Ten years ago this week—on June 29, 2007 —many waited (in line or online) for the first iPhone's formal release. This week as the device turns 10, we're examining its impact and revisiting the phone that changed it all. As such, we wanted to resurface this trip down iPhone review memory lane. This piece first ran on January 9, 2017 (ten years after Steve Jobs first unveiled his now signature product to the world).

Ten years ago, Steve Jobs hopped onstage at the 2007 MacWorld conference and announced a much-anticipated product that would come to totally eclipse the Mac. It was an iPod, a phone, and an Internet device. It was the first iPhone, and whether you like Apple and its products or not, it drastically altered the face of computing.

Apple stopped attending MacWorld in 2009 (the conference ended entirely in 2015) and Steve Jobs passed away in 2011, but the iPhone is still here and so are we. We've reviewed every single iPhone that Apple has released, and as we did when the iPad turned five, we'll walk down memory lane with both the benefit of hindsight and the stuff we thought at the time.

The iPhone: It begins

Our original iPhone review was written by four people and was nearly 20,000 words long—even in the pre-App Store days, there was a ton to cover. We take pretty much everything about that first phone for granted these days. It's driven almost entirely by its touchscreen, eschewing any sort of hardware keyboard. It had a mini version of the desktop Safari browser that could actually display accurate versions of sites instead of barely formatted piles of text and unsupported HTML and CSS. And it served as such an effective iPod replacement that it eventually cannibalized sales and reduced the iconic music player to a rounding error on Apple's balance sheets.

But we can say all of that pretty easily with the benefit of hindsight. At the time, we hedged our bets, and much of our review was about the things that the first iPhone was missing: no Exchange support, no MMS support, no app store, and no 3G connectivity. It was locked to AT&T, and since Apple hadn't yet succumbed to the subsidized two-year-contract model that helped obscure the true cost of a high-end smartphone, you had to pay $500 or $600 up front for a 4GB or 8GB model. From the review:

We love the concept of the iPhone. It's extremely easy to use and almost entirely self-discoverable; the interface looks better than any other phone—smartphone or not—currently on the market, and it's just plain fun to use. In a perfect world, the iPhone is a perfect 10. But neither the world nor the iPhone is perfect. ...It's clear to us that the iPhone wasn't meant, at the outset anyway, as a smartphone for smartphone people (who typically end up being business people). Instead, the iPhone was meant as a smartphone for everyone else: average people who, until now, had no reason or motivation to get a BlackBerry or something similar that may have been more difficult to use and had way too many features for the average phone user. But the concept of the iPhone doesn't just appeal to average users; it appeals to everyone, including business users. And some would even say that business usage patterns are really at the forefront of what the iPhone should be doing anyway: push e-mail, network independence (you don't have to choose a carrier based on your phone), and custom apps. But like iPod 1.0, this design set out to accomplish the basics of what a full-featured Internet phone should be. With regard to Exchange and push e-mail, we believe that only a fraction of the target audience has use for that. Most people are using POP, IMAP and webmail; iPhone supports these. Of course, we anxiously await what Visto and others are working on with regard to add-on Exchange support. For us personally, the short explanation that we find ourselves giving people most often about how we feel about the iPhone is this: before the iPhone came out, we were planning to buy a new smartphone that was not the iPhone. We are still not buying an iPhone today, after having used it exclusively for some time. However, we are not buying something else either; we plan to wait to see what software (and hardware) updates might come out for the iPhone in the near future. We believe that the iPhone is cool enough to wait for whatever might come out, and we have confidence that many of the nits we have picked can be fixed through a major software update.

The iPhone 3G: An iPhone with 3G

Apple's second iPhone got a tweaked design and that 3G connectivity we wanted, but the most important stuff about it in retrospect was its software and the way it was sold. "iPhone OS 2.0," as it was then called, added the App Store to both the 3G and the first-gen iPhone. Even with all the limits Apple placed on developers, it felt like the full potential of the iPhone was beginning to be realized. By this point, AT&T was also offering the phone for $199 or $299 with a two-year contract for 8GB and 16GB models—sure, you'd end up paying more in the long run, but those subsidies helped downplay the original model's sticker shock and get the phones in the hands of more people.

Our review highlighted those advantages, but we were still lukewarm on the iPhone as a BlackBerry replacement for business users. At the time, in fact, we knocked this device down a couple points on an arbitrary numerical scale Ars was in the process of discontinuing.

The $199 (or $299, or $399, or $499) question is: is it worth it? As usual, the answer is "it depends." If you're using some old, crappy cell phone, you're looking for something new, and you're not allergic to AT&T, then go for it. Do it now. Well, maybe wait until the lines subside. If you've got a smartphone for personal use—iPhone or otherwise—then the answer depends on how much you value the new features. Are 3G, the louder speaker, and GPS worth at least $200 plus $10 more per month for two years? Remember that you can get the iPhone 2.0 firmware and the App Store on an older iPhone as well. For us reviewers who are using the iPhone 3G as a personal phone, we feel happy with the decision to purchase it. Sure, it's not a religious experience, but we're definitely satisfied. If you want to wait and see what comes out of Apple in another six months to a year, however, there's no huge reason not to do so. If you're a business user, then we feel the answer is no, it's not worth it. The original iPhone was not made to be an enterprise device, and the new iPhone isn't either. Although some baby steps have been made, BlackBerry users will find themselves frustrated with the lack of complete Exchange support and may even end up returning their devices, or at least carrying an iPhone alongside a BlackBerry. We already know several who have done this, and it will happen to many more. Although we have dropped numerical scores from our product reviews, we feel the need to enumerate the iPhone 3G in comparison to our original iPhone score. A year ago, we gave the iPhone an 8 overall (with significant caveats based on personal use). The original iPhone was truly an innovation in the mobile space, and it has most certainly shaken things up over the last 12 months. The iPhone 3G is being marketed not only as a faster device, however, but as a business-capable device as well. So, not only is it being compared to the original iPhone, it is being compared more heavily to its competitors in the smartphone space than its predecessors. Because of this, we at Ars have agreed that the new device deserves a 6. It's great as a consumer device, but with enterprise users' expectations having been raised this time around, we feel it still has quite a ways to go.

The iPhone 3GS: S is for speed

Apple's third iPhone was its first "S" model, establishing a pattern that Apple followed until 2016's iPhone 7. One year would bring an iPhone with an all-new design, and the next year would bring a refinement of that design with faster internals and other new tweaks.

For the 3GS, performance really was the main draw—even though the 3G didn't improve performance at all. What this phone did offer was double the RAM (from 128MB to 256MB), a processor bump from a 412MHz ARMv6 CPU to a 600MHz ARMv7 CPU, and a brand-new GPU. Those hardware improvements combined with the new stuff in iPhone OS 3.0 earned the 3GS a solid review from us, but we complained that it still couldn't run third-party apps in the background. Note the comparisons to the Palm Pre, a phone that looked impressive at the time but ultimately ended up imploding: