $199 with a two-year contract.

The phone also came with GPS and 3G data,

two pretty standard features the iPhone somehow didn't have.

The iPhone 3G could do push email,

and turn-by-turn navigation,

and most of all, it had an App Store.

Finally, developers didn't have to build web apps,

or find janky ways to end around the iPhone's security

just to install an app.

They could make them, and sell them right through the store.

There were 500 apps when the store first opened.

The App Store was the moment

the iPhone became something more

than just those three things Jobs mentioned in 2007.

It was an internet communicator, an iPod,

and a phone, yes.

But suddenly, it was also a television, and a shopping tool,

and a way to get work done away from the office.

It was a computer in your pocket.

From there, Apple kept refining the iPhone.

The 3GS was a lot faster, and could shoot video,

plus, copy and paste!

In 2010, the iPhone 4 was released,

at the same price tag of $199, with 16 gigs.

It came in this gorgeous, stainless steal body,

and had a front-facing selfie camera.

Instagram launched the same year.

Coincidence?

The 4S brought Siri, that chatty voice assistant,

into the world.

[Siri] I found three locksmiths fairly close to you.

[Voiceover] Then, Apple redesigned the whole thing

all over again in 2012, with the iPhone 5.

But this time, in aluminum.

That's also when it changed the AirPods headphones,

and introduced the Lightning cable.

There was some tangents along the way,

like the awesomely colorful 5C,

but Apple mostly just kept on polishing,

and perfecting its phone.

As all this was happening,

Apple was also making a bunch of investments

to give it more control over the iPhone works and evolves.

Today, the company makes its own chips,

does its own machine learning,

builds its own hardware and software,

runs its own cloud services,

all the way up and down the line.

It even controls the way you get your iPhone fixed.

That stuff matters to Apple's bottom line,

and to your phone.

But, by 2014, the rest of the market had, at least,

somewhat adapted to this crazy new world.

Across the board, phones started to be really good.

Nobody was making hardware keyboards anymore,

or fretting about swappable batteries.

Everyone had a pocketable monolith

of computing communication power.

Android claimed its spot as the only real iPhone competitor,

with a huge app store and ecosystem of its own,

and other companied had found ways to compete with Apple.

Samsung finally got its design right,

and build a camera that could rival the iPhone's.

And they also built big phones,

compared to the relatively tiny iPhone.

Turns out, people liked big phones.

So what did Apple do?

It built a big phone.

The iPhone 6 went from a four-inch screen

to a 4.7-inch panel,

and the new iPhone 6 Plus went all the way to 5.5 inches.

That went, uh, well.

Apple sold 74.5 million phones in the quarter

after iPhone 6 came out.

By that point, Apple had become a truly global power,

even becoming one of the biggest players in China.

In the years since the iPhone,

more and more of the world had come online,

and hundreds of millions of people who had never owned a PC

were starting with smartphones.

A lot of them started with iPhones.

After all that, we got the iPhone 6S in 2015,

and a year later the iPhone 7 was released.

It came with some small changes and software upgrades.

Okay, some people still mourn the lost headphone jack.

But other than the dual camera on the iPhone 7 Plus,

it's now been a couple of years

since Apple really rethought what the iPhone should be.

And, once again, the rest of the smartphone world

is doing some interesting stuff,

while Apple just sits on its hands,

and its incredible pile of cash.

Other high end phones screens with virtually no bezels,

so it's like all you're holding is a display.

They do wild, augmented reality things,

thanks to tracking sensors and super-powerful cameras.

They dock into VR headsets,

so you can leave this crazy world,

and hang out in a better one.

All the best apps tend to be everywhere.

Android is great,

and lots of other companies have figured out how to make

awesome looking and awesome performing phones.

Jobs said during that original launch in 2007,

that the iPhone was five years ahead of the competition.

He was right, and then some.

But after 10 years,

it started to feel like Apple needed something big again.

And now, as if on cue, here comes something big.