Being an Apple fan and tech geek, I'm not ashamed to admit cutting work with a friend on June 29, 2007 to wait in line for six hours, and hand over $600 for an 8GB iPhone on top of a two-year contract. It was worth it for my friend and I to have first dibs on a device that would go down in history.
We didn't know it at the time, but that simple smartphone, with no third-party applications, had enough quality software and hardware to warrant its $499 for 4GB and $599 for 8GB price tag. Just as Apple claimed it would, it reinvented the telephone with the iPhone.
With the recent news that Apple is officially going to make the first generation iPhone obsolete, I wanted to take a look back at how things have changed in the iPhone world and how things have remained the same, by comparing my original iPhone to my iPhone 5.
The original iPhone was, in my opinion, the best-designed iPhone. It had a beautiful form and was wrapped in aluminum and glass, something consumers were not used to in a smartphone at that time. The iPhone had a 3.5-inch 320 x 480 LCD display, iPhone OS 1, 412MHz processor, 128MB of RAM, 4GB or 8GB of internal storage, and 2-megapixel camera. The user interface is basically the same in iPhone OS 1 as it is in iOS 6.1.3. Thankfully, we are expecting a major redesign when Apple releases iOS 7. It's about time and long overdue.
When Apple was designing the iPhone 5 it was pretty clear that it wanted to bring back the high-end feel of the all-aluminum first generation iPhone smartphone that began Apple's reign as king of the smartphone world.
The iPhone 5 has a 4-inch Retina Display, 640 x 1136, LED-backlit IPS LCD, iOS 6.1.3, 1.2GHz A6 dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM, 16GB, 32GB and 64GB of internal storage, 8-megapixel rear camera, 1.2-megapixel front facing camera.
The specs of the iPhone 5 have gotten better compared to the original iPhone but the OS and even the general look of the iPhone have remained intact. Apple seems to have been taking the attitude of "don't fix what's not broken," but even after being released in 2007 my original iPhone basically looks and acts very much like my current iPhone 5. It still has the same Home button, swipe to unlock, navigation is exactly the same, and all of the core apps have remained largely unchanged.
Sure, we've received updates to iOS through the years to add useful features, but at this time Apple needs to wow us with iOS 7. If you took any other smartphone that was made in 2007 and put it next to a smartphone from 2013, you would expect to find major differences in terms of UI and physical design. Six years is a long time in the tech world to keep an OS looking and acting the same, no matter how great the internal specs are.
The good news is that we should expect a major redesign of iOS 7 in June and from the sound of it, it seems like Apple will once again wow us and reinvent the iPhone, iPad, iPad mini and iPod touch through the innovative and groundbreaking software the company is known for.
