the one carrier to support iPhone. Apple kept complete control over design, manufacturing and marketing — and they even managed to garner $10 a month from every iPhone Cingular plan. AT&T didn’t even see iPhone until a couple of weeks before it was introduced in January 2007: although such secrecy was common at Apple, it was unheard of in the cell phone industry.

Work on the iPhone really intensified by early 2006. The product was, once again, a tribute to Apple’s unique ability to innovate in the consumer electronics industry. It was a miracle of the marriage of hardware and software, and Apple was the only company that excelled in both. On the software side, it used Mac OS X, the exact same system that was used on Macs. This made iPhone potentially able to run any kind of Mac software. As for hardware, its most revolutionary feature was its touch-screen display, a technology Apple originally developed for a tablet PC... that would eventually be introduced three years later (iPad, folks!).