Before the iPhone

Every January, the Apple faithful turned their eyes toward San Francisco. Macworld was the pilgrimage—Jobs on stage, keynote, the machine running at full temperature for days afterward. Apple didn’t need a campaign. A single cryptic banner on their homepage was enough to send every message board into a frenzy, and the night before the 2007 keynote was no different.

The hunger was specific: a new Mac OS, an iPhone that had been rumored into near-mythology, iTV, new hardware, and the inevitable "one more thing" at the end. Grainy photos of alleged secret banners and prototype products were already circulating online, obviously fake, as they always were.

And then Jobs walked out and said: an iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator. Three things. One device. The iPhone.

Watching the video of that keynote, you can see on the audience’s faces the exact moment the scale of it lands. It’s a strange thing—a room full of people who think they already understand how technology works, realizing all at once that they don’t. The January 9, 2007 Apple keynote is one of the few product announcements that actually earns the word "historic" rather than just borrowing it. Jobs knew exactly what he had. The crowd barely did.