Technology History | Moscone West — The Phone Was Announced Six Months Before Anyone Could Buy One

Apple announced the iPhone in this building on 9 January 2007 and then sold nothing for almost six months.

That gap is the interesting part. Apple's habit was to announce close to shipping, and here it stood in front of a Macworld audience with a product that would not reach a store until 29 June.

Steve Jobs opened by describing three devices — a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a phone, and an internet communicator — before letting the audience work out that he meant one object.

He called it a product that was "literally five years ahead of any other mobile phone", which turned out to be roughly the head start Apple got.

Pricing came the same morning: $499 for four gigabytes and $599 for eight, and Cingular was named the exclusive American carrier in a separate release that day.

It was not the first smartphone. The IBM Simon, sold by BellSouth from 16 August 1994 at $899, put a touchscreen, calendar, email and fax in one handset thirteen years earlier, and Nokia, BlackBerry and Palm filled the decade between.

What changed here was the interface argument, that a phone should have a screen and almost nothing else.

The keynote carried a quieter announcement at its end. Apple Computer, Inc. dropped the word Computer and became Apple Inc., having carried the older name for its first thirty years.

Moscone West still stands at 800 Howard Street, three floors of glass at the corner of Fourth, running conferences that have nothing to do with Apple.

The company said 2009 would be its last year at Macworld, and it now launches products in a theatre it built for itself in Cupertino, so events of this scale no longer come to this address.

Cover: the registration hall inside Moscone West during Apple's WWDC in June 2005, eighteen months before the iPhone keynote. The second photograph shows the original iPhone at left, beside the 3G and the iPhone 4.

Photos: Mobius, public domain; Yutaka Tsutano, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.