A Decade Ago, Apple's iPhone Transformed the World
FILE - Then Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, speaks in London during the launch of the European iTunes online music store in this June 15, 2004, photo.
In the two years leading up to June 29, 2007, when Apple’s iPhone went on sale, company co-founder Steve Jobs and a select team were hard at work secretly designing what would become a global game changer.
A father and his two daughters take a break from sightseeing at a Starbucks in Washington, D.C. (C. Maddux/VOA)
The initiative even had a code name, "Project Purple." By all accounts, the project was pained.
Inside a secure room, a collection of super smart techies, ate, slept, worked way beyond the typical eight hour day, fought and, at times overthought, the design of this new slick mobile device.
Before that day, flip phones, Blackberries and even the occasional pager were commonplace.
Pay phones were rarer still.
Photo gallery: America's love affair with the ever-evolving phone
From pay phones, flip phones to the Blackberry, nothing compared to that very first iPhone
1/10As coins slide down before her eyes, a German woman uses a new long distance dial telephone for public booths, July 17,1957.(AP Photo)
2/10FILE - This Wednesday, April 14, 2016, file photo, shows a push-button landline telephone, in Whitefield, Maine. According to a U.S. government survey released Thursday, May 4, 2017, homes and apartments with only cellphone service exceeded 50 percent for
3/10A pay phone requests U.S. coins in the border town of San Ysidro, California September 2, 2015. Picture taken September 2, 2015. REUTERS/Mike Blake - RTX1R4MF
4/10The Peek is displayed Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2008, in New York. A New York-based startup is trying to fill the niche the BlackBerry abandoned with a sleek, cheap e-mail pager that hits Target stores next Monday, Sept. 15, 2008. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)
5/10Apple CEO Steve Jobs talks about the Apple iPhone at the Apple World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco, Monday, June 11, 2007. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma)
7/10New driver Brandi Eadie, 16, looks down at her cell phone to read a text message as she drives through a rubber-cone course in Seattle on Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2010 to demonstrate the dangers of phone use while driving. Eadie, who volunteered for the Driven
8/10President Barack Obama takes a "selfie" on stage with a a student from the ReNew Cultural Arts Academy, from New Orleans, during the White House Talent Show in the East Room of the White House, Tuesday, May 20, 2014 in Washington. The talent show was host
9/10A customer tries an iPhone in an Apple store, in this June, 29, 2007 file photo, in Seattle. Apple Inc. is expected to release quarterly earnings on Wednesday, July 25, 2007.
Ten years later, Jobs is no longer with us, having passed away in 2011.
But most of the public is hunched over a hand-held device, iPhone or not, accessing the internet, watching videos on demand, and conducting mobile banking.
A couple on vacation sit side by side in a hotel in Washington, D.C., but are busy reading their smartphones. (C. Maddux/VOA)
Time magazine published the final public video appearance of Jobs before he died after a 10-year battle with pancreatic cancer.
Apple, of course, is still redesigning, and hopefully improving upon, that first, innovative cell phone.
Later this year, the iPhone 8 will be released amid much speculation and apparent premature leaks.
