16 years ago a server was writing as an amateur about Apple in a personal blog of which I no longer even remember the name or the domain in which it was hosted. He was 22 years old (who had them now), and my partner Pedro Aznar (among other people) was starting with Applesfera as a side project to Xataka.
There was still almost a year to go before I started writing in this house, but I was very attentive to the keynote that was taking place. 16 years ago Steve Jobs made history by introducing the iPhone and changing the world forever.
First came the smartphone. Then came the iPhone
There were rumors about the arrival of an Apple phone, but they were only the tip of the iceberg of what we got to see that day. The company had kept the iPhone as top secret project, only accessible to the brightest workers. Whoever went to work on the development of the iPhone disappeared. No one knew what he was doing or where he was.
We are not exaggerating when we say that the iPhone changed the whole world. No one remembers the PDAs or Blackberries of yesteryear and that’s the iPhone’s fault. When you see a photograph of them they look like pots to us antediluvians, with incomprehensible keyboards and operating systems that relied too heavily on their desktop interfaces. All of that was destroyed when Steve Jobs scrolled through an iOS menu for the first time.
Applesfera was very young when the original iPhone was announced. The article we dedicate to you at that time it reflected our astonishment and makes clear the difference of time: what we highlighted were the capabilities to consult complete web pages and mail, and we already considered the interface of that “iPhone OS” historical. And that was just the beginning: the App Store would arrive a year later and still change everything once more.
Fifteen years later, it seems that we have reached a “ceiling” of development with linear improvements (the iPhone 15 may follow that trend according to rumors) in all the industry of the smartphone. The future seems to come by other pathsalthough it will take us a long time to know it well and everything will be determined by increasingly strict regulations.
But today, January 9, the iPhone deserves recognition. No matter how much time passes, and no matter how many obstacles and setbacks it encounters, this little pocket-sized device has managed to change everything. Happy anniversary, iPhone; And thanks to Apple for making it possible.
