How the World Got Wired

Chapter 15 — The Phone in Your Pocket

On January 9, 2007, a thin man in a black turtleneck walked onto a stage in San Francisco and proceeded to give what is probably the most famous product demonstration in the history of computing.

His name was Steve Jobs. He was the chief executive of Apple, a computer company that had nearly gone bankrupt ten years earlier and was now in the middle of the most dramatic corporate comeback any large company had ever made. He had stage presence that nobody else in the business world has ever quite matched. He spoke slowly, with long pauses. He wore the same outfit to every public appearance — black turtleneck, faded jeans, gray sneakers — so that nothing about his clothing would distract from what he was saying.

What he was about to say, on that January morning, would change the way human beings spent their days for the foreseeable future.

“Today,” he said, looking out at an audience of about three thousand people, “Apple is going to reinvent the phone.”

He walked the audience through what was wrong with the cell phones of the time. They were ugly. Their buttons were tiny. Their screens were small. Their web browsers were terrible. Their cameras were bad. They were difficult to use, and even the most expensive ones — the BlackBerrys that businesspeople carried, the early smartphones from Palm and Nokia — felt clunky and limited.

Then he said: today we are introducing three revolutionary products. A wide-screen iPod with touch controls. A revolutionary mobile phone. And a breakthrough internet communications device.

He paused. The audience cheered, because each one of those things would have been impressive on its own. Apple already made the best music player in the world. A revolutionary phone would have been huge news. An internet device that could fit in your pocket would have been astonishing.

Then he said it again. An iPod. A phone. And an internet communicator. He repeated it. An iPod. A phone. And an internet communicator. The repetition was deliberate. The audience started to realize.

“Are you getting it?” he said. “These are not three separate devices. This is one device. And we are calling it iPhone.”

The audience went wild. Steve Jobs, the showman, the salesman, the man who had spent six months rehearsing this exact moment, smiled.

The world your parents grew up in was about to end.

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