On June 29, 2007, iPhones went on sale to consumers for the first time. Steve Jobs had announced the groundbreaking device months earlier, in a notable address at that year’s MacWorld event. Throngs of people packed up their lawn chairs, their laptops and their fortitude to be among the first in the country to buy the latest lusted-after electronic object from Apple Inc.: the iPhone.
Apple considers the iPhone its biggest product launch since the Macintosh in 1984. The iPod portable music player, introduced in the weeks after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was a more subdued affair. But Apple’s venture into mobile phones has been greeted with the kind of fervor usually reserved for game-console debuts or hard-to-score concert tickets. The Cupertino, Calif., company is trying to leverage the popularity of its iPod, of which it has sold 100 million, to break into the crowded yet lucrative cellular phone market.
Apple closed its 164 U.S. stores at 2 p.m. Friday to prepare for the sale of the iPhone, which began at 6 p.m. “There’s nothing like coming here to see people excited about it,” said Greg Joswiak, Apple’s vice president of iPod product marketing. “These are just normal people. They’re not computer geeks. They’re normal folks.”
Long lines formed for days before the release at Apple and AT&T retail stores across the nation. At the flagship Apple store on Fifth Avenue in New York, some customers had been camping out for at least four days prior to the launch. People were sitting in deckchairs, sleeping on the pavement, and enduring various weather conditions in New York, the weather was described as hot, muggy, and even involving “torrential rain accompanied by flashes of lightning.” Customers were allowed to purchase up to two iPhones on a first-come, first-served basis.
It was like that at Apple stores around the country. In a scene evocative of the annual Rose Parade, people broke out their folding chairs and formed a line along Colorado Boulevard in Old Pasadena to wait for the Apple store to begin the sale. At the Westfield Century City mall in Los Angeles, 150 people were sitting in lounge chairs and on sleeping bags, watching movies on their Mac computers, listening to their iPods and chatting with their neighbors in line about how many phones might be in the stores.
The early sales were strong, with Apple selling an estimated 270,000 iPhones domestically in its first week. The release captured a high-end, tech-savvy market, despite the initial price of $499 (4GB) and $599 (8GB) (both with a required two-year contract), and criticisms that it lacked features common on other smartphones at the time (like a physical keyboard or 3G connectivity).
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