Six Weeks Before the iPhone Shipped, Steve Jobs Demanded the Plastic Screen Be Replaced With Glass

On the morning of January 9, 2007, at Macworld in San Francisco, Steve Jobs walked onto a stage and used the same line three different ways: "a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, a breakthrough Internet communications device." Then he repeated the line and said the three were one device. The first iPhone went on sale on June 29 of that year, at $499 for the 4 GB model and $599 for the 8 GB, both subsidized by a two-year contract with AT&T's predecessor Cingular.

Apple had been working on the device in secret for about thirty months, at an estimated cost of $150 million. Most of the team had not seen the work the other half was doing; the project was split between Tony Fadell's iPod-based prototype (a click wheel iPhone) and Scott Forstall's mobile-OS-X team. Forstall's team won. By the time of the keynote, the device's hardware was largely done — except, six weeks before launch, Jobs noticed that the plastic screen on his prototype had been scratched by the keys in his pocket. He demanded a switch to glass. Foxconn won an emergency bid against Wintek and built a dedicated factory wing for what became Corning's chemically strengthened Gorilla Glass.

The phone itself was less radical than the demo suggested. It ran on 2G EDGE rather than 3G; it had no app store, no copy-paste, no MMS messaging. Apple sold 270,000 units in the first weekend and reached one million units in 74 days. The iPhone 3G arrived in July 2008 with 3G and the App Store and addressed most of the gaps.