19 years ago yesterday I bought the first iPhone at Steve Jobs’ store.
When I arrived at the store with my son Patrick (who officially was first in line), there was nobody there. We set up our chairs and waited, and 45 minutes later, somebody else showed up.
By the time the store opened, there was about 1,000 people behind us in line. It was one of the most remarkable Silicon Valley events I have ever been a part of.
In line with us was the original Macintosh team, along with so many entrepreneurs and people who are running the tech industry today. Brian Solis took this photo, for instance, and he is now a storied executive.
One thing I remember clearly was Andy Hertzfeld showing up with a wood model of the iPhone. He was the guy who invented major parts of the Macintosh and HyperCard, and he is largely seen as one of Apple's best engineers of all time. He wanted to hold the iPhone to dream about how the world would change after they got it.
It is that dreaming that I think is indicative of the spirit of Silicon Valley: a dreaming of a better future. It keeps me going because I have the same dream.
After that, I went around Silicon Valley taking pictures of people holding their iPhones. Those pictures are still up on Flickr. People were so happy to get this new device. It was much better than the Nokia phones everybody had before that, or the Palm Trios, or the Blackberries.
It was a time of hopefulness, a feeling that the world had changed. Now we are going into a period where technology is changing at such a rate that it is hard for everybody to get that feeling back, but it is still there.
The thing people forget is that the iPhone really wasn't that big a seller at first, even though there were a thousand people in line at the Palo Alto store and lines at other stores around the world. At the time, Nokia had far more dominance. For three years after the iPhone shipped, Nokia's CEO kept reminding me that his phones had better radios and better cameras. That was true, but the company was doomed from that day because the iPhone simply let you use the phone in a much nicer way.
I still have a drawer full of Nokia phones; they were just so hard to use and lacked a good developer platform. Neither did the iPhone, for that matter. The first iPhone developers camp only had one Apple employee at it, and there was no App Store on the original iPhone. The platform we know today showed up much later.
It is interesting because my boss at Microsoft eventually left for Google, where he funded Android. I have watched the iPhone versus Android rivalry play out from the very beginning. Today, the iPhone doesn't have nearly as much market share (it is around 10%), but it still has the affluent users and the best developer ecosystem. There is a reason Apple is the most profitable company in the world today: it is all due to the iPhone.
If you bought one the first day, do you have any cool stories?
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