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Phones · Apple iPhone

Apple iPhone first generation

6owners with an opinion
60%of verdicts positive
2/0positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for value and display; criticized for reliability and performance.

What people wrote

Likes it
>I dunno if you were alive at the time but that's not really what happened. I was pretty alive at the time, I was an intern on the iPhone team at Apple when it launched and the run-up, so I was using the first gen phone/touch all day every day, and I was paying pretty close attention to its launch (but just watching what was said in the press/by the people I knew, nothing privileged on the sales side). Looking around at sales figures, it looks like the first gen sold low single digit million units total, 1.4M in 2007. The 3G sold 1M on the first weekend (the press release tagline was "Twice as Fast at Half the Price", and that lower price is a big part of what brought it mainstream). Now they’re up to a couple hundred million phones per year. I wouldn't say it was a "miss", it was very good compared to the status quo trash on the market, but it also wasn't the company defining success it turned into until the following gens, it made much less revenue than Macs at the time, and the Mac was pretty niche. My point was that it took a bit to really dial it in, and Apples first gen products don’t usually reflect their eventual success very well. I don’t think Vision Pro is at 1M sold yet, and Apple products definitely have more sales reach now, but again, I wouldn’t count it out. I was pretty impressed when I tried it, they really nailed a lot of the hard technical problems, especially around text rendering, and if it was 1/3 the cost, I’d definitely have one now, maybe at 1/2. W…
Likes it
I’m both buyer of iPhone first gen and Vision Pro on day one. The iPhone was an amazing value: replaced my nokia cellphone, had an amazing touch UI with a gorgeous display that was a delight to use compared to anything else at the time, loved to be able to properly check my email and browse the Web anywhere with WiFi, it replaced my iPod, watching youtube anywhere was super useful… I couldn’t get enough. Value prop was super clear on day one I don’t use my Vision Pro at all. Do you think I’m an exception or the norm?
Neutral
It's clear that this is a first gen problem. I remember owning the very first iPhone. It didn't work at first in Australia, the cellular band wasn't the same. It had no store, very few Apple apps. But it still felt like the future. It's worth remembering how silly things look today and ask the question, what will it look like in 10-15 years?
Doesn’t like it
I had a barely used first generation iPhone in my safe and went to get it the other day to show it to some friends just to discovered it had blown up. It didn't look charred as your modem but it definitely exploded. Next day I ordered a few fire retardant boxes where I put all of my lithium batteries and power banks.
Likes it
I administer about 40 servers under linux (well mostly with Chef and docker), I used to use linux on my main computer for 6 years (debian, gentoo and ubuntu). I have a freebsd server at home that I use for fun. And yet despite all that, my main computer for work nowadays is a mbp retina because I like OS X as an OS and as a GUI (despite some of it's bugs and annoyances). So I don't really agree with you. In term of hardware, I've had a few lemons and I've complained loudly but under Applecare, Apple replaced the mbp retina I had that failed 3 times with a new model (which runs perfectly fin) so I can't really complain. I've also had very long lived devices from Apple, my first ibook lasted 4-5 years until my parents sat on it, my wife's old powerbook lasted 6 years until it was stolen, my first generation iphone still works perfectly fine... One thing I did learn though is never to buy a first generation model from Apple, they tend to be unreliable (at least in my anecdotical experience)
Doesn’t like itDoesn’t say they own it
It is a far more complex story than that. Nokia had some of the first commercially successful smart phones in the world. The Nokia 9100, 9300 and 9500 were tremendously powerful devices in terms of their capabilities, running full multitasking operating systems. There were two things that hampered companies like Nokia going further: battery life and data. The relationship between handset manufacturers and telcos in the 2000s was ... Complex. Telcos had an immense amount of influence over manufacturers and dictated many of the terms, from how handsets could interact with their network, through to branding and "value added services" provided through customised software. Failure to comply would mean a handset could be blacklisted from the network. So companies like Nokia had to play the game. They couldn't run full desktop-class browsers, for example, because the carriers were worried about their networks crumbling. Then Apple came along, and reversed the relationship. They dictated the terms and told the carriers they needed to meet their requirements to carry their handset. Many carriers resisted. Many only agreed to carry it once all their competitors had agreed to carry it. And the first iPhone ... wasn't great. Carrier networks initially struggled under the load. Pages loaded slowly. Battery life was abhorrent. The first iPhone didn't support apps. In most ways, the iPhone was far less sophisticated than available Nokias, Blackberries and Windows Mobile devices. But people…
Doesn’t like itDoesn’t say they own it
Thing that people forget is iPhone was not an instant success - the first gen was expensive (for the time, for a phone), it had no app store, no 3G so the internet was slow. For a time dumbphones were still overselling smartphones. It got better as mobile internet got quicker and people got used to the shorter batteries.
Likes itDoesn’t say they own it
I think if you find a good, objective history of the first iPhone, you'll find that it was groundbreaking in many meaningful ways. It was a full unix OS, not some mobile-specific trash like the others (Symbian, Windows Mobile, Blackberry). Capacitive touch wasn't an invention, but a premium form of touchscreens (most were resistive). Having nearly 60fps high quality 3d accelerated animations on a phone also contributed to a heavily premium feeling for the software. It enabled things like Inertial Scrolling, which among other things (like first class typography afforded by using OS X, and a fully standards compliant web browser), none of which were "innovations" in the sense of "we came up with this first", but more exceptionally good engineering in service of a great experience. In almost every way (apart from the "traditional phone metrics" like 2G ironically), the iPhone was a huuuuuge leap forward from the status quo. It might be true that anyone else could've done it. But nobody else did. It wasn't just luck that Apple did.