The iPhone turns 19 this year and it remains Apple's defining product, its largest revenue source, and the template every serious smartphone still follows. The Verge's anniversary retrospective makes one argument clearly: nobody underestimated the iPhone, they just underestimated how completely it would reshape computing itself.
The piece centers on a specific design philosophy Steve Jobs and Jony Ive repeated across products: take the constraints of available hardware and make them the feature. The original iMac wrapped its translucent case around a heavy CRT. The original iPhone had no third-party apps, no 3G, no copy-paste, and sold anyway because the multi-touch screen and the software made every competitor look like a toy. That tension between limitation and elegance is the real story here, not the launch keynote mythology.
This is part of a larger Verge package on Apple's 50th anniversary. Read it for the argument about where the iPhone's influence ends, because the answer the piece is building toward is that it does not.
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