Photos: Waiting in line for the first iPhone taught us about patience and priorities
10 years ago, desire and the day of reckoning
Oh 2007, what a time to be alive! The global financial crisis was yet to hit, economic optimism was soaring, and Barack Obama was inspiring hope on the campaign trail.
In January of that year, Steve Jobs made his historic announcement of the iPhone—a first-of-it’s-kind celly that doubled as a wireless web browser with an mp3 player to boot. Finally people would be able to leave their laptops at home, put down their clunky iPods, and shelve those ugly Nokias for good.
In that speech Jobs gave us the world’s first real smartphone and the keys to a hyper connected future. We were liberated. But did we really know what we were signing up for?
Ten years on, the iPhone’s colossal impact on how we talk, eat, buy, and love is vividly clear. Jobs’ gadget has fundamentally changed the world—though not necessarily for the better. Smartphones might make it easier to get a taxi, but they also make it harder to sleep, read a book, or maintain a relationship.
Guess that’s the trade off.
The first iPhone hit stores at 6 pm on June 29, 2007. Thousands queued for the release—some waiting overnight in mercifully warm summer weather to be the first to hold the sleek new contraption. An interesting facet of these pictures of Americans lining up outside Apple stores like a new Batman movie is how many of them are still on laptops. Presumably they were picking up WiFi from inside. But the tableau of people using computers outdoors in public would soon give way to the wave of smartphones vying for our eyeballs, and the now constant spectacle of mobile distraction. If laptops freed us from the tyranny of the office, smartphones planted it firmly in our pockets.
