The iPhone is Apple’s multi-touch smartphone, introduced by Steve Jobs at Macworld in San Francisco on January 9, 2007. Apple’s own press release described it plainly in its opening line: “Apple today introduced iPhone, combining three products - a revolutionary mobile phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet communications device with desktop-class email, web browsing, searching and maps - into one small and lightweight handheld device.” That framing of three devices in one became the defining pitch of the product.
The central technical break was the user interface. The press release stated that the iPhone “introduces an entirely new user interface based on a large multi-touch display and pioneering new software, letting users control iPhone with just their fingers.” Jobs cast this as a generational shift, saying the device “uses them to create the most revolutionary user interface since the mouse.” Eliminating the hardware keyboard and stylus in favor of a capacitive multi-touch glass screen was the change that the rest of the industry would copy within a few years.
The first iPhone ran on a touch-driven version of Apple’s OS X software (later named iOS) and shipped in the United States in June 2007. The original press release listed a 4GB model at 499 dollars and an 8GB model at 599 dollars, both on a two-year contract with the carrier AT&T (then Cingular). The handset paired Wi-Fi and cellular data with a full desktop-class web browser, Safari, which made browsing the real web on a phone practical for the first time.
At launch the iPhone had no third-party application store; Apple initially steered outside developers toward web applications running inside Safari. That changed quickly. The iPhone SDK arrived in March 2008 and the App Store opened in July 2008, turning the device from a sealed appliance into a programmable platform. It was that combination - capable hardware plus an official distribution channel for native software - that created the app economy.
The iPhone reframed the entire smartphone category. Where earlier smart devices centered on physical keyboards, styluses, and carrier-controlled software decks, the iPhone put a large touchscreen, a real browser, and eventually an open app marketplace at the center. Competing platforms, most prominently Android, reoriented around the same model, and the multi-touch glass slab became the dominant form of personal computing worldwide.