iPhone

In 2004, Apple chief executive Steve Jobs initiated a confidential development effort codenamed Project Purple at the company's headquarters in Cupertino, California. Mobile phone manufacturers had begun integrating digital music players into handsets which, along other pressures, posed a commercial threat to Apple's dominant iPod business. A furious round of internal hiring coalesced top (and willing) Apple talent and disparate projects into one push for a mobile hardware concept. Two competing approaches rose to the surface: an iPod click-wheel phone codenamed P1 and an experimental multi-touch slate codenamed P2.

Building the touch-screen system required advances in capacitive sensor hardware and touch recognition. In early 2005, Apple acquired FingerWorks, a company founded by Wayne Westerman and John Elias that held pioneering patents for gesture-based multi-finger input. Apple engineers adapted the multi-touch patents to a handheld screen, replacing physical styluses and mechanical keyboards with a dynamic glass interface. Software engineers developed core interaction mechanics, including finger scrolling, physics-based bounce animations, and on-screen keyboard software under strict project secrecy.

Jobs publicly introduced the device on January 9, 2007, at the Macworld convention in San Francisco, presenting it as a combination of an iPod, a mobile telephone, and an internet communicator. The phone went on sale in the United States on June 29, 2007, featuring a 3.5-inch display and an operating system derived from Mac OS X. The final hardware unified visual voicemail, full-scale web browsing, and capacitive touch controls, strongly contributing to modern smartphone design we use today.