steve jobs iphone 4 presentation

4 Presentation Lessons From Steve Jobs' iPhone 4 Press Conference

On Friday, Apple CEO Steve Jobs held a press conference to address "Antennagate" , or the issues that iPhone 4 users have been having with the phone's antenna.

With the conference, Jobs ended up coming out on top by promising a free solution for customers and emphasizing that the issue was over-hyped (and backing it up with data.)

The online world was charged with discussions about the presentation (and still is) -- and not only because it concerned Apple. There were a few specific things Jobs did that ensured his presentation would go viral.

Fast Company spoke with Dan Zarella, a scientist who studies how presentations turn into viral sensations, about what Jobs did right during his presentation to make sure it was talked about afterwards.

Related stories

Here are 4 tips anyone can incorporate into their presentations:

1. Focus just on what your viewers came to hear about. Jobs spoke directly to the concerns and issues about iPhone 4 that had been raised by the media -- who were also the individuals in attendance.

2. Give the audience new, relevant information. Zarella points out that Jobs didn't waste time re-hashing what the company had already said on the matter; instead, he supplied new data on how the company tests its phones and how many phones had actually been returned. Not surprisingly, that was the information that got tweeted out, blogged about, and searched for afterwards.

3. Make your slides concise. Jobs' signature presentation style is simple: one image and thought per slide, which is conducive to repeatable sound bites.

4. Repeat your most important messages. Just count how many times Jobs uttered a variation of the phrase "We love our users," or it appeared on-screen.

Read the entire article over at Fast Company >

• Main content

Steve Jobs introduces iPhone 4 at WWDC (live blog)

CNET is covering the keynote at the Apple developer confab live on Monday, where Jobs has just announced details of the next version of the iPhone.

Editor's note: We used Cover It Live for this event, so if you missed the live blog, you can still replay it in the embedded component below. Replaying the event will give you all the live updates along with commentary from our readers and CNET editors Kent German and Josh Lowensohn. For those of you who just want the updates, we've included them in regular text here. You can find a brief summary of what was announced in our followup article " WWDC 2010: What you need to know ." For all the latest iPhone coverage from CNET, click here .

SAN FRANCISCO--On Monday morning Steve Jobs will take the stage at the company's Worldwide Developers Conference at Moscone West here. In all likelihood, he will be introducing the next version of the iPhone. And we will be there to bring you live coverage of the event.

Jobs' keynote will start at 10 a.m. PDT Monday. I'll be live blogging all the news from his speech, along with CNET's iPhone reviewer Kent German and CNET News' Josh Lowensohn. For a reminder of when the event will start, sign up below. You can also bookmark this page and come back here Monday morning.

Though the iPhone is widely expected to be the star of the show, expect more details about iPhone OS 4, the iPad, and lots about apps. The theme of this year's conference is, after all, "The Center of the App Universe."

Jason Howell, Rafe Needleman, Donald Bell, and Brian Cooley will be doing a special edition of Buzz Out Loud while the event is running. There's an embed of that video podcast at the bottom of this page, in case you want to listen to their commentary while following along with the Cover It Live live blog. Also, check out the official WWDC 2010 Bingo card and photos of workers setting up for the event on Friday.

9:51 a.m. PDT: Welcome to our WWDC 2010 live blog. I'm here with CNET's Kent German inside Moscone West where we're listening to Louis Armstrong while waiting for the event to begin. Josh Lowensohn will also be on hand to help out answering your questions once the event gets going. It'll probably kick off in about 10 minutes.

9:55 a.m. (Josh Lowensohn): We're getting a lot of questions about a live video feed. Apple does not allow such things, which is why you don't see one from us, or anyone else. We will be bringing you the news and photos of the keynote as it happens, as well as video highlights immediately afterwards. Apple typically posts a full stream of the keynote a day later.

9:57 a.m.: OK, they tell us we're about to get started momentarily.

9:58 a.m. (Josh Lowensohn): Besides our coverage here, CNET's Buzz Out Loud is doing live, real-time (same thing I guess) podcast coverage of the keynote, which you can watch/listen to here .

10:02 a.m.: Lots of Louis Armstrong while we wait.

10:01 a.m.: OK, lights are going down. Music is fading out. Here we go.

Steve Jobs takes the stage. Standing ovation from the WWDC crowd.

10:02 a.m. (Kent German): Funny to see media people shooting photos of Jobs with an Android phone.

10:02 a.m.: He says it's great to be here. The conference has 5,200 attendees from 57 countries this year.

10:03 a.m.: He's going to start with some iPad updates first.

10:04 a.m.: Apple has sold more than 2 million iPads, as we know, in 59 days. It's in 10 countries total. Now he's going to show a quick video about it.

10:06 a.m.: The iPad will be in 19 countries by the end of July, he says. There are 8,500 iPad apps, plus 200,000 iPhone apps that also work on it. That's 17 apps per iPad that have been downloaded, according to Jobs.

10:08 a.m.: Now he's running through some apps: Financial Times, a DJ app, Elements (the Periodic Table), and others. He says the Elements people earned more on the sales on the iPad in one day than five years of Google ads on the company's same site.

10:09 a.m.: Now he's talking about iBooks. In 65 days, users have downloaded 5 million books. About 2.5 books per iPad. "That's terrific," he says.

The share of e-books going through the iBooks store is 22 percent in 8 weeks, according the publishers on the iBooks store. Some enhancements from iBooks: You can now make notes.

10:10 a.m.: There's a new control where you can tap to bookmark the page. On the table of contents you'll see all your bookmarks and notes too.

One of the biggest requests was the ability to view and read PDFs. That's now built in, he says.

10:11 a.m.: You can select between books or PDFs within your iBooks shelves. That will be out a little bit later this month.

10:11 a.m.: I'd like to talk about the App Store, he says. "I want to make something really clear. We support two platforms at Apple." The first one is HTML5, a fully open and uncontrolled platform, he says.

10:12 a.m.: We fully support that. Apple's browsers are in the lead in terms of supporting the HTML5 standard. Anyone can write HTML5 apps and have them on iPhone, Mac, iPod, iPod Touch, iPad.

The second platform we support is the App Store.

10:13 a.m.: There are 225,000 apps there. Now I'd like to talk about that. You've read a lot about our process of approving apps. We get 15,000 apps sumbitted every week. And they come in in up to 30 different languages. "Guess what? 95 percent are approved within seven days."

10:14 a.m.: Why don't we approve the other 5 percent? The No. 1 reason? An app doesn't do what the developer says it does. The second reason is use of private APIs. We're clear on this.

Developers who do that know what they're doing, but they can't. Third reason we reject apps? They crash. "If you were in our shoes, you'd reject those app for the same reason. Just wanted to give you those facts."

10:15 a.m. (Kent German): Interesting that Jobs is addressing the app approval process so thoroughly. We heard the 95 percent number twice.

10:16 a.m.: Now, I'd like to highlight eBay, he says. Was on iPhone last year. It was downloaded 10 million times. Will apps all be that successful, he says? He's going to show us three new entertainment-oriented apps. First up is Netflix. Reed Hastings is up on stage to talk about it.

10:16 a.m.: Hastings says the iPad app has gone really well. 2,000 downloads, he says. But now, Netflix will be on the iPhone this summer, for free.

10:17 a.m.: They're demo-ing it now. Same service you get on your TV or laptop or iPad. Can start a movie on your TV and pick it up on your iPhone. Also will get your recommendations, your viewing history, and the entire catalog and your queue.

10:18 a.m.: You can add movies to your queue right from the phone. It is using the HTTP adaptive bit rate playback technology over Wi-Fi or 3G. That's it from Netflix. Next up is Zynga, the social games company.

10:19 a.m.: Mark Pincus, Zynga's CEO takes the stage.

10:19 a.m. (Kent German): Hoping the app parade is short and we get on to the big news soon!

10:19 a.m.: "Farming" for the iPhone is what he'll be introducing. It's FarmVille for the iPhone.

10:20 a.m.: It has 70 million monthly active users, he says. Now they're demo-ing the game. The same farm you can build on Facebook can also be accessed on the iPhone.

10:21 a.m.: You can buy a snow leopard on the iPhone version only, Zynga says. Cute.

10:23 a.m. (Kent German): Hmmm. Not sure that more Farmville notifications are what we need.

10:23 a.m.: It will be available by the end of June.

10:23 a.m.: Next (and last, we think) is Activision. They're going to talk about Guitar Hero.

10:24 a.m.: Karthik Bala, SVP at Activision, says there's a new iPhone and iPod Touch version of Guitar Hero. He's showing a demo of how the app will work.

10:26 a.m.: You can download new songs to play right over the iPhone, Bala says. He's also giving us a nice air guitar demonstration.

10:26 a.m. (Kent German): Wow. The music got MUCH louder during this demo.

10:26 a.m.: The new version of the app is on sale today for $2.99. And they're off. Steve is back.

10:27 a.m.: He says last week they crossed 5 billion downloads from the App Store. His favorite stat, he says, is coming up. 70 percent of app sales goes to developers. To date, Apple has paid $1 billion to developers.

10:28 a.m.: There's a lot of cheering for that, naturally.

10:28 a.m.: Now, he says, he's going to talk about the iPhone.

10:29 a.m.: "There have been a lot of stats floating around about it. Some of them are OK. Some of them are questionable, you can make your own judgments about market share." For Q1 of 2010, Nielsen says RIM is No. 1 with 35 percent. iPhone is No. 2 with 28 percent. Windows Mobile with 19 percent. Android is 4th place with 9 percent.

10:30 a.m.: Mobile browser usage in the U.S.: iPhone has 58.2 percent. That's 2.5 times as much as Android's 12.7 percent. "This may help you put things in perspective," he says, to some laughs.

"It's hard to remember what it was like before iPhone," he says. Apps weren't the same. There was no free market for apps. iPhone changed that in 2007, he says.

10:31 a.m. (Kent German): The main event!

10:31 a.m.: IN 2008, we added 3G networking. 2009 we made the phone twice as fast. For 2010 we'll take biggest leap since the original iPhone.

We're introducing iPhone 4. "This is really hot," he says.

10:32 a.m.: There are 100 new features, but he's going to cover 8 of them. First, all new design. "Some of you have already seen this," he says. To great applause.

10:32 a.m. (Kent German): So not quite the iPhone 4G, but definitely not the iPhone HD.

10:32 a.m.: "Believe me, you ain't seen this. You gotta see it in person."

10:32 a.m. (Kent German): As expected, a mention of the lost iPhone saga.

10:32 a.m.: It's the most precise thing we've ever made. Glass on front, and back. Stainless steel around. Its closest kin is a beautiful old Leica camera.

10:33 a.m.: "It's really thin," he says, but doesn't specify how thin.

10:33 a.m. (Kent German): From the front it looks about the same, but the profile is different.

10:33 a.m.: OK, now he does: 9.3 mm thick. A quarter thinner than iPhone 3GS. Thinnest smartphone yet, he says.

10:34 a.m. (Kent German): Thinnest on the planet, but for how long? That race changes daily.

10:34 a.m.: There's a front-facing camera, a receiver, a microSIM tray, a camera with LED flash in the back. On bottom, a mic, 30-pin connector, and speaker. On top, a second mic, second sleep/wake button, and noise-cancellation button.

10:34 a.m.: People have wanted to know what the seam in the side of the phone is about, he says.

10:35 a.m.: It turns out there are three lines in the stainless steel structure of the phone. The slits in it are part of the engineering. It uses the stainless steel band as part of the antenna system.

10:35 a.m. (Kent German): Why is Apple pushing the micro-SIM format? Will be able to move the same SIM card between an iPhone and iPad? Or is it just to save plastic?

10:35 a.m.: Integrated antennae right in the structure of the phone. "Really cool engineering" he says.

10:35 a.m.: The glass is for better optical quality and scratch resistance, he says.

10:36 a.m.: Second new thing: A retina display. "What's that?" In any display there are pixels. With retina display we dramatically increase the pixel density. Four times as many in the same amount of space.

10:37 a.m.: More precision in display with more pixels. "We get really, really sharp text," he says.

10:37 a.m.: 326 pixels per inch.

10:37 a.m.: The crowd is impressed, lots of cheers.

10:37 a.m. (Kent German): Jobs pushed the antenna and its benefits. His first indirect nod to call quality that I remember seeing.

10:38 a.m.: 300 pixels per inch is the limit of the human retina, he says. So things start to look like continuous curves at that level. Text will look like a printed book, he says. We are comfortably over that limit. He shows us two side by side.

10:39 a.m.: "Once you use a retina display you can't go back," he says. With character-based languages it's "striking" and with pictures and video, the same effect, he says.

10:40 a.m.: He's now going to compare the iPhone 3GS' display versus the iPhone 4 for us.

10:40 a.m.: "We had to get special projectors for this," he says.

10:41 a.m.: Now he's showing us The New York Times, though the connection is hanging a bit. "The networks are always kind of unpredictable in here. If you're on Wi-Fi, if you could just get off, I'd appreciate it," he says.

10:42 a.m.: "I don't know what's wrong with our networks," Jobs says. He's silent for a bit. But now he's going to try some back ups, he tells us.

10:42 a.m. (Josh Lowensohn): @Jobs, we're on Sprint :)

10:42 a.m.: His phone says "Cannot activate cellular networks," to some laughs from the crowd. "Well geez. I guess I can't show you that much today. I can show you some pictures."

10:44 a.m.: He shows us the difference in picture quality. He's trying the phone demo again. "I'm sorry guys, I don't know what's going on." "Got any suggestions?" he asks. Someone shouts "Verizon." Jobs says, "We're actually on Wi-Fi here."

10:44 a.m. (Josh Lowensohn): Now your photos come with more wrinkles.

10:44 a.m. (Kent German): With the connection issue I wouldn't want to be the AT&T rep in the crowd.

10:45 a.m.: Now he's doing specs. 3.5 inch display. Same IPS (in-plane switching) display as iPad. "better than OLED," he says. Contrast ratio is 800 to 1. iPhone OS 4 makes it so your apps automatically run on the retina display, full size, he says.

10:46 a.m.: Apps will look better without you doing any work, he says. But you can help by putting in higher-resolution artwork.

10:46 a.m.: "We think this will set the standard for displays for the next several years."

10:46 a.m. (Kent German): Apple is always good at giving us something we didn't know we wanted. I never had a complaint about the current iPhone display resolution, but the new one looks great.

10:47 a.m.: Display is the most important component of the entire phone, he says.

10:47 a.m.: The iPhone is powered by the A4 chip, designed in-house.

10:48 a.m.: The iPhone 4 is packed to the gills on the inside, he says. He points out they used a micro SIM because it's smaller and they needed the space. The biggest thing in there is the battery. Now it's a little bit bigger.

10:48 a.m.: Since battery is bigger and A4 is good at power management. There is 7 hours of talk time now. 6 hours of 3G browsing, 10 hours of Wi-Fi browsing, and 300 hours of standby.

(Josh Lowensohn): That battery boost will give users an extra 2 hours of 3G talk time over what the 3GS can do.

10:49 a.m.: Environmental report card: arsenic-, mercury-, BFR-free, he says.

10:49 a.m.: Up to 32 GB of storage. Quadband HSDPA/HSUPA.

10:50 a.m.: Another new piece of hardware. We're taking it further, we're adding a gyroscope, he says. Lots of applause.

10:50 a.m.: A three-axis gyro with pitch, roll, and yaw. It's tied with accelerometer to provide six-axis motion sensing. New CoreMotion APIs for extremely precise positioning.

10:51 a.m.: Now he's going to demonstrate this. "Since this does not require the network I should be OK," he jokes.

10:51 a.m.: He's tilting the phone forward back and side to side and the game on screen corresponds. He rotates in a circle and the game rotates too.

10:53 a.m.: "I can't wait to see what you guys are going to do" with the gyro, he says to the developers.

10:53 a.m.: These phones are getting more and more intelligent, he says.

10:53 a.m.: Next up: the new camera.

10:54 a.m.: Everybody loves to talk about megapixels with photography. But we ask, how do you make better pictures? They're different things. But cell phone cameras are about capturing photons.

10:54 a.m.: We've gone from a 3-megapixel to 5-MP sensor, but we're using something that's new to smartphones, a back-side illuminated sensor.

10:55 a.m.: Gets the wiring out of the way. We've gone from 3 to 5 MP but kept pixels the same size, 1.75 microns.

10:55 a.m.: There's a 5X digital zoom, tap to focus, and LED flash built in.

10:55 a.m.: He shows us some photos taken from the iPhone 4.

10:56 a.m.: Camera also does HD video recording, he says.

10:56 a.m.: Lots of applause for that. 720p at 30 frames per second.

10:57 a.m.: There's also tap to focus for video. Can edit videos right on phone. Also has 1-click sharing and the LED flash will stay on for the HD video recording.

10:57 a.m.: We're going even further than that, he says. We've written iMovie for iPhone.

10:58 a.m.: He's bringing up Randy Ubillos, the chief architect for Apple's video apps, on stage to demonstrate it.

10:58 a.m.: He runs over the same things Jobs just told us. But now he's demoing it.

10:59 a.m.: Can use the app in portrait or landscape. You can record directly into a video timeline within the app. Can pinch to change the scale of the timeline. Or drag to trim/edit.

11:00 a.m.: Can pan/zoom, add effects, transitions, themes.

11:01 a.m. (Josh Lowensohn): CNET's Tom Krazit notes "It's rare for Apple to bring product-level executives on stage. They usually reserve that for just senior VP level people like Scott Forstall."

11:01 a.m.: The camera will bring in geolocation information, too, to the video.

11:01 a.m. (Kent German): Welcome the camera improvements. It's never been bad, but it could stand more features like these.

11:02 a.m.: He demos how you can add map info based on the location, along with photos, music, etc.

11:03 a.m.: OK, Steve is back on stage. You can buy iMovie for $4.99, "if we approve it," he jokes.

11:05 a.m.: He says he figured out why the demo crashed. There are 570 Wi-Fi connections in this room. Either turn off Wi-Fi or I give up. Would you like to see the demos? he asks. All you bloggers need to turn off your notebook Wi-Fis.

11:06 a.m.: OK, now onto iPhone OS 4.

11:07 a.m.: "We're renaming the OS. Now it's just iOS 4." Because it's on the iPad, iPod Touch, and iPhone.

11:08 a.m.: He's talking about the features, which we saw in April at the iPhone OS 4 event. Multitasking is something that took us a while to get. He quotes Larry Page from a few weeks ago about sofware running in the background running down the battery.

11:08 a.m.: "Yes, it does," Jobs says. "Unless you do it right."

11:09 a.m.: Now he's going to demo Pandora, playing us some Jack Johnson. He's checking e-mail while listening to music. Now he's launching a Web page (big applause that the Wi-Fi here works) simultaneously.

11:09 a.m. (Kent German): Steve's message about multitasking is similar to what he's said before about other features like cut, copy, and paste. They may not be first, but they get it just right.

11:10 a.m.: He shows us some mail features, with the unified in-box. Shows e-mail threading so you can see a whole e-mail conversation.

11:11 a.m.: Now he's going to create a folder to manage apps. By holding and dragging you can drag one app on another and a folder is automatically created. You can rename the folder and add more apps there whenever you want.

11:12 a.m. (Kent German): Multitasking, unified e-mail box and app folders were my most wanted features from the new OS. I liked the demo before and it looks good here, as well.

11:13 a.m.: He's talking enterprise integration now. Data protection, device management, wireless app distribution, deeper VPN support, Exchange Server 2010.

11:13 a.m.: On consumer side, we're adding Bing to the iPhone for search.

11:14 a.m.: Google will be the default, but now you'll have choice of Google, Yahoo, or Bing. Each has a different approach and how they format results, he says. "Micorsoft's done a really nice job on this, it has HTML5 presentation."

11:14 a.m.: Developers will get a Golden Master Candidate release of iOS4 today.

11:14 a.m. (Kent German): Interesting that Google is staying as the default search. Leading up to today we had heard rumors to the contrary.

11:15 a.m.: Another major milestone for iOS coming this month. "We will sell our 100 millionth iOS device," he says. That includes iPhones, iPod Touches, and iPads. "There is definitely a market for your applications."

11:16 a.m.: Back to iBooks. It's now coming to the iPhone. Same controls, highlighting, notes, and bookmarking. Same bookshelf as on the iPad, same ability to read a PDF.

11:17 a.m.: The iBooks Store is also available right on the iPhone and iPod Touch now too. You can download and purchase a book to iPhone, iPod, or iPad wirelessly. You can download the same book to all your devices at no extra charge.

11:17 a.m.: In addition, iBooks will automatically and wirelessly sync your current place, bookmarks, and notes across all your devices.

11:18 a.m.: So you can start it on your iPad, pick up on your iPhone, if you want.

11:18 a.m.: Now he's demonstrating what iBooks looks like on the retina display.

11:20 a.m.: Now he's showing the library, and opening a PDF. You tap to flip pages through a PDF, and can pinch and zoom as with other apps.

11:21 a.m.: There are 150 million accounts hooked up to the App Store, iTunes, and iBookstore. Most of any store on the Web, he says. "So people are ready to buy your apps."

11:21 a.m.: Now he's talking about iAds. Why are we doing this? To help our developers earn money to continue to create free and low-cost apps for users.

11:22 a.m.: He shows banners popping into The Wall Street Journal app. "We're trying to combine the emotion of video with the interactivity of the Web."

11:23 a.m.: iAds keep you in your app. The worst thing is to tap on a banner and be taken to some random Web site and somehow get back to where you left off before. If people don't click on ads, you don't make any money. iAds won't hijack users out of the app they're using.

11:23 a.m.: Apple sells and hosts the ads, so developers just have to tell them where to put the ads. And devs get paid 60 percent of the revenue.

11:25 a.m.: Apple started selling ads eight weeks ago. He's listing the companies: Nissan, Citi, Unilever, AT&T, Chanel, GE, Liberty Mutual, State Farm, Geico, Campbell's, Sears, JCPenney, Target, Best Buy, DirecTV, TBS Network, Disney.

11:25 a.m. (Kent German): iAds is a benefit to developers, but I don't see it as as a boon for users. But then again, this is a developers conference.

11:26 a.m.: These are "high-end brands," he emphasizes to developers. Nissan will advertise the electric Leaf car, for example. Jobs is showing what Nissan's Leaf ad will look like. Tapping on the ad makes the ad go full screen. If you want to go back to app, just click and you're back.

11:27 a.m.: He's showing how interactive Nissan's ad is. You can tap to find out the MPG of the car, for example.

11:29 a.m.: iAds will start July 1 for all iOS 4 devices.

11:30 a.m.: Advertisers have committed $60 million so far this year. That's about 48 percent of the entire expected U.S. mobile display advertising market, as predicted by JP Morgan. "We think we're off to a pretty great start," Jobs says.

11:31 a.m.: "Our goal is to help you earn money," he reiterates.

11:31 a.m. (Josh Lowensohn): CNET's Ina Fried points out that Microsoft's Bing will also be a search option in the Mac and Windows version of Safari .

11:31 a.m.: He asks what people think of the iPhone so far. He gets a big cheer.

11:31 a.m.: One more thing, he says.

11:32 a.m.: In 2007 when iPhone launched, he made the first public call onstage, he recalls. Now he's going to do the same today. He's calling Jonathan Ive, Apple's head designer.

11:33 a.m.: He's using the front-facing camera to make a video call. Jonny answers, big applause from the crowd.

11:33 a.m. (Kent German): If iAds is out July 1, will iOS 4 be out to users the same day or before?

11:34 a.m.: They're chatting about the technology in the phone and make a lunch date.

11:35 a.m.: The feature they just used is called "FaceTime" video calling. It works between iPhone 4 devices. No set-up required. Works anywhere there is Wi-Fi.

11:36 a.m.: Can make FaceTime calls in landscape or portrait.

11:36 a.m.: It's Wi-Fi only in 2010. We need to work a little bit with our providers. And Apple will ship tens of millions of FaceTime devices this year, he promises.

11:37 a.m.: He's showing a video of how people can use the FaceTime feature.

11:38 a.m. (Kent German): Good to hear FaceTime runs only over Wi-Fi for now. Definitely the best thing for users. Though I'm wondering what the next year could bring in cellular provider news. More U.S. carriers? A real 4G iPhone?

11:39 a.m.: FaceTime is based on a bunch of open standards, which he lists. We're going to standards bodies tomorrow and we're going to make FaceTime and open industry standard.

11:40 a.m.: That's the iPhone 4. It's the biggest leap we've taken since the original iPhone. Price and availability is up next.

11:40 a.m.: It comes in two colors: black and white.

11:41 a.m. (Kent German): Yay! The really good stuff. Price and release date!

11:41 a.m.: It's $199 for 16GB, same as 3GS. $299 for 32GB model. AT&T is going to make a "an incredibly generous upgrade offer." If your contract expires anytime during 2010, you can get the new iPhone 4 if you re-sign a new contract.

11:41 a.m.: "We're thrilled about that."

11:41 a.m. (Josh Lowensohn): Hmm, no 64GB model. That's a bummer.

11:42 a.m.: 3GS is $99 now, as suspected.

11:42 a.m.: On sale June 24.

11:42 a.m.: Preorders begin June 15. Will ship in U.S. and four other countries on the first day.

11:43 a.m.: By September it will ship in 88 countries. "Our fastest roll-out ever."

11:43 a.m. (Kent German): Decent pricing and upgrade offer by AT&T. Hopefully no additional upgrade fees if you move up from a device other than an iPhone.

11:44 a.m.: Time to talk accessories: $29 dock. Also, they've make their own iPhone case. Called a "bumper" so it covers the sides of the phone in multiple colors for $29.

11:44 a.m.: iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3G can upgrade iOS 4, though not all features will be supported.

11:44 a.m.: Same goes for iPod Touch, except for first generation.

11:44 a.m.: Upgrade for those devices will be free on June 21.

11:45 a.m.: That's new; iPod Touch users usually pay a small fee.

11:46 a.m.: Now we're getting another video demo, this time about the iPhone 4. They're running through all the features we've heard about so far today.

11:47 a.m. (Kent German): Remember that multitasking will not be avaialble on the iPhone 3G. It will get most other iOS 4 features, though. The 3GS will get multitasking.

11:47 a.m. (Josh Lowensohn): CNET's Maggie Reardon says: "Cisco has agreed to license the iOS trademark to Apple for use as the name of Apple's operating system for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. The license is for use of the trademark only and not for any technology."

11:51 a.m.: OK, video's over and Steve is back.

11:52 a.m.: He's talking again about Apple being at the intersection of technology and liberal arts. He discussed it at the iPad introduction back in January.

11:52 a.m.: He says an example is the front-facing camera in addition to 18 months work on software that "you'll never even notice" when placing a video call.

11:53 a.m.: He's thanking all the teams at Apple who've worked their tails off. He asks Mark Papermaster and his hardware team to stand up and get acknowledged by the crowd, which obliges with applause.

11:54 a.m.: The design team, and the A4 chip team take turns too, as does Scott Forstall and the iOS software team.

11:54 a.m.: He also recognizes the operations team headed by Tim Cook, and the "rest of the Apple family." "I'm really proud of all you guys. Awesome job," he says.

11:54 a.m. (Kent German): No news about tethering even though AT&T's recent data plan changes mention the feature. Since the iPhone has always been capable, and AT&T was the holdup (iPhone carriers in other countries offer tethering), perhaps that's an AT&T-only announcement.

11:55 a.m.: "This is our new baby. I hope you love it as much as we do," Steve says.

11:55 a.m.: And that's a wrap. He exits the stage.

11:55 a.m. (Kent German): And the wait for the elusive Verizon iPhone continues.

11:56 a.m.: That's it for us too. Thank you everyone that joined us today for our live blog! We'll be digesting all of this new information and bringing you more analysis throughout the day at CNET, so check back often.

Editors' note: The original, bare-bones version of this story was posted June 4 at 2:09 p.m. PDT.

How Steve Jobs' iPhone Keynote Changed Everything

When Steve Jobs took the stage at Macworld in San Francisco , January 9, 2007, to introduce the first iPhone, no one could have imagined the impact that small device would have on Apple, the smartphone industry, and the world at large. Back then, the smartphone market was much different — and far smaller — than it is today.

In Q4 2006, only 18 million smartphones were shipped, with an additional 2.5 million wireless handhelds and 1.5 million traditional handheld devices ( via Canalys ). For comparison, more than 300 million smartphones were shipped in Q3 of 2021, alone. That means a total of only 22 million smart mobile devices were shipped in Q4. Even more telling, Canalys noted that this seemingly small number represented a 30% increase year-over-year.

In those early days of the smartphone market, Nokia was the company to beat, with BlackBerry, Motorola, Palm, and Sony Ericsson rounding out the top five ( via AppleInsider ). One thing that defined all of the major companies were phone designs that incorporated physical keyboards. In that market, Jobs and Apple saw an opportunity for revolutionary change.

How the iPhone impacted the industry

What immediately caught most people's attention was the touch screen interface (via History ). The entire front of the iPhone was one large screen, completely devoid of a physical keyboard. Instead, the interface adjusted to the user, hiding or displaying the keyboard as needed. Despite its revolutionary features, many were not convinced the iPhone would gain traction.

In an interview with USA Today , Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said the following: "There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get."

Unfortunately for other smartphone makers, their dismissiveness of iPhone's impact on the market was their own undoing. Nokia and BlackBerry's market share plummeted, as Investopedia points out , with both making major changes to their business models just to survive.

Most smartphones now mimic the features the iPhone pioneered. However, Digital Trends has noted that the market is largely divided between the iPhone and Google's Android operating system (OS), which debuted in September 2008 and borrowed heavily from iOS. Handheld GPS along with low to mid-range cameras and standalone MP3 players were completely upended, as the iPhone took on those roles in a single device.

How the iPhone impacted Apple

Not to be overlooked is the impact the iPhone had on Apple itself. Apple began as a computer maker, and nearly died as one (via Business Insider ). Prior to Jobs' return to the company, it was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.

As Business Insider noted, Jobs helped turn the company around with the original iMac, followed by the G3 Mac, the G4, and the iPod. Despite the company's success with those products, the iPhone propelled it to all new heights. Apple went from being a computer whose Mac OS was a distant second to Windows — that also made a successful music player — to a company that was a market leader in the smartphone industry.

Even after the rise of Android, which according to Statista currently has the lion's share of the global market, Apple continues to be a dominant force. The success of the iPhone also helped drive Apple to be the first U.S. company to ever be valued at $1 trillion ( via CBS News ).

How the iPhone impacted Jobs' legacy

Another major impact the iPhone had was on Steve Jobs himself, and the legacy he left behind. Jobs died  four years after he introduced the iPhone at MacWorld, leaving behind a far greater legacy as a result of it.

Jobs had a conflicted history at Apple, co-founding the company with Steve Wozniak before eventually being ousted for his mercurial nature. He went to found NeXT, Inc. in an effort to duplicate his initial success with Apple. Ultimately, NeXT failed as a company, but it helped create an OS that would eventually serve as the foundation of the current macOS, after Apple purchased NeXT to bring Jobs back into the fold, as told by Business Insider. In the midst of his exile from Apple, Jobs also purchased Pixar. That company would go on to produce some of the most successful animated films in history. 

Founding Apple, buying Pixar, and then turning Apple around and helping save it from bankruptcy and oblivion would have been accomplishment enough to cement Jobs as one of the 20th century's most successful entrepreneurs and CEOs. The success of the iPhone, however, helped catapult Jobs' legacy to the realm of legend, making him an icon that countless Silicon Valley entrepreneurs aspire to. No one could possibly have known how much the iPhone would change the world when it was first introduced but, in a true testament to how much it did change, it's tough to imagine a world without it.

Things you buy through our links may earn Vox Media a commission.

How Steve Jobs Faked His Way Through Unveiling the iPhone

Ten years ago today, Steve Jobs took the stage at Macworld and showed off a new device. You know the spiel. “So, three things: a widescreen iPod with touch controls. A revolutionary mobile phone. And a breakthrough internet communications device. An iPod. A phone. And an internet communicator. An iPod. A phone — are you getting it? These are not three separate devices. This is one device! And we are calling it iPhone .”

Brian McCullough of the Internet History podcast pulls together a good collection of memories from the day of the event itself, showing how much of Jobs’s presentation was held together with tape and glue to ensure his brand-new device was successful, unlike Apple’s previous foray into cell phones, the little-loved and little-remembered Motorola Rokr .

After two-and-a-half years of extremely secretive work on what Apple code-named “Project Purple,” Jobs was ready to take the stage at the Moscone Center and show off the iPhone. The problem was that the iPhone itself wasn’t quite ready.

Jobs rehearsed his presentation for six solid days, but at the final hour, the team still couldn’t get the phone to behave through an entire run through. Sometimes it lost internet connection. Sometimes the calls wouldn’t go through. Sometimes the phone just shut down.

Per Andy Grignon, senior radio engineer for the iPhone: “Very rarely did I see him become completely unglued. It happened. But mostly he just looked at you and very directly said in a very loud and stern voice, ‘You are fucking up my company,’ or, ‘If we fail, it will be because of you.’”

Of course, if the iPhone failed onstage, it was because the prototype Jobs would be demoing was a bug-filled nightmare. From Fred Vogelstein’s 2013 write-up in The New York Times Magazine :

The iPhone could play a section of a song or a video, but it couldn’t play an entire clip reliably without crashing. It worked fine if you sent an e-mail and then surfed the Web. If you did those things in reverse, however, it might not. Hours of trial and error had helped the iPhone team develop what engineers called “the golden path,” a specific set of tasks, performed in a specific way and order, that made the phone look as if it worked.

Jobs also wanted to make sure that connectivity wasn’t an issue for the iPhone. But to do that required some shading around the edges. From the same Times Magazine report:

They had AT&T, the iPhone’s wireless carrier, bring in a portable cell tower, so they knew reception would be strong. Then, with Jobs’s approval, they preprogrammed the phone’s display to always show five bars of signal strength regardless of its true strength.

Jobs had more than just the reputation of the iPhone to contend with. CES was happening at the same time, and it was Jobs’s hope that the iPhone would steal headlines away from whatever was being debuted in Vegas that day. But there was still a nagging problem: In virtually every rehearsal Jobs had done with the phone, it would run out of memory at some point, causing the phone to crash and restart. The only fix was to have multiple backups on hand.

 Jobs had a number of demo units onstage with him to manage this problem. If memory ran low on one, he would switch to another while the first was restarted. But given how many demos Jobs planned, Grignon worried that there were far too many potential points of failure. If disaster didn’t strike during one of the dozen demos, it was sure to happen during the grand finale, when Jobs planned to show all the iPhone’s top features operating at the same time on the same phone. He’d play some music, take a call, put it on hold and take another call, find and e-mail a photo to the second caller, look up something on the Internet for the first caller and then return to his music.

McCullough goes on to explain what happened after — how Jobs had to be convinced to actually create an App Store (he wanted developers to simply do everything in Safari), and the struggle to get the next version of the iPhone, the iPhone 3G, off the slow-as-hell Edge data networks.

Jobs unveiling the iPhone is often pointed to as the pinnacle in tech presentations — one of the few times where the hype and grandeur actually matched the device on display. But it wasn’t just a master class in marketing and showmanship; it was a technological roll of the dice that ended up changing the world.

Most Viewed Stories

• Andrew Huberman’s Mechanisms of Control  
• What Will Iran’s Attack on Israel Mean? Live Updates
• Trump Media’s Stock Price Is Plummeting. His Election Odds Aren’t.
• What I Knew About O.J. Simpson’s Gloves
• What on Earth Is Aileen Cannon Doing?
• A Handgun for Christmas
• Who’s the Trump VP Pick? Latest Odds for Every Shortlist Candidate.

Editor’s Picks

Most Popular

• Andrew Huberman’s Mechanisms of Control   By Kerry Howley
• What Will Iran’s Attack on Israel Mean? Live Updates By Chas Danner
• Trump Media’s Stock Price Is Plummeting. His Election Odds Aren’t. By Kevin T. Dugan
• What I Knew About O.J. Simpson’s Gloves By Robin Sayers
• What on Earth Is Aileen Cannon Doing? By Benjamin Hart
• A Handgun for Christmas By Lisa Miller
• Who’s the Trump VP Pick? Latest Odds for Every Shortlist Candidate. By Margaret Hartmann

What is your email?

This email will be used to sign into all New York sites. By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy and to receive email correspondence from us.

Sign In To Continue Reading

Create your free account.

Password must be at least 8 characters and contain:

• Lower case letters (a-z)
• Upper case letters (A-Z)
• Numbers (0-9)
• Special Characters (!@#$%^&*)

As part of your account, you’ll receive occasional updates and offers from New York , which you can opt out of anytime.

Newsletters

• Our sponsors
• Watch Store
• Hot topics:
• Apple legal battles
•  Apple deals 
• Editor’s picks
• Buying guides

Today in Apple history: Steve Jobs introduces the iPhone 4

By Luke Dormehl • 6:00 am, June 7, 2016

• Top stories

These days, with the iPhone 4 no longer capable of running the latest version of iOS, it’s easy to look back on the fourth-generation handset as a piece of ancient tech. In fact, the device was incredibly significant: The iPhone 4 introduced some very important features — and also addressed concerns that are still important today.

Check out Steve Jobs unveiling the iPhone 4 below.

The iPhone 4 launched the same year as the iPad, marking the first year that established the now-familiar packed release cycles that Apple continues to stick to.

But even taken on its own merits it was a significant release — introducing FaceTime, an upgraded 5 megapixel camera with LED flash, VGA-quality front-facing camera, refreshed design, and significant Retina display screen resolution upgrade — with 4x the number of pixels as its predecessor. I’ve always been partial to the iPhones of this era, and the 3.5-inch form size, combined with the flatter, Braun-esque design (a whole 24 percent thinner than the iPhone 3GS) made it Jony Ive’s best iPhone design yet.

If the iPhone 4 had problems it was that, like many first-gen Retina devices, it struggled at times to push all the necessary pixels around — although Apple did give us a boost in RAM (to 512MB), processor (the A4) and, most envy-inducing today, useful battery life.

Do you have fond or less-than-fond memories of the iPhone 4? Leave your comments below.

Daily round-ups or a weekly refresher, straight from Cult of Mac to your inbox.

Cult of Mac Today

Our daily roundup of Apple news, reviews and how-tos. Plus the best Apple tweets, fun polls and inspiring Steve Jobs bons mots. Our readers say: "Love what you do" -- Christi Cardenas. "Absolutely love the content!" -- Harshita Arora. "Genuinely one of the highlights of my inbox" -- Lee Barnett.

The Weekender

The week's best Apple news, reviews and how-tos from Cult of Mac, every Saturday morning. Our readers say: "Thank you guys for always posting cool stuff" -- Vaughn Nevins. "Very informative" -- Kenly Xavier.

Popular This Week

Some of the best 2024 macs are still ahead of us, how to change the size and color of the mac pointer, macs with ai-focused m4 chip launching this year, oled ipad pro and new ipad air on track for early may launch, 42-inch smart tv may be user’s best display ever [setups], 15-inch macbook air vs. dell xps 15: which laptop should you buy, save on nut mini, an affordable airtag alternative [deals], humane ai pin review roundup: it’s a disaster, iphone users around the world warned they are specific target of spyware, use your iphone to scan and fax documents with this multipurpose scanning app [deals].

Maximize your go-to-market team’s potential

What sets top performers apart? Which deals have the most risk? Which messages resonate with your buyers? Get a demo to see how Gong can help.

Thank you for your submission.

9 sales presentation lessons from steve jobs’ iphone keynote.

“Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything …” 

Those were the now-iconic words spoken by then-Apple CEO Steve Jobs in his 2007 MacWorld keynote. 

This talk — well worth the 80-minute watch — was Jobs’ introduction (cough cough SALES PITCH) for the OG iPhone (aka, iPhone … aka iPhone 1).

It’s arguably the best sales presentation of all time, the GOAT if you will.

Hyperbole? Maybe, but Steve Jobs (and Apple) – no matter your feeling towards him or the company — have kinda sorta earned the right to hyperbole.

If you are an SDR/BDR or account executive (or anyone who does sales for a living), Jobs’ talk is something you must watch — and rewatch. It’s textbook for presentations, specifically ones that are sales in nature.

As you watch this Steve Jobs keynote (dare I say, Masterclass), be on the lookout for these 9 sales presentation lessons.

Sales Presentation Lesson #1: Demolish the status quo

“The most advanced phones are called smartphones (so they say).”

The problem, according to Steve Jobs? Smartphones are not so smart, and they’re not so easy to use.

He discusses this point around the 4-minute mark of his talk.

He says the current “smart” phones fall into one of the three categories: 

• not so smart
• hard to use, or 
• not so smart AND hard to use

It’s hard to imagine a pre-iPhone world, but the Treo, Moto Q, E62, and other cell phones were quite advanced for their time. They were pretty awesome.

But Jobs challenges that point. He shatters the status quo with a strong statement + powerful visual.

How this translates to sales: Instinct tells us to focus on the product’s benefits — (hopefully) positive and (relatively) easy to talk about.

But … focusing your message on the pain of the status quo is more persuasive than focusing on benefits.

If the status quo is no longer an option (iPhone > “smartphones”), your buyer is more likely to invest in the “new” option.

Accomplish this mindset change through the behavioral economics principle of loss aversion — humans will go to more extraordinary lengths to avoid loss than they will to gain benefits.

Loss aversion tugs on human nature. We will undergo 2x more effort to avoid a loss than to incur a gain . 

Example #1: It’s easier to convince someone to move away from a fire (loss aversion) than to move from a chair to a comfy sofa.

Example #2: People are more motivated to NOT lose $25,000 (loss aversion) than they are to earn $25,000.

Use this psychological bias to your advantage. Your close rates will bump up if you do it right.

Start by showing why the current situation is bad (see “Business School 101” graph above) and demolish the status quo.

Sales Presentation Lesson #2: THEN show the gain

You’ve talked about how the status quo is no more. You’ve got your buyer leaning in (captivated?), on the edge of their seat.

It’s time to show the gain your product or service offers.

Steve Jobs started every demo with some version of the following: “Now what if I wanted to do X? Here’s what that looks like…”

The “I” Jobs was referring to was him in the shoes of the customer. The “what that looks like” is the gain realized from the product/service offered.

Good sales presentations show what the product can do. Great sales presentations show what the customer can do (with the product).

To accomplish this, you must answer these three questions:

• What OUTCOME did the customer achieve?
• What ACTION did the customer take to accomplish this?
• What PRODUCT BENEFIT or INSIGHT made that action possible?

Here’s a sales template to get you started:

But you are not done after showing the gain. Not quite!

Sales Presentation Lesson #3: Keep switching between status quo and gain

Sales Tip #1 (status quo), then Sales Tip #2 (gain). 

Keep going back and forth between the status quo and the gain customers realize with your solution.

“Not the crippled stuff you find on most phones — these are the real, desktop-class applications.” About 9.5 minutes into his talk, Jobs comes back to the status quo, the “crippled stuff” … the industry-standard stuff yet is broken.

And then he hits the audience with the gain iPhone offers.

Status quo.

Back and forth. Back and forth.

Steve Jobs repeats this technique throughout the next hour+ of his talk. He keeps coming back to what he hates about the status quo over and over again to better tee up what he’s showing next.

In Nancy Duarte’s 2011 TEDxEast talk, The Secret Structure of Great Talks , she mentions this technique 6 minutes or so into her presentation (bold is mine): 

“At the beginning of any presentation, you need to establish what is. You know, here’s the status quo, here’s what’s going on. And then you need to compare that to what could be. You need to make that gap as big as possible because there is this commonplace of the status quo, and you need to contrast that with the loftiness of your idea. So it’s like, you know, here’s the past, here’s the present, but look at our future. Here’s a problem, but look at that problem removed. Here’s a roadblock; let’s annihilate the roadblock. You need to really amplify that gap. This would be like the inciting incident in a movie. That’s when suddenly the audience has to contend with what you just put out there: ‘Wow, do I want to agree with this and align with it or not?’ And in the rest of your presentation should support that.

“So the middle goes back and forth; it traverses between what is and what could be, what is and what could be. Because what you are trying to do is make the status quo and the normal unappealing, and you’re wanting to draw them towards what could be in the future with your idea adopted.”

The last sentence is the key. That’s your goal: “…make the status quo and the normal unappealing … what could be in the future with your idea…”

Sales Presentation Lesson #4: Lead with the “Oh S$#T” moment

There is no massive build-up, no long lead into the punchline. 

3 minutes into an 80-minute talk (3.75% of the way through!) Steve Jobs drops the iPhone name for the first time.

Too often, in sales pitches, there is a long lead-in, a huge build-up. We talk about our storied company history, our amazing customers, and so on.

Instead, flip your sales product demo upside down.

In this blog post , we share an example of a sales rep pitching a politician on building a new city on top of an empty plot of land in South Dakota. The example shows a typical sales demo.

The problem? It takes 20 minutes to get to the juicy stuff — what the city (in this case) will look like. 

Flipping the demo to lead with the result (a fabulous new city in South Dakota, a revolutionary smartphone called the iPhone) takes the guesswork out.

If done effectively, you’ve now piqued interest. It’s your job to maintain that interest throughout the remainder of your pitch.

Start with the outcome and allow the conversation to unfold from there naturally .

In the 3 million web-based sales product demos we analyzed using AI, we found winning product demonstrations mirror the same priorities raised during discovery calls, in priority order.

Start your sales product demo with the problem you spent the most time on during discovery, and go forward from there.

This is called “solution mapping” — helping guide you and your buyers by getting to the stuff that matters most first .

Sales Presentation Lesson #5: Obey the 9-minute rule

9.1 minutes.

For winning deals, 9.1 minutes is the average time to go through an introductory sales meeting presentation deck. 

This number is backed not only by Gong data, but also by science.

Humans are complex creatures, but we are also easily distracted. SQUIRREL!

A recent study showed the average human brain now has an attention span shorter than a goldfish . What? Every time I read that study … Mind. Blown.

In some instances, this 8-second attention span serves as an advantage , but it can be tricky when selling!

While our attention starts to wander after 8 seconds or so, as we mention here , neuroscientists have proven that our brains have a built-in stopwatch that stops around 9-10 minutes.

Notice how every 9-minutes or so, Steve Jobs introduces something in his talk to “perk up” the brain … to change the pace.

To command your customer’s attention, you must introduce a “brain-perking” change of pace, such as a new speaker, a video/live demo, or a dramatic story.

The first significant shift in the Jobs keynote is when he shows a video of the new iPhone in action. Notice he’s gone from talking with images only to sharing a live video.

Brain switch. Powerful stuff.

Jobs continues this “every 9 minutes” switch: Story to demo to story to demo. Jobs talking followed by (then) Google CEO Eric Schmidt talking.

This constant switching throughout the entire 80-minute presentation keeps the audience engaged.

Sales Presentation Lesson #6: Simplify your slides

We’ve all seen ‘em.

We’ve all been on the other side of a slide presentation that is full of words — words the seller reads VERBATIM from the slide.

It’s painful. It’s cringeworthy. It’s a colossal waste of (everyone’s) time.

Yet “busy slides” are still an issue for many-a-sales presentations.

Notice most of Steve Jobs’ slides (from more than a decade ago, mind you): 

• No lists with 17+ bullet points
• No paragraphs of words
• No fancy animations or wild things flying on and off the screen

Steve Jobs’ slides are — for the most part — a short headline + a single image. Each slide = one big idea.

P.S. We have a brand new Sales Presentation Template — for you, for free. Grab this fill-in-the-blanks template to create knockout sales presentations.

Sales Presentation Lesson #7: Load up on pronouns

a word that can function by itself as a noun phrase and that refers either to the participants in the discourse (e.g., I, you ) or to someone or something mentioned elsewhere in the discourse (e.g., she, it, this ). — Oxford Languages

Pronouns make things personal.

I. We. You. 

Jobs leans heavily on the use of pronouns. You can hear them peppered throughout all of his presentations. 

“Well, how do you solve this? Hmm. It turns out we have solved it. We solved it in computers 20 years ago. We solved it with a bit-mapped screen that could display anything we want. Put any user interface up. And a pointing device. We solved it with the mouse. We solved this problem. So how are we going to take this to a mobile device? What we’re going to do is get rid of all these buttons and just make a giant screen. A giant screen.”

7 “we’s” in a single paragraph!

He does the same with the pronouns “you” and “I.”

Gong has done some research on words and phrases top sellers use .

The best sales reps speak directly to buyers using the pronouns you, your, and your team 29% more often than their average and underperforming peers. 

A: “Users maximize their time with this workflow.”

B: “You’ll be more efficient with this workflow.”

Can you guess which seller closes more deals?

Users vs. You. A single word can have a significant impact.

Pronouns make the person (or team) on the other end feel more part of the conversation. Pronouns flip the script from generic, vague, and indirect to personal.

Pronouns allow buyers to visualize the product or the experience. It puts them in control.

Sales Presentation Lesson #8: Give signposts at the start

Step 1: Tell them what you are going to tell them. 

Step 2: Tell them. 

Step 3: Tell them what you told them.

Said another way …

Step 1: Preview your key points (“give pointers at the start”). Tease out the main idea.

Step 2: Share your key points and main idea — the meat of each section.

Step 3: Summarize (Sales presentation lesson #9).

Jobs spends a lot of time on Step 2, as any good speaker should.

However, he never misses the opportunity to preview each part of his presentation. He always starts by listing what he’s going to cover before just diving in.

30 or so minutes in, Jobs introduces the SMS section: “Now what I want to do is show you SMS texting” (Step 1).

Yeah, I know. The current smartphone has come a long way with SMS texting!

And then he does it (Step 2)— shows how texting works on the new iPhone.

Previewing upcoming content accomplishes two things: 

• It alerts the buyer “your question will be answered soon.” This allows them to focus on what is being shown instead of guessing what comes next.
• It creates a clear structure — a roadmap if you will. This section is focused; we aren’t just aimlessly meandering.

Note: It’s okay to be direct, “In this next section, I’m going to tell you about XYX.” It may sound a bit robotic, but better to err on the side of directness versus ambiguity and vagueness.

Sales Presentation Lesson #9: Get back to them at the end

When moving through a long presentation, it’s crucial to break things up every 9 minutes (see: Sales presentation lesson # 5) AND summarize what you covered.

Notice how when Steve Jobs wraps up a section, he often leads with, “So again …” This type of language signals, “I’m about to change chapters. Any questions before I move on?” 

He reviews and recaps what he’s just covered.

Jobs does this brilliantly while finishing the “iPod feature” section of his talk:

Note: While this slide appears to be counter to Sales presentation lesson #6 (Simplify Your Slides), it’s okay that he includes more words on this particular slide. After all, it’s a summary — a  takeaway slide — one that may be printed (or have someone take a picture of).

This summary slide check-in is essential.

Why? Gong data show that superstar sales reps are bombarded with questions during their demos compared to their peers .

In fact, top reps get 28% more questions from their buyers during product demos and technology-related discussions than “average” sales reps.

Pausing in between sections, summarizing what you’ve just covered, and allowing time for questions is essential to your success as a salesperson.

Our gift to you: Sales Presentation Template

Steve Jobs — love him or not — was one of the most talented business presenters of all time.

He balanced confidence and hyperbole with killer content and a style that kept his audience’s attention … for more than 8 seconds.

Take the 9 sales presentation tips from his 2007 iPhone keynote and incorporate them into your next sales presentation. 

Download our fill-in-the-blank Sales Presentation Template for some added flex, and start prepping your next product demo today.

Sign up to receive sales stats, data, and insights

Atlanta Office 756 West Peachtree Street Northwest, Suite 04W101 Atlanta, GA 30308

Chicago Office 167 North Green Street, Suite 04A-105 Chicago, IL 60607

Dublin Office Grand Canal House, 1 Grand Canal Street Upper Dublin D04 Y7R5 Ireland

Israel Office 40 Tuval Street 39th Floor Ramat Gan 52522

San Francisco Office 201 Spear St. 13th Floor, San Francisco, CA 94105

Utah Office 1633 W Innovation Way, Suite 05-106 Lehi, UT 84043

• Integrations
• Trust Center
• Customer Success
• Strategic Initiatives
• Deal Execution
• Outstanding Gongsters
• Operating Principles
• Leadership Principles
• Gong Merch Store
• Customer Advocacy Program
• Golden Gong Awards
• Reveal: The RI Podcast
• Case Studies
• Revenue Intelligence
• What’s Your Revenue IQ?
• Sales Template
• Improve Sales Skills
• Sales Training
• Sales Onboarding
• Sales Strategy
• Sales Engagement Platform
• Sales Enablement Software
• Conversation Intelligence
• Call Recording Software
• Sales Training Software
• Sales Analytics Software
• Voice Of Customer Software
• Sales Tracking Software
• Sales Management Software
• Auto-Dialer Software
• Call Software
• Zoom Call Transcription
• Revenue Operations Software
• Log Record Calls in Salesforce
• Revenue Management Software
• Sales Automation Software
• Sales Software
• Sales Coaching Software
• Customer Success Software

Copyright 2024 Gong.io Inc. All rights reserved. Various trademarks held by their respective owners.

For Patent and Trademark Legal Notices, please  click here .

• Terms & Conditions
• Privacy Policy
• Your Privacy Choices
• Service Status

• History Classics
• Your Profile
• Find History on Facebook (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on Twitter (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on YouTube (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on Instagram (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on TikTok (Opens in a new window)
• This Day In History
• History Podcasts
• History Vault

This Day In History : January 9

Changing the day will navigate the page to that given day in history. You can navigate days by using left and right arrows

Steve Jobs debuts the iPhone

On January 9, 2007, Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs unveils the iPhone —a touchscreen mobile phone with an iPod, camera and Web-browsing capabilities, among other features—at the Macworld convention in San Francisco . Jobs, dressed in his customary jeans and black mock turtleneck, called the iPhone a “revolutionary and magical product that is literally five years ahead of any other mobile phone.” When it went on sale in the United States six months later, on June 29, amidst huge hype, thousands of customers lined up at Apple stores across the country to be among the first to purchase an iPhone.

In November 2007—by which point more than 1.4 million iPhones had been sold—Time magazine named the sleek, 4.8-ounce device, originally available in a 4GB, $499 model and an 8GB, $599 model, its invention of the year. The iPhone went on sale in parts of Europe in late 2007, and in parts of Asia in 2008. In July 2008, Apple launched its online App Store, enabling people to download software applications that let them use their iPhones for games, social networking, travel planning and an every growing laundry list of other activities. Apple went on to over 10 updated models of the iPhone.

The iPhone helped turned Apple, which Jobs (1955-2011) co-founded with his friend Stephen Wozniak in California in 1976, into one of the planet’s most valuable corporations. In 2012, five years after the iPhone’s debut, more than 200 million had been sold. The iPhone joined a list of innovative Apple products, including the Macintosh (launched in 1984, it was one of the first personal computers to feature a graphical user interface, which allowed people to navigate by pointing and clicking a mouse rather than typing commands) and the iPod portable music player (launched in 2001), that became part of everyday modern life.

Also on This Day in History January | 9

Los angeles lakers' record winning streak ends, apple launches itunes, revolutionizing how people consume music, harvey milk becomes the first openly gay person elected to public office in california.

This Day in History Video: What Happened on January 9

First modern circus is staged.

Columbus mistakes manatees for mermaids

Wake Up to This Day in History

Sign up now to learn about This Day in History straight from your inbox. Get all of today's events in just one email featuring a range of topics.

By submitting your information, you agree to receive emails from HISTORY and A+E Networks. You can opt out at any time. You must be 16 years or older and a resident of the United States.

More details : Privacy Notice | Terms of Use | Contact Us

United States invades Luzon in Philippines

Richard m. nixon is born, record cold and snow decimates cattle herds, pop luminaries gather at the u.n. for the music for unicef concert, virginia woolf buys a house in bloomsbury, sylvester stallone starts filming "rocky", fire breaks out on former rms queen elizabeth, one of the “hillside stranglers” sentenced to life, president truman warns of cold war dangers.

10 Little-Known Facts About Apple

A pple -- officially known as Apple Inc. -- is one of the biggest companies in the world by any metric, and yet there are lots of facts about Apple you probably don't know. We'll explore those little-known facts here, with interesting tidbits of information dating all the way back to Apple's founding and all the way up to today.

Apple was founded as Apple Computer, Inc. in 1976 as a means to market and sell the Apple I desktop computer. The company mostly focused on selling computers into the 1990s, but everything changed when it released the iPod in 2001. That led to the release of the iPhone in 2007, and Apple is now known for manufacturing a range of different products.

For most of its history, Steve Jobs was the driving force behind Apple, but he passed away at the age of 56 after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. The company is now led by Tim Cook --  the first chief executive of a Fortune 500 company to publicly declare that he's gay -- who has been CEO since Jobs' passing in 2011 and has a different leadership style to Jobs .

Read more: The 20 Best Mac Apps That Will Improve Your Apple Experience In 2024

Apple's Name Comes From The Fruit

There have been lots of explanations given as to why the company is named Apple. However, the simple truth is that Apple is named after the fruit due to Steve Jobs' love of apples and fruit in general. Jobs considered himself a fruitarian, and followed a fruit-based diet for periods of his life -- including after he fell ill with pancreatic cancer. CNN reports that Jobs told his biographer Walter Isaacson that the name sounded "fun, spirited and not intimidating," which made it a good fit for the fledgling company

According to Steve Wozniak, one of the two co-founders of Apple alongside Jobs, the name was inspired by Jobs' visit to an apple orchard in Oregon. However, Wozniak suggested that the apple orchard was "actually some kind of commune," according to Macworld . Regardless, that visit, and Jobs' love of fruit, inspired the name of a company that has now been around for several decades.

As an aside, Apple Inc. endured a years-long battle with Apple Corps, the holding company set up by The Beatles. Both companies were called Apple and both logos featured a profile of an apple, leading to a series of trademark disputes. This ended in 2007 when Apple Inc. acquired all of the trademarks related to Apple.

The Third Co-Founder Of Apple Sold His Stake For $800

While Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak became household names as the founders of Apple, there was a third co-founder who opted out of the company early -- and lost billions of dollars by doing so.

Ronald Wayne worked at Atari alongside Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, which meant he was involved in their early discussions about the company. He was older than Jobs and Wozniak, explaining to  NextShark that he was often seen as the "adult in the room". With Jobs and Wozniak often disagreeing on computing and business decisions, Wayne was given a 10% stake in the new company to act as a tie-breaker in the decision-making process. Wayne's contributions to Apple included drafting the original partnership agreement, creating the first logo featuring Sir Isaac Newton, and writing the Apple I operations manual.

Wayne exited the company days after forming it due to being somewhat risk-averse and not wholly convinced he was a fit for the business. He was later paid $800 to relinquish his 10% equity stake in the company. Those shares would now be worth many billions. However, Wayne has insisted that he doesn't regret exiting Apple, believing it was the correct decision based on the information he had at the time.

Apple Was The Third Company To Be Offered The iPod

While the iPod is synonymous with Apple, the idea was actually offered to two other companies first. Thankfully for Apple's sake, those two companies turned it down, whereas Steve Jobs saw the potential in the product which would set Apple off on a different, and very successful, path.

Tony Fadell was the brains behind the iPod. A former employee of both General Magic and Philips, Fadell had a vision to make a better MP3 player. He first approached RealNetworks with the idea of building a premium MP3 player with a better way of buying music. The company declined the offer. He then approached Philips, which also turned down the opportunity. Fadell then spoke to Apple, which decided to support his project. He was taken on as an independent contractor and led the team that built a prototype iPod. 

This product, which worked seamlessly with iTunes, was something of a game changer for Apple, with hundreds of millions of units sold. Beyond that, the iPod also led to the creation of the iPhone, which cemented Apple's position as a global brand which hasn't looked back since. Fadell stayed at Apple for almost a decade, and later, co-founded Nest Labs, which has since been acquired by Google .

The Apple I Sold For $666.66

Apple's first computer, the appropriately-named Apple I, was released in 1976, and it came with an odd price tag of $666.66. Not only would this be the equivalent of more than $3,000 in today's money, it was also a rather odd asking price. Especially as in Christianity, the number 666 is considered to be so-called the number of the beast, a euphemistic reference to the Antichrist or devil.

However, unlike some online conspiracy theories will attest, this had nothing to do with Satanic worship. Instead, Steve Wozniak has stated that the price point was decided on as he just preferred repeating digits. He has also stated that he had no idea of the relationship between the number and The Book of Revelation when coming up with the price.

As for why the Apple I cost that rough sum of money, it all comes down to profit margins. The wholesale price of the Apple I was $500, so $666 constituted a markup of 30 percent. The 66 cents on top of that wasn't important in any way except to catch people's eyes in advertisements. With the local computer store, The Byte Shop, agreeing to purchase 50 fully-assembled units for $500, the numbers all aligned.

Apple's First Logo Featured Sir Isaac Newton

Apple's logo has evolved over the decades that the company has been in business. However, the biggest change occurred between the first and second logos. The first logo, designed by the aforementioned Ronald Wayne in 1976, included an illustration of Sir Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree. This is due to his association with an apple falling from a tree (and inspiring the discovery of gravity). The logo also features Apple Computer Co. on a banner wrapped around the drawing.

This logo only lasted for a year, with Steve Jobs deciding a rebrand was needed as early as 1977. He considered the first logo to be too old-fashioned and not easy to print on a smaller scale. So he hired Rob Janoff, an experienced designer, to design a new logo. That new logo was the profile of an apple with a bite taken out of it that we're all now achingly familiar with. The first version featured the colors of the rainbow, but that was consequently simplified further into single colors such as gray, silver, and white.

Apple Was The First Company To $1 Trillion

In 2018, Apple became the first private company to hit a market value of $1 trillion. This came 42 years after Apple was founded, and 117 years after US Steel became the first company to be valued at $1 billion in 1901. As amazing as Steve Jobs' tenure at Apple was -- especially after his return in 1997 -- it was his successor Tim Cook that led them to this monumental moment.

Apple's share price quadrupled between 2011 when Cook took over from Jobs after his resignation due to ill health. At the moment the price hit $207.05, Apple became the first $1 trillion private company in the world.

Some believe that PetroChina beat Apple to a $1 trillion market cap, but its valuation is considered unreliable due to only 2 percent of the company's shares being publicly traded. Either way, Apple now has a market cap north of $2 trillion, and at one point, it topped $3 billion. However, at the time of writing, it's only the second most valuable company in the world, with Apple's arch rival Microsoft holding the top spot.

Apple Fired Steve Jobs From The Company In 1985

Despite being the co-founder of the company, Apple fired Steve Jobs in 1985. To rub salt into the wound, Jobs actually hired the man who would go onto fire him. That man was John Sculley, the CEO of PepsiCo, who was hired as CEO due to the board of directors not feeling that Jobs was ready for the job. Jobs was fired after falling out with the board of directors when two Apple products, the Macintosh and Lisa, failed to live up to expectations.

However, Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 after the company acquired NeXT, the company Jobs launched after his ousting 12 years earlier. The board made Jobs CEO, and in that role, he went on to be instrumental in turning Apple's fortunes around.

Jobs stayed at the company from 1997 until his untimely death from pancreatic cancer in 2011. At the point he passed away, Apple had become a world beater, with new and innovative products making it a household name, and even the Mac being a success. Meanwhile, the Lisa remains a footnote in the history of Apple .

Apple Is Wealthier Than All But A Handful Of Countries

Apple's astounding market cap (short for market capitalization) means it's wealthier than all but a handful of countries. A company's market cap represents its total value based on the outstanding shares of stock. Which makes it the closest thing we have to compare it with a country's GDP (gross domestic product).

The countries that Apple can be considered wealthier than change as both Apple's market caps and the GDPs of countries do, but the Cupertino-based company is consistently in the top 10. Which, given that there are around 195 countries in the world, is mightily impressive.

In January 2022, Apple became the first company to hit a market cap of $3 trillion. At that point, it was more valuable than all but the six largest economies in the world, including the U.S., China, and Germany, which means it beat big hitters such as France and Russia. Apple obviously isn't alone in this, with Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, and Alphabet being other companies that compete with entire countries for wealth. 

Steve Jobs Only Took A Salary Of $1 Per Year

For the decade plus change after he returned to the company, Steve Jobs only took a symbolic salary of $1 per year. This was despite pushing the company into new areas and increasing its stock price massively.

Opinions on why Jobs did this differ, with theories ranging from it was his way of showing how much he cared for the company he created to ensuring both he and his family could make use of Apple's health plan. However, the key is that Jobs didn't need to be paid a salary. He owned millions of shares in Apple, and they continued to grow in value throughout his tenure as CEO.

Jobs was one of the first CEOs to opt for a symbolic $1 salary, but he isn't alone in doing so. Other notable examples include Larry Ellison at Oracle, Mark Zuckerberg at Meta, and Elon Musk at Tesla. The idea of taking a $1 per year salary dates back to World War I. The U.S. Government is forbidden from employing unpaid volunteers, so businessmen keen to help the war effort were given a nominal salary. This is how financier Bernard Baruch came to manage the War Industries Board for just $1 per year.

Apple Products Are Usually Pictured With A Time Of 9:41

Official images of Apple products almost always have the time set to 9:41. Once you notice it, you'll see it every time. But why 9:41am specifically?

This tradition dates back to 2007 and the reveal of Apple's iconic first iPhone . In a dress rehearsal of the keynote presentation, it was noted that the iPhone reveal would occur around 40 minutes in. And given that the presentation began at 9:00 am, that meant the iPhone would be revealed at around 9:40am. Add a minute or two in case of delays, and you get to 9:41.

Therefore, the promotional materials that would flash on screen behind Steve Jobs showed the iPhone with 9:41 as the time. Some early promotional images actually show 9:42, but 9:41 has become the standard for Apple ever since, despite new product reveals now happening at different times during keynote presentations.

The days of Jobs' using his signature "One more thing" line to reveal a surprise product at the end of presentations are long gone, but having 9:41 shown on the displays of new products with screens seems set in stone.

Read the original article on SlashGear