Watching the First iPhone Event, 17 Years Later! 

This video was posted, to the day, 17 years after the iPhone was unveiled - January 9th, 2007. Originally, I planned to have this out for Christmas but uh, then I got COVID, but hey- this works out pretty well. Hope you all enjoy; I know I really did.

To know that all of the engineers were drunk back stage just to get rid of the anxiety of knowing the iPhone that was on that stage was not at all fully functioning and Steve just pulling it off literally switching iPhones between the demo's when it wasn't working like nobody's business is something of a masterminds game.

Young people will never understand how terrible the internet and mobile products were. The iPhone was the first useable mobile phone for normal people. The only downside was the battery which got bigger over the years

The 20th anniversary is gonna be a multi-part documentary series at this rate. In the meantime, I’ve got something good to watch.

The reason Apple didn’t call the Apple TV iTV is because here in Britain we have a TV channel called iTV and they told Apple no you can’t do that.

How the hell are we only 3 years away from the iPhone being a 20-year-old invention? Damn two decades is tough.

I dont know why, but Vista and the iPhone being released on the same year feels so weird... 2007 feels like a true liminal space year. I also find it amazing that the gap between the latest iPhone 15 and the first iPhone is the same between the original 1984 Macintosh and the iPod (17 years). Edit: I was 12 years old at the time, so its probably just sone strange case of nostalgia thats exclusive to Zillenials.

The legacy of the first iPhone isn't just newer iPhone models but all smartphones. It was the first generation execution of a brilliant idea.

However you feel about Apple or Steve Jobs, you have to give the man respect as a salesman. There's just something about the way he presented his products. Listening to him still makes me want to buy an original iPhone today, even though it's long obsolete by current standards.

When the iPhone came out, it was subsidized $450 by the carrier for the 2 year contract. That means they were $950/$1050 on launch. It's amazing to watch Steve show off his products. It's something that is greatly missed in the newer keynotes. If he had lived, he'd still be out there giving keynotes.

I usually watch these past Apple keynotes as they are, but it's great to see you watching and providing commentary. Hope you do this again with other events at some point.

iPhone had the first real web browsing experience. Looked exactly like it did in laptops and desktops and that was revolutionary at the time. That really got my attention.

When he says it runs OS X he means it uses Darwin. Even to this day macOS/iOS/iPadOS/tvOS/watchOS/etc all still use Darwin at their core.

Fresh stuff! Cant wait to watch. I've know every single word by word of this presentation : >

about steve pranking the local starbucks: "Ying Hang "Hannah" Zhang is still a barista at that Starbucks location and hasn't forgotten the fateful day Apple's visionary rang her up. "I feel very happy and lucky that I had a chance to actually talk to him," she said of the brief, seconds-long chat."

07:24 not sure if related, but ITV was an already trademarked TV channel in the UK

7:22 correct me if i'm wrong, but I think they couldn't go for the iTV name since there is already a british independent tv broadcast network called ITV, and probably this is the major decisive factor on the change of name to Apple TV

I remember getting my first iPhone (the 4) and immediately saying “I’ve waited my whole life for this”

When Steve says OS X in an iPhone, I think it means something very different today than it did back then. It would be similar to Microsoft talking about something running NT. I don't think anyone expected a macos desktop, but it literally is the same core stack of Darwin and very similar if not identical frameworks for the system.

I watched this the day after it was announced and I was sold. I got it a month after release (it was my first cell phone I purchased myself and my first “smartphone”) loved that phone.

What incredible irony it is for the majority of us to watch this video on an iPhone (or Android smartphone) all these years later. Things could've been very very different if the iPhone had faltered or never released.

Just IMAGINE what iPhones would be like currently if Steve was still alive!! So iconic, I’ve been a super tech nerd for over 2 decades now & this was such an astronomical presentation at the time. We’ve come so far , hard to imagine what we’ll have in our hands another 10 years from now lol 🤯

What he described as wallpaper, was actually what we’d call “Lock Screen wallpaper.” You’re right, Home Screen wallpaper didn’t come until iOS 4.

Awesome vid. 2 things. Al Gore was part of Apple’s board if my memory serves me right and the real reason AT&t was chosen was because they were the only ones who offered cel & data working at the same time. Believe it or not that was not common back then. And AT&t had exclusive rights to that tech for several years after this keynote

This was so revolutionary looking back at this. It’s almost like taking somebody from the 1980s and showing them a PC set up from the early 2000s. Their mind would be absolutely blown.

The reason why they didn’t call Apple TV the iTV is because that was already used and a registered trademark by a different company, they did try to buy it off that specific company but the offer was rejected so Apple had to come up with a new name for it instead

ITV is a broadcaster in the UK so I'm guessing that why they couldn't call the Apple TV that

It's funny that around 30 minutes into this video Steve makes the world's first call on an iPhone. Surely as historic as the first ever mobile phone call way back in the 1970s on a phone the size of a breeze block! 😀

One more thing, The iPhone Steve is holding is actually a plastic capacitive iPhone. The original iphone prototypes did not have glass. After this announcement Steve called up Corning and asked for medical grade glass strengthened to use on the iphone. It cost apple millions, but it paid off in the long run.

I’m 100% sure it’s not the first time he’d heard about the potential for an ‘Apple Phone’, but the guy at 11:24 is so like “huh, really?”, gets me every time!

The iTV (:P) demo probably was not faked. Because it was all local video not streaming. Streaming from your iTunes library. It’s easy to have a PowerMac behind the desk with an Ethernet cable and get that performance

Annoyingly in the UK there's a surprising number of carriers that still *STILL* don't support Visual Voicemail.

I always love your content man! ❤

ITV is a UK TV network. iOS is a tailored version of OSX. So the services and features needed for mobile use were included, and the UI was tailored for touch on a small ARM device. It's based on OSX - Unix.

This is a great video! I remember when that presentation went out and it felt like everybody was talking about the iPhone. I'd never seen a phone from the future in the present day. Every phone copies the iPhone and EVERY manufacturer copies these Steve Jobs style presentations. Truly iconic on all levels.

I remember the original event, to relive it was fantastic!! Thank you 🙏

I'm not an Apple person, but I think I would be if Steve had lived a bit longer. Dude was so good at selling

56:24 AT&T was formerly known as SBC (Southwestern Bell Corp)/Cingular before SBC/Cingular acquired AT&T and it was rebranded as the new ATT as of 2006

I could watch these keynotes all day long they are very entertaining thanks for this super fantastic look back at of OG iPhone

Didnt he delete a contact of someone who was a part of the team as a way of saying "your fired" during the contact showcase

45:39 the girl found out when people kept calling 😂

What an amazing video man thank you iPhone really set the stage and revolutionized the way we use our phones today. It all dates back to this event here it’s amazing looking back

25:47 it was all real but stepping on real thin ice. There were an extremely high chance of crashing to desktop, freezing or respringing, but there was a tested order of task which were both impressive and feasible to complete, which are somewhat miraculously worked on stage. Thats why he switching devices.

46:20 Dang you cut my favorite part. Hearing him talking about seeing the Eiffel Tower and Colosseum…right on your phone. And the way he was saying it like a dad proud of his kid.

Man those mac vs pc ads were the days. I remember falling in love with apple after i got my ipod and were saving up money to afford the 2009 macbook which my dad didnt allow me to get for like 900bucks in germany back then.

13:55 Too bad with the removal of actually good UI in iOS 7 and introducing all the undiscoverable stupid gestures, they threw all this away. An iPhone 4, my elderly grandparents figured out in 4 minutes. A current iPhone 15 is a nightmare for my parents and even myself to use a lot of the time.

I loved cover flow on my ipod touch and i honestly miss it to this day. In a way wanting to enjoy coverflow forced me to become more organised and have all things nicely named and that process made me a generally more organised person 😅

7:28 ITV exists in the UK. It's a broadcasting company/network

The demonstrations were the world's greatest magic tricks with what we know now behind the scenes.

Watching this on my iPhone 15 pro max

I love this presentation…. I’ve watched it multiple times. Who knew what it would turn into.

Can’t wait for the iPhone 9 review!

It’s crazy to watch how the literal inventor of modern touch interfaces uses them like a boomer

RIP LEGEND 🙏

9:10 I definitely know who the Canucks are; I'm happy for you and The Hockey Guy that they're good again. Maybe we'll see an Avs (my team) vs. Canucks playoff matchup! ;) 30:00 yes, merging calls still works as well as it did back then. I frequently make merged calls for work and have never had an issue! This is awesome to watch over again. One of the most immortalized moments in history, and a moment that changed all our lives going forward. How different would the world be without iPhone?

Do more of these!

Took me a week to get through this video but I definitely had fun watching!

This goes to show how good of a communicator Steve Job was back then. Apple Keynotes have never been the same since Tim took over. Also I remember when this came out. I brought the first one and yeah, back then it was revolutionary. Just a shame it was only 2G!

6:10 Tim Cook isn’t as petty as Steve J. Haha😅

When they made the 2nd generation of Apple TV they removed storing content on it and switched exclusively to streaming because syncing all your content to multiple devices was not something people wanted to do

All SIX Star Trek movies? I guess Steve was a 'TOS till I die' type fan.

1:02:32 hey thats me :)

This is so nostalgic 😢

The Apple Pencil might go against the idea that nobody _wants_ a stylus but it doesn't go against the main point Steve was making which is that they shouldn't be a necessity; smartphones around that time all required a stylus because the screen size was so small that you needed it to use the UI, it wasn't until after the iPhone launched that Windows Mobile started prioritising larger UI elements and then around 2008 Android entered the competition. UI wise the iPhone was the best phone you could get at the time and it was a fair while before the competition started to really up their game (HTC's Sense UI and Windows Phone 7's Live Tiles spring to mind).

This video deserves a lot more views! ❤.

The nostalgia ♥️

In 3 years from now the iPhone will be 20 years old.

Yes, he meant OS X's foundation, and the same Darwin Unix-like Kernel. And the CPU is a single core at just 412MHz with 128MB of RAM, so they had to optimise for that.

7:26 that’s exactly why it wasn’t called itv that was already a channel in the uk

Apple TV wasnt called iTV because the second biggest uk tv channel is also called ITV

ITV is actually a TV channel in the UK 🇬🇧🤣

Album art was more important back then…because you were still solely, almost, buying songs and items. So, you still needed that connection to buying physical albums.

ITV is a broadcaster here in the uk

“You can tell he’s excited…” that was funny. He was like an excited little puppy.

Ngl this phone is what got me into apple when i heard about it so thanks for this video (i heard someone review it in 2020 before then i didnt know much about apple)

The way the pricing was introduced is just crazy

the most surprising thing is that i never knew they went wirreless earbuds at that time :0

Wow! The music app was better on iOS 1 then it is now!

It is technically runs OS X. iPhoneOS is based of the foundation of OS X

The jokes that dude made on stage lol they need to bring that back

ITV is in fact a channel in the UK

AT&T might be a little weird, but I love using it! My dad bought the first iPhone with AT&T!

I remember just graduating high school when this came out! Me and my friend went to AT&T to look at it cuz we couldn’t afford it 😂

45:30 Ying Hang "Hannah" Zhang was the Starbucks employee who picked up. Not much info available online but the name is known.

'ITV' literally is a channel over here in the UK and is one of the oldest networks after the BBC. Apple probably didn't want to run into the confusion.

iTV is a UK TV network, that is why there was no Apple iTV

ITV is indeed an independent TV network in the UK.

ITV is a channel here in the UK.

This channel should be named "IPhone Documentaries."

I watch this keynote at least twice a year. Mainly the where the iPhone section starts lol

iTV is a tv channel in the UK so they never would have got the trademark for it back then.

I had to unlock the phone to get it to use for T-Mobile back then it was stupid the iPhone was locked to ATT I’m glad they changed that.

14:42 it is SOOOO hilarious looking back at this with now the new Clicks Technology accessory, adding back this feature 17:44 also this is funny how Apple merged the OS in all their devices (except apple TV) 26:19 the most consistent feature on current iphones

iPods were a huge ramp for iPhone's success, including sync ecosystem with iTunes and online music store. Even if such phone technically was introduced by, say, Google or MS, it wouldn't have such a strong foundation for success.

The Wii music was wonderful

What are the specs on your new PC?

I want too see ya remake this keynote ambit with your voice

It was definitely a groundbreaking device. If it had launched with 3G, video capability, and the App Store that would have been really incredible. The technology was available at the time for all those things, but they had to save them to get people to buy the iPhone 3G.

ITV is a commercial channel here in the UK and IIRC blocked Apple using that name for their product

3GS reveal next im down ❤