January 9, 2007 dawned early for me. We had spent most of December in full-on crazy-person mode trying to load the cans for shipping so that we wouldn’t be killed the first week back from our week off between Christmas and New Year’s. So we actually had a glide path to the opening of MacWorld San Francisco. And my wife was in Vegas on the eve of CES for something I don’t even remember. It was just me waking up beside my laptop as Suggs did his Afternoon Tea show on Virgin Radio UK.
I got to the office about two hours before the keynote, both to get good parking and to make sure we could squat the Skybox. Whenever there was a big keynote, they took all the tables out of Caffe Macs on main campus and just set up chairs, and not particularly comfy ones too. But there was a fixed padded half-booth all the way at the back to one side, and it was the habit of my team to get there early and squat it for as long as it took to ensure we would be comfy for whatever was to come.
What we got was the 21st century answer to the Mother of All Demos. In 1968, Doug Englebart had shown off the mouse, windowed computing, videoconferencing – everything that went with the modern personal computer, and twenty-five years before it really hit the mainstream. On 9 January 2007, Steve Jobs – and you could tell from the outset that he knew it, too – introduced the world to the future of truly personal computing: a multitouch UI, persistent cellular connectivity, maps and browsers and email in your pocket, multimedia entertainment, your new camera and your new iPod and your new pager and cellphone. He said “someday every phone will work like this,” and he was not exaggerating in the least.
Ten years on, no one’s phone has put that kind of dent in the universe. Things have improved incrementally – there’s cut and paste now, and LTE kicks the shit out of EDGE, and the battery life is finally acceptable in the iPhone SE after years of struggle, and there’s voice-activated assistants like Siri and real GPS and some car integration – but no product anywhere has reshaped not only its market but the world like the iPhone. No iPhone? No Instagram. No Snapchat. No Uber. Twitter and Facebook and social media in general look very different. The entire concept of phone applications was slapdash at best in 2006 – the dream was to get a SonyEricsson K790 and somehow get the Google Maps Java applet kinda sorta working on its tiny QVGA screen. Internet access on the phone meant WAP decks, or if you were very lucky, finding some European site to get programs that would run on your super-bulky Nokia 6620 with EDGE and no wi-fi.
Not a glorified two-way pager like the Blackberry. Not a thin hapless slab of overpriced sex appeal like the MOTO RAZR. This was the everything phone. This was more than a dent in the universe. This transformed everything.
In a way, it was fine when I left Apple, even though I now tend to think of it as one of the biggest mistakes of my life. Should have sought out something else internal, should have sought some kind of accommodation, shouldn’t have just quit and gone back to IT. But if I’m honest with myself, I was already there for the greatest moment in the company’s history. And it’s the sort of thing I’ll be telling my friends’ grandchildren about someday. I was there the day Apple changed the world.
ETA: vice John Gruber, the phone in my pocket while this announcement was happening was almost certainly my SonyEricsson Z520. Dismissed in some quarters as a “ladies phone”, it offered class-10 GPRS which was almost as fast as EDGE, the best UI on the market (at the time), Bluetooth, speakerphone, easy integration with iSync (remember iSync??) and a good selection of downloadable third-party themes (I remember mostly going between a Celtic FC theme and some sort of animated thing), not to mention the not-inconsiderable advantage of going almost four days between charges. That, plus the loop antenna so it wouldn’t snag AND the size that let it fit in my change pocket AND the fact it was unlocked, made it my daily driver until the iPhone arrived – even over half a dozen other phones with assorted combinations of better camera or better screen or better battery or whatever. SonyEricsson was the cutting edge…until Apple showed up.