First iPhone in 2024 - Review & Retrospective

Now turning 17, the first generation iPhone (aka iPhone 2G) has impacted every facet of modern society. While it may be obsolete, looking closer we can see the incredibly thorough blueprint & foundation established by Steve Jobs & his team- forming the DNA of any smartphone today.

0:00 - 17 Years of iPhone
4:06 - iTunes Phone
6:29 - iPhone Design & Longevity
11:10 - Incredible Display
14:30 - Who wants a stylus?
18:48 - Home Button
22:43 - Foundational Features
26:32 - No Keyboard, No Problem
28:05 - Death of 2G
31:20 - Camera & the Pinch
33:57 - Specs, & Storage
36:38- Pricing in 2024
40:29 - Jailbreaking & Usability
42:20 - iPhone OS 3 & Apps
49:15 - Technological Revolution
54:45 - Conclusion

[Tech]

Sorry for the delay, posted this a couple days ago but had to deal with some copyright shenanigans. Thanks for watching!

The original iPhone managed to establish so many of the fundamentals of any smartphone today, it's actually absurd. Our phones nowadays are bigger & fancier, but the core experience genuinely isn't all that different 17 years later.

...I promise the next video won't take another 2 months. Probably. Maybe. Hope you enjoy this one, I know I enjoyed making it!

[CodyHeap]

Crazy to think we are about as far away from the iPhone 6s as the iPhone 2G when the iPhone 6s was released

[sburton]

When the original iPhone was released in 2007, I was only 23 years old at the time of its release. I turn 40 in May of this year.

[llorenstorrespr]

The tech world haven't had that same feeling about a technology ever since the original iphone cameout in (2007), the world stood still because of the iPhone. (2007) will always be remembered for that!

[STRAWBERRYMoi]

This was peak Technological Innovation.

[sammyt]

I had the Nokia N95 when this came out and I remember feeling so smug comparing it to that first iPhone when a friend of mine got one of the latter. I just felt the Nokia had far superior hardware, especially in the camera department, and I saw no way that newfangled iPhone thing was going to make it against competition like that! Little that I knew then that iPhone had just heralded the era when software, rather than hardware, was the main reason people bought a smartphone (which is a term that didn't exist until iPhone came out I believe). With the benefit of hindsight, it's obvious now that there was no way Nokia's Symbian (and its later, ill-fated iterations) could compete with iOS and, later on, Android, no matter how good its hardware was.

[farv]

13:50 Omg that air power animation is so good

[MrMoogle]

I still clearly remember the first time I saw an iPhone in person. It was on a flight from Salt Lake City to Indianapolis. The guy sitting behind me had one and I asked if I could see it. He was super cool about showing me everything it could do and letting me play around with it. I bought one shortly after when it got the price cut. I was already on Cingular/AT&T at the time so that worked out well. Thinking back on how limited that phone was by today's standards is comical. But at the time, it was amazing.

[Dwall]

I love this phone! I still have my dad‘s with the original box! It still works and I plug it in every now and then just so the battery doesn’t go flat.

[sigiligus]

The iPhone’s big revolutionary feature was the huge (for the time) multitouch screen. It actually had even less functionality than basically any earlier smartphone, but the UI and big capacitive touchscreen are what really changed the market. Remember, iPhone didn’t even launch with copy/paste, an essential feature for business smartphone usage.

[mashy]

@21:04. I remember that in iOS 2 and 3. Double clicking the home button did open the audio controller. Which was like a small blue bubble with media controls and volume slider under it.

(That may be an iPod touch 1st gen thing though)

[granath]

Thank you for this video! Watching this on my iPhone 14 pro Max, but my first iPhone was the 4s. First iOS device was the original iPod touch (RIP)! This video is exactly what the iPhone deserves! 🔥🔥🔥

[rondobrondo]

Love your videos man, I've been binge watching your stuff since yesterday after watching this video. I think you have a great sense and skill for editing. I can also tell who your YouTube inspirations are :3, and I approve there too. You're also a fairly great writer too, even at a young age and fairly early in your career. I've been looking for a tech channel like yours that has just the right ratio of personal opinion to historical fact, with perfect pacing for both of those aspects, with just the right aesthetic in the editing for all my tastes.

It's usually not enough to get just a dry history of the facts; it helps to have someone add in enough of their own critical views of the information to provide 'personal context' to the facts. Makes it easy for the viewer to understand where things sit in YOUR opinion and where things sit RELATIVE to each other, without pushing history and fact to the side. It adds additional information to the timeline and lets me temper everything with the context that you provide, both personal and also relevant context to our current understanding of the state of the art. 

The reason I'm writing all this is because I'm a huge apple fan! lol. And that is because my family has been using their computers since 1981, and I have been personally using them since 1997. My dad is a professional photographer, and so has always been a huge apple fan; and he is a very lazy, but discerning buyer. He only cares about professional productivity and simplicity for his personal products so he can focus on his professional work. He loves to buy the best, but loves simplicity and ease of use, so he's always bought the shiny new apple stuff. 

And even though I usually don't get his hand me downs because they are too expensive not to sell off later, he'd always get me the low end stuff because he knew I was more of a minimalist, low-expectation kind of person. I am happy using low end stuff that is several years old, and I still am that way. So like iPod shuffle, iPod nano, low end iPhones, giving me old computers from my grandparentsI think apple makes the best laptops in the world, the best phones in the world, best operating system for PC use. They make the best of a lot of things. I was using a 2015 15" MBP that I bought for $1200 for 8 years until my cats broke it lol. Now I'm happily using a 16" M1 MBP that is basically the same size as a 15" MBP 2015.

Also, I do have one tip for you as a photographer, I feel like you'd be better off if you kept your camera at a lower angle, like much lower, like orthogonal to your body. Especially with your posture, it tends to leave you at an angle that makes your glasses frames cover your eyes as well as some other strange angle issues. Not tryna tell you how to live, but I think you'd look better with a lower angle. Unless you want your persona to specifically look like a hunched over gargoyle that leaves your hair as the dominant feature of your look. It's not a bad thing if that's what you want to have yourself look. It is definitely much different than the typical tech tuber.

[Damariobros]

49:24 Steve Jobs and his team not only came up with all this, but they did it while being split up, having it kept secret from each other. The software team never saw the hardware and the hardware team never saw the software until it was time to put them together, and only Steve Jobs knew all the details.

[UltraCenterHQ]

14:33 I feel like Steve would love how companies are moving to one single port. USB C

[phazonlord]

Love watching these videos because while the iPhone 2G was groundbreaking for society and the industry in general, it's clearly as day that the first proper iPhone to finally get everything right into a package still recognisable today was the iPhone 4. It was so beautiful and well made that I still regarded it as one of the most beautiful phones ever made and was so happy when Apple brought that design language back with the iPhone 12. I'm still an Android guy through and through but getting back those square sides and USB-C is definitely tempting me to give it a chance.

[sburton]

The closest device that I have to the original iPhone would be the original iPod touch that Apple released a little later in 2007. It still has iPhone OS 1.1.5, so on this version, the App Store still didn't exist yet. I remember to be able to sync music to it, I had to use an older version of iTunes on a Windows XP PC.

[rickyrosay]

The photos you took from the iphone 2G give off an old school feel reminds of watching a old youtube video using modern youtube they have that grainy, more muted colors makes me nostalgic

[MudkipOnYT]

Rest in Peace, Sam.

You were one of the greatest people I’ve ever had the privilege of being friends with, rest easy, friend. ❤

[rondobrondo]

I think the photos from the older devices actually look better than the photos from the new devices haha. Like from the perspective of an ex-professional photographer, I think they are objectively more pleasing and grounded in fundamental aesthetics of general photos. My dad used to quote something from Jobs that you mention here, "People like to focus on tangibles of photos, like megapixels... we think about how to make better pictures." Or whatever the quote exactly was, since my dad has 'quoted' it so many times that I've gotten it mixed up over the years.