My Reporting Notes From the Original iPhone Launch 15 Years Ago

pcmag.com:

Fifteen years ago, Apple put a phone in our hands that was very different than the iPhone you hold today—and very different from what came before.

I never got to talk to Steve Jobs about the first iPhone. I had to take at least some of my lead from executives at Cingular, the wireless carrier (later AT&T) that gave us a pitch at January 2007's CES trade show about how the new phone would change things. Its perspective, as you may guess, was a bit different from Apple's.

While we now associate the iPhone with making smartphones broadly popular and offering millions of apps, the Cingular execs wanted to talk more about how it was locked down. A few PCMag stories came from that press event: Cingular: We Made Apple Bend and Apple's Revolution For The Few.

To celebrate the arrival of the phone which changed so much, I'm publishing those CES meeting notes, with annotations giving some context. Because my handwriting is awful and I use a lot of shorthand, there's also a transcription below. (My editor asks: "does that say, I hate Clay Aiken?")

Things sure have changed, haven't they?

Also check out 15 Years Ago, the iPhone Created 'Big Tech' and The Top 5 iPhones of All Time.

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