The first iPhone: It s hard to believe what it couldn t do

The first iPhone: It s hard to believe what it couldn t do

Apple showed us the very first iPhone 15 years ago. Many functions that we take for granted today were unthinkable back then. It's hard to believe what Apple's first iPhone couldn't do - let's look back.

If you want to visualize the rapid development of the iPhone, just take a look at the first model from 2007. It laid the foundation for Apple's success today, but it still had to do without a large number of functions that we find in today's iPhones consider as "normal".

15 features the first iPhone didn't have

The colleagues from MacRumors collected 15 of these features in a list to match the anniversary (source: MacRumors). Let's take a closer look:

App Store: An iPhone without an App Store? Inconceivable today, but it actually didn't exist until the summer of 2008, a year after the introduction of the first iPhone. In the meantime, developers and customers should be content with web apps, but the call for native apps was just too loud, Apple heard it and responded. Copy and paste: The iPhone had to do without "copy & paste" for a long time, only in 2009, two years later, was this a matter of course available. Front camera: Video conferences, especially with FaceTime, are indispensable today, but this only became possible with the iPhone 4, the first Apple cell phone with a front camera. Flashlight: At first there was no suitable LED flashlight, instead resourceful developers presented apps that displayed a white screen at maximum brightness to imitate a flashlight. An absolute must for iPhone users for a long time. Video recordings: With the first iPhone, you could take (poor) photos on your own, but you had to be patient for video recordings. Only the iPhone 3GS (from 2009) was able to do this.

A snippet from the legendary January 2007 keynote unveiling the first iPhone:

MMS Support: While MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) never became a hit, it would have been nice if the first iPhone supported it. But it didn't work, this was only possible from 2009 and then only from the second iPhone generation upwards. GPS: Navigation with the iPhone? Was only available in the following year with the iPhone 3G, the original Apple cell phone was still denied. Background images for the start screen: With the iPhone it remained monotonous for a long time, because it was only with iOS 4 from 2010 that the system made it possible to use your own background images. SIM lock vs. free choice of provider: today you have to remember that with the iPhone you couldn't initially choose your provider. In the USA, for example, cell phones were only available from AT&T for a long time, in Germany from Telekom. Today unimaginable. Siri: The voice assistant has only been hearing our requests for a little over 10 years. But let's be honest, even today Siri still doesn't understand everything. Touch ID and Face ID: Fingerprint sensor (from iPhone 5s, 2013) and face recognition (from iPhone X, 2017) seem natural to us today, but before we always had to enter our passcode manually. Lightning connector: Even in the days of USB-C, it was still standard on the iPhone, but the first model didn't even have the Lightning port, instead it used the iPod's 30-pin dock connector. Retina display: Even if the name is pure marketing, the fact is that the first iPhone had a relatively low display resolution. It wasn't until the iPhone 4 that everything got a bit sharper – the retina display was born. Wireless charging: It's only been around since 2017 and yet we've gotten used to it. Water resistance: The original iPhone should be kept away from water, but the latest models are even IP68 waterproof.

We already looked back in 2017 and collected the milestones in iPhone development:

Unchanged: The actual idea behind Apple's iPhone

In short, from today's perspective, using an original iPhone might even seem absurd to us, but the DNA of Apple's phone hasn't really changed and hasn't changed since then. An easy-to-use touchscreen with a perfectly optimized user interface and the power of the internet – this applied equally in 2007 and 2022.

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