Today in 2007, the iPhone went on sale.
Introducing it in January 2007, Steve Jobs said:
Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything… today, we're introducing three revolutionary products... An iPod, a phone, and an Internet communicator…These are not three separate devices, this is one device, and we are calling it iPhone.
The Economist reported on the first day of our lives with the revolution that changed everything in “Where Would Jesus Queue?”
The blogosphere had already christened the iPhone, an allegedly revolutionary handset made by Apple, the “Jesus phone” weeks before it went on sale. The actual launch day, June 29th, became known as “iDay” among Apple cultists. Queues started forming days in advance at many of Apple's 164 shops in America. Depending on the location, the scenes had flavours of Woodstock, Mardi Gras, or—in Silicon Valley's Palo Alto, say—an Apple programmers' conference.
Lev Grossman on Brian Merchant’s The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone (New York Times, June 19, 2017):
“The One Device” isn’t definitive, but it’s a start. What we need is the critical equivalent of a Pentalobe, a book that will crack open the meaning of the iPhone, to properly interrogate this digital symbiont, or parasite, that has introduced new kinds of both connection and disconnection into our lives. If the iPhone was a revolution, who or what exactly was overthrown? One of the stories Merchant tells comes from Grignon [one of the iPhone’s key engineers], who was the first person to receive a call on the iPhone. The punch line is that he didn’t pick up. “Instead of being this awesome Alexander Graham Bell moment, it was just like, ‘Yeah,… go to voice mail,’” Grignon says. “I think it’s very apropos, given where we are now.”