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Steve Jobs iPhone 2007 Presentation (Full Transcript)

• July 4, 2014 3:22 pm November 20, 2023 8:08 am
• by Pangambam S

On January 9, 2007, then Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone for the first time and the world of mobile devices changed forever. Here is the full keynote presentation by Steve Jobs….

  TRANSCRIPT: 

Steve Jobs- Apple CEO

This is the day I’ve been looking forward to for two and a half years.

Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything and Apple has been – well, first of all, one’s very fortunate if you get to work on just one of these in your career. Apple has been very fortunate. It’s been able to introduce a few of these into the world.

1984 – we introduced the Macintosh. It didn’t just change Apple. It changed the whole computer industry.

In 2001, we introduced the first iPod. And it didn’t just change the way we all listen to music, it changed the entire music industry.

Well, today we’re introducing three revolutionary products of this class. The first one is a widescreen iPod with touch controls . The second is a revolutionary mobile phone . And the third is a breakthrough Internet communications device .

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. Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone, and here it is.

No, actually here it is, but we’re going to leave it there for now.

So, before we get into it, let me talk about a category of things. The most advanced phones are called smart phones, so they say. And they typically combine a phone plus some e-mail capability, plus they say it’s the Internet. It’s sort of the baby Internet into one device, and they all have these little plastic keyboards on them. And the problem is that they’re not so smart and they’re not so easy to use, and so if you kind of make a Business School 101 graph of the smart axis and the easy-to-use axis, phones, regular cell phones are right there, they’re not so smart, and they’re not so easy to use.

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• Smartphones

Watch Steve Jobs Unveil the First iPhone 10 Years Ago Today

T oday, our smartphones function like a high-tech Swiss army knife, serving as everything from a communications device to a digital camera to an alarm clock. That multiple-use functionality is exactly how late Apple CEO Steve Jobs teased the first iPhone when he introduced it on stage ten years ago today, on Jan. 9, 2007.

“An iPod, a phone, and an Internet communicator,” Jobs said on stage during the Macworld conference. “Are you getting it? These are not three separate devices. This is one device.”

The first-generation iPhone would be considered primitive by today’s technology standards, with its 2-megapixel camera, iPod Touch-inspired design, and 3.5-inch touchscreen. And it certainly wasn’t the first portable phone capable of connecting to the Internet. But the first iPhone is widely credited with heralding in the modern smartphone era, with nearly all of today’s devices taking design and functionality cues from Apple’s original handset.

Read more: The 50 Most Influential Gadgets of All Time

A decade after its original debut, the iPhone has become Apple’s most popular product, accounting for most of the company’s revenue . Later this year, Apple is expected to unveil a new iPhone with a dramatically different design, potentially adding new characteristics like a curved screen and ditching the home button.

Watch Jobs’ full 2007 keynote below:

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The iPhone at 15: Steve Jobs Revealed His Greatest Product in 2007

The first iPhone went on sale on June 29, 2007 and it helped Apple grow into a $3 trillion company over the next 15 years.

• Patrick's play The Cowboy is included in the Best American Short Plays 2011-12 anthology. He co-wrote and starred in the short film Baden Krunk that won the Best Wisconsin Short Film award at the Milwaukee Short Film Festival.

On Jan. 9, 2007 at the MacWorld Expo, Steve Job unveiled the first iPhone.

Fifteen years ago today, the first iPhone went on sale. It was five months after Steve Jobs, in perhaps his most iconic Apple keynote,  introduced the original iPhone : "An iPod, a phone and internet communicator. An iPod, a phone, are you getting it?"

Steve Jobs revealed Apple's phone on Jan. 9, 2007. Night at the Museum was No. 1 in theaters. Nokia was the big name in phones. President Gerald Ford had been buried days earlier. And in a wildcard playoff game, the Indianapolis Colts had just defeated the Kansas City Chiefs before going on to win the Super Bowl. 

"iPhone is a revolutionary and magical product that is literally five years ahead of any other mobile phone," Jobs said during his keynote speech.

The iPhone wasn't actually magical. There were even  behind-the-scenes efforts required to keep the iPhone from crashing while Jobs demonstrated it during the keynote . But 15 years later, it would be hard to argue that the iPhone wasn't revolutionary. Whether you are a loyal iPhone owner or have never owned one, the impact the iPhone has made in our daily lives is indisputable.

Read: What it was like attending the very first iPhone event

Months after being announced, the iPhone arrived in stores on June 29, 2007.

To celebrate the 15th anniversary of the iPhone, here are 15 facts about the iPhone and Apple.

Apple is now worth $3 trillion dollars

In 2007, Apple's market capitalization (the total value of all the shares of Apple stock) was $174.03 billion. On Jan. 3, 2022, it hit $3 trillion dollars , the highest market capitalization for any company ever.

The first iPhone had an aluminum body

The original iPhone came with a silver brushed aluminum finish. The current  iPhone 13 has an aluminum frame, glass front and back, and comes in five colors. The iPhone 13 Pro is available in three finishes.

An iPhone for $499

The original iPhone cost $499 and came with 4GB of storage. For $100 more you could get one with 8GB of storage. The iPhone 13 Pro Max costs $1,099 for 256GB of storage and tops out at 1TB of storage for $1,599.

It predates Instagram, Uber, TikTok and more

The following companies didn't exist in 2007: Instagram, Uber, TikTok, Twitch, Snap, Lyft, DoorDash, Tinder, Slack, Lime, Postmates, Venmo and Pinterest.

It only had a single camera

The original iPhone had a single camera and it was located on the back. The iPhone 13 Pro has four cameras (three on the back and one on the front).

You couldn't copy and paste

You couldn't copy and paste text with the original iPhone. In fact, copy and paste wasn't added until 2009 with the release of iPhone OS 3.

The first iPhone had 15 apps.

There were only 15 apps to start

The original iPhone had 15 apps: Calendar, Camera, Clock, Contacts, iPod, Maps (Google Maps), Messages, Notes, Phone, Photos, Safari, Stocks, Voice Memos, Weather and Settings.

The first of 34 iPhone models

There have been 34 iPhone models, and  Apple currently sells eight .

You couldn't record video

You couldn't record videos with the original iPhone. Now the iPhone 13 Pro can record 4K 60fps video and can even record in  ProRes at 4K 30fps .

A future movie maker

The following movies were filmed with an iPhone: Unsane , Tangerine , Detour , High Flying Bird , Snow Steam Iron and Lady Gaga: Stupid Love (which is technically a music video).

You couldn't text photos

The original iPhone didn't support MMS for sending things like photos and videos via text messages. It was added as a part of iPhone OS 3 .

A 3.5-inch screen

The original iPhone had a 3.5-inch screen. The iPhone 13 Mini has a 5.4-inch screen, the iPhone 13 comes with a 6.1-inch screen and the 13 Pro Max has a giant 6.7-inch screen.

Blue bubbles came later

FaceTime was released in 2010 and iMessage in 2011.

The App Store came later

The App Store opened on July 10, 2008 with 500 apps. According to Apple's website , there are currently 1.8 million apps in the App Store.

A million iPhones sold every day and a half

On Sept. 10, 2007 (74 days after the launch of the original iPhone) Apple sold its millionth iPhone. In 2018, Apple sold 216.7 million iPhones which is roughly a million iPhones sold every 1.5 days. Apple stopped sharing the number of iPhones sold after 2018.

How the original iPhone stacks up to the iPhone 7 Plus

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The first iPhone was announced 13 years ago today — here's how Steve Jobs introduced it

• Apple cofounder and former CEO Steve Jobs introduced the first iPhone thirteen years ago today.
• Jobs announced the phone, which he called "revolutionary" at a Macworld conference.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories .

January 9, 2007, was a milestone in the history of computing: the introduction of the first iPhone.

It wasn't the first "smartphone," or the first phone with a camera. It wasn't the first mobile device to have a touchscreen, or to let users install apps. (In fact, the App Store didn't even launch until 2008 , a year after the first iPhone was released!)

But it tied numerous disparate features together in a cohesive, well-designed whole — kickstarting a mobile revolution that has transformed the modern world.

Today's app economy is bigger than Hollywood , and WhatsApp , Snapchat , Uber , Tinder , and more are essential parts of modern culture, collectively used by hundreds of millions of people every day. But prior to 2007, none of that existed, and the iPhone's success was by no means guaranteed.

It was announced by the late Steve Jobs, Apple's cofounder, onstage at the company's Macworld conference on January 9, 2007. The now-iconic exec was not humble about its possibilities — calling it a "revolutionary device ... that changes everything."

Five months later, as customers queued for days, it hit shop shelves in the US.

And the rest is history.

Keep reading for the story behind the launch and to watch the full keynote ...

Jobs took to the stage in his trademark black turtleneck sweater for the now-legendary presentation in January.

"Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything," the executive said. "Apple's been very fortunate. It's been able to introduce a few of these into the world."

"Well, today, we're introducing three revolutionary products of this class. The first one is a wide-screen iPod with touch controls. The second is a revolutionary mobile phone. And the third is a breakthrough internet-communications device."

He went on: "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."

The performance was carefully stage-managed — but it wasn't all smooth sailing getting there.

According to a report from The New York Times from 2013, rehearsals were plagued with technical glitches. An early iPhone engineer said Jobs was "intense," telling him, "If we fail, it will be because of you," and, "You are [expletive] up my company."

Source: The New York Times

Apple is (in)famous for its secrecy — and Jobs reportedly even wanted contractors working on the presentation to sleep at the auditorium to prevent leaks. (In the end he was persuaded against the idea.)

When the phone launched, The New York Times described it as "not ... for everyone" and a "gamble." That "gamble" has propelled Apple to stratospheric heights, with the largest market cap of any company in the world.

Revisiting the launch ten years later, BBC tech reporter Rory Cellan-Jones wrote that he was criticised for giving what some argued was "undue prominence to a product launch." He now feels as if his coverage was probably justified.

Source: BBC

Google and Apple would become bitter rivals, battling for supremacy on mobile. But Eric Schmidt, then the CEO of Google, actually appeared onstage at the iPhone launch. He praised it as an "incredible job" that let companies like Google and Apple "merge without merging."

Though hyped, dozens of features iPhone owners now take for granted were nowhere to be seen at the time. No App Store, no copy-paste, no changeable background, no picture messaging, no video camera, no Siri, no notification centre, and more. It was actually pretty basic.

We've rounded up even more here .

After 2 1/2 years in development, the iPhone was announced on January 9, 2007.

It went on sale on June 29, 2007, in the US. People lined up for days outside Apple Stores to be the first to get their hands on it.

It didn't launch in the UK until months later, on November 9, 2007. People queued for it then too — and queues have since become a familiar sight at Apple's hyped launches.

Since then, more than 1 billion iPhones have been sold worldwide.

In a statement celebrating 10 years of the iPhone, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the "iPhone is an essential part of our customers' lives and today more than ever it is redefining the way we communicate, entertain, work and live ... iPhone set the standard for mobile computing in its first decade, and we are just getting started. The best is yet to come."

Source: Apple

Finally, here's part of the press release that came out alongside the announcement of the first iPhone, and the full keynote:

Apple Reinvents the Phone with iPhone

MACWORLD SAN FRANCISCO - January 9th, 2007

Apple today introduced iPhone, combining three products — a revolutionary mobile phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet communications device with desktop-class email, Web browsing, searching and maps — into one small and lightweight handheld device. iPhone introduces an entirely new user interface based on a large multi-touch display and pioneering new software, letting users control iPhone with just their fingers. iPhone also ushers in an era of software power and sophistication never before seen in a mobile device, which completely redefines what users can do on their mobile phones.

"iPhone is a revolutionary and magical product that is literally five years ahead of any other mobile phone", said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "We are all born with the ultimate pointing device — our fingers — and iPhone uses them to create the most revolutionary user interface since the mouse".

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Steve Jobs Originally Envisioned the iPhone as Mostly a Phone

By: Dave Roos

Updated: October 3, 2023 | Original: September 12, 2018

As Apple's iPhones and other smartphones feature increasingly sophisticated cameras, processors and touch screens, the rise of the super-stocked device shows that even the inimitable Steve Jobs couldn’t predict the future.

The popular mythology around Jobs was that he was always thinking 10 years ahead of the rest of the computing and electronics world. Under Jobs’ leadership, Apple produced some of the most revolutionary and iconic pieces of consumer technology ever: the Apple IIc, the original Macintosh, the iMac G4, the iPod, the iPhone and iPad.

But the origin story of the first iPhone reveals that Jobs, while undeniably brilliant, was not a technological soothsayer who predicted our digital future. He was just trying to make a really cool phone.

Brian Merchant, author of The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone , says that for all of the original iPhone’s game-changing innovations—the multitouch screen, the high-quality camera, the built-in accelerometers and gyroscopic sensors—Jobs conceived of the device as a cellphone, first and foremost.

And central to the concept of a cellphone back in 2005 and 2006 when the iPhone was being developed, was that it fit comfortably in your hand and in your pocket. “If the iPhone was uncomfortable to hold, that would have been a non-starter for Jobs,” says Merchant.

If you watch the 2007 Apple keynote when the iPhone debuted, the first thing Jobs says when he unveils the device is that “It fits beautifully in the palm of your hand.” Its size was perfectly suited for what Jobs believed was the original iPhone’s crowning achievement, making phone calls.

“We want to reinvent the phone,” said Jobs at the 2007 keynote. “What’s the killer app? The killer app is making calls. It’s amazing how hard it is to make calls on most phones.”

Merchant says that Jobs’ number one pet peeve, according to developers who worked on the original iPhone, was that his regular cellphone would drop calls. No doubt Jobs was jazzed about the iPhone’s groundbreaking touchscreen and Apple’s first-ever apps for music, photos, and SMS texting, but none of that could get in the way of making phone calls. The first iPhone shipped without the App Store, in fact, because Jobs didn’t trust third-party developers to prevent dropped calls.

“Which is insane to think now,” says Merchant. “Because the iPhone became famous for being kind of a crappy phone. The phone was the last thing anybody used it for.”

The iPhone took two-and-a-half years to develop and wasn’t even Jobs’ brainchild. In 2001, Apple released the iPod, a sleek, handheld digital music player that sold millions and catapulted Apple into the device market. Apple executives worried that the iPod would lose market share once cellphone manufacturers figured out how to put MP3 players on their phones. But not if Apple beat them to it.

The first prototype of an Apple phone shows just how stuck Jobs and his team were in existing technologies. According to Tony Fadell, one of the original designers of the iPod and the first three iPhones, the first concept was literally an “iPod phone.”

“It was an iPod with a phone module inside it,” Fadell told Venturebeat . “It looked like an iPod, but it had a phone, and you would select numbers through the same interface and so on. But if you wanted to dial a number it was like using a rotary dial. It sucked."

Jobs scrapped the design and started from scratch. At the time, there was a team of Apple engineers who had been playing with a device called the Fingerworks iGesture Pad invented by a man with hand injuries who couldn’t use a conventional mouse. Members of the team had worked on the Newton, Apple’s infamous flop of a PDA, but still believed touchscreens held promise.

“It was more of a ‘blue sky, future of computing’ kind of thing,” says Merchant. “The touchscreen research had gone through several iterations. It was briefly tied to a tablet, put aside, and had just kind of sat in the dark. Then Steve Jobs showed up and said, maybe this is the phone. Out of that mutation was how the iPhone was born inside Apple.”

With the touchscreen technology in place, Merchant says that many of the designers and engineers on the iPhone development team absolutely saw it as an opportunity to build an entirely new kind of mobile computer, exactly what the iPhone would become for its millions of loyal users.

“Steve Jobs didn’t,” says Merchant. “He thought it was cool, but the evidence suggests that Steve Jobs wanted to use Apple’s technology to build the best phone possible. And a phone fits in your hand.”

Subsequent generations of the iPhone stuck to the small design, incrementally increasing screen size, but nothing beyond 4 inches. Samsung was the first to release a truly huge phone in 2011. The Samsung Galaxy Note featured an almost comically huge (at the time) 5.3-inch screen and single-handedly popularized the term “phablet,” a cross between a phone and a tablet.

Jobs passed away from pancreatic cancer that same year. Whether or not it had anything to do with his absence, Apple released the iPhone 5 in 2012 with a noticeably larger 4-inch screen. Its first bona fide phablet was the iPhone 6 Plus, though, a 5.5-inch version released in 2014.

Simply put, the move toward larger screen sizes across the smartphone industry reflects the way that consumers are using their mobile devices. Jobs may not have imagined back in 2005 how the humble cellphone would become the primary platform for thousands of apps offering streaming music and video, real-time video chat, addictive video games and virtual and augmented reality experiences.

“The iPhone was designed to be a super slick phone in Steve Jobs’ mind,” says Merchant. “It was his development team and the demands of the user base that saw the potential in the new platform, that transformed the iPhone from a ‘slick phone’ into the culturally dominant, world-eating phenomenon that it is today.”

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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.

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Behind-the-scenes details revealed about Steve Jobs' first iPhone announcement

The engineers and managers were downing Scotch in the fifth row of the Moscone Center as Apple's co-founder demonstrated an aspect of the iPhone. According to a new write-up in The New York Times Magazine , they were all quite nervous that the still-incomplete iPhone prototype would fail to perform some task during the demonstration, and whoever had been responsible for that feature prior to the demo would later have to suffer the wrath of Jobs.

The Times ' look back at the development of the iPhone reveals a process filled with setbacks, glitches, and obstacles. Andy Grignon, a senior radio engineer at Apple, contributes a first-hand perspective on the process, one filled with stress and high stakes.

“At first it was just really cool to be at rehearsals at all — kind of like a cred badge,” Grignon said of the rehearsals that preceded the actual iPhone unveiling. “But it quickly got really uncomfortable. 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 [expletive] up my company,’ or, ‘If we fail, it will be because of you.’ He was just very intense. And you would always feel an inch tall.”

Before those rehearsals, Apple was on lockdown. Apple is well known for its culture of secrecy, and the development of the iPhone was no different. Engineers were asked to sign non-disclosure agreements before they could even be told what they were working on, and then they were asked to sign documents reaffirming the previous agreements. "Rockstar" employees began disappearing from their departments, only to be seen later entering rooms with badge scanners and multiple other levels of security. The secrecy was aimed at preventing any leaks of what employees would soon find out was a "moon shot" of sorts for the then-iPod maker.

"It had been drilled into everyone’s head that this was the next big thing to come out of Apple," Grignon said, as the iPhone was essentially the only big, new product Apple had been working on at the time. “It was Apple TV or the iPhone... And if he had gone to Macworld with just Apple TV” — a new product that connected iTunes to a television set — “the world would have said, ‘What the heck was that?’ ”

The iPhone project — which would eventually cost $150 million to create, by some estimates — produced a number of prototypes. Among them was a device that looked like a joke slide Jobs showed before introducing the real iPhone: an iPod with a rotary dial in place of the click wheel. That design was rejected, as it "was not cool" in the way Apple wanted its products to be.

The team behind the iPhone's development came to realize that their earlier idea that building the device would be like building a small Mac was quite off the mark. Issues arose with battery life, the multitouch interface, and even build materials. Jobs and Apple design guru Jony Ive initially designed an iPhone made entirely from brushed aluminum; they had to be gently let down by Apple's antenna experts that such a design would block radio waves, rendering the device "a beautiful brick."

“And it was not an easy explanation," said Phil Kearney, a former Apple engineer. "Most of the designers are artists. The last science class they took was in eighth grade. But they have a lot of power at Apple. So they ask, ‘Why can’t we just make a little seam for the radio waves to escape through?’ And you have to explain to them why you just can’t.”

By the time the actual device was unveiled in San Francisco, nerves were frayed throughout the development team. The process was fraught with slammed doors, shouting matches, and exhausted engineers quitting in a huff, only to return once they had gotten a few nights' sleep. When the finale came — and it worked along with everything before it, we all just drained the flask.

The device that Jobs actually took onto the stage with him was actually an incomplete prototype. It would play a section of a song or video, but would crash if a user tried to play the full clip. The apps that were demonstrated were incomplete, with no guarantee that they would not crash mid-demonstration. The team eventually decided on a "golden path" of specific tasks that Jobs could perform with little chance that the device would crash in the actual keynote.

Jobs took the stage on January 9, 2007 in his trademark black turtleneck and jeans, saying "This is a day I have been looking forward to for two and a half years," before showing off Apple's revolutionary take on the phone. Grignon, by that time, was drunk, having brought a flask in order to calm his nerves. As Jobs swiped and pinched, some of his staff swigged and sighed in relief, each one taking a shot as the feature they were responsible for performed without a hitch.

"When the finale came," Grignon said, "and it worked along with everything before it, we all just drained the flask. It was the best demo any of us had ever seen. And the rest of the day turned out to be just a [expletive] for the entire iPhone team. We just spent the entire rest of the day drinking in the city. It was just a mess, but it was great.”

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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.

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The iPad has always existed between things. In fact, it was originally pitched as existing in between the iPhone and Mac , capable of things both devices can do, but designed to be better at a few key tasks.

From one angle, that made the iPad the antithesis of netbooks, pale imitations of notebook laptops Steve Jobs characterized as not being particularly good at any one thing because of their cramped keyboards and lousy performance. From another angle, the iPad was a big version of the iPhone, a home for touchscreen apps and games, but in many ways a better version, especially if you liked watching video, browsing the web, or reading books.

Now 14 years since its original release on April 3, 2010, and over a year since Apple last updated it , the future of the iPad is more complicated and laptop-like than ever. Apple’s tablet has changed radically since the first-generation model was introduced in 2010, not necessarily in its capabilities, but in how Apple fits it into its lineup. The original iPad proposed a turn towards a casual, iPhone-inspired vision for the future of computing that has come to pass, but not entirely in the way Apple imagined.

A “Big iPhone”

Looking back at the presentation Steve Jobs gave to introduce the iPad, you can see how it was a powerful idea, but also why it’s in the strange position it’s in now. Jobs claimed that the iPad would be specifically better at web browsing, email, photos, video, music, games, and ebooks. The iPad’s adoption of the iPhone’s interface, paired with processing power and screen size that was approaching entry-level laptops, would allow it to be better suited to the task than the devices it was squished between. A loose pitch, but not necessarily an uncompelling one: People like bigger screens.

What stands out about Jobs’ framing now isn’t how loosely the iPad was described but what happened after. While most Apple keynotes up until that point had involved clicking through slides and standing by podiums for demos, after Jobs introduced the iPad, he immediately sat down in a leather chair on stage and started using it. The demo went on for minutes as he blew through the basic apps and functionality he outlined previously, communicating a different, lean-back energy for the iPad that wasn’t really present with the iPhone or the Mac. The iPad was for chilling out, browsing the web, reading books, and watching videos. It was a big iPhone, but a big iPhone that was more pleasant to use.

“Using this thing is remarkable,” Jobs said while plopped on the leather chair. “It's so much more intimate than a laptop and it's so much more capable than a smartphone with this gorgeous large display.”

That feeling, that because of the size of the iPad you were actually holding a physical version of a webpage, or a book, or a document, is easy to overlook, but not to be discredited. The original iPad might have just been a pleasingly curved mix of glass and aluminum, with a 9.7-inch LCD multitouch touchscreen, prominent bezels, and no cameras. But speculation went wild when it launched because of how Apple was trying to connect its new iPad business to publishing and the media industry.

The iPad was for chilling out, browsing the web, reading books, and watching videos. It was a big iPhone, but a big iPhone that was more pleasant to use.

The iPad was supposed to reinvent books and the magazine business in portable digital form. News Corp. launched an iPad-exclusive publication called The Daily hinged on the hope that a multimedia, touch-friendly reading experience would reignite interest in the news. It didn’t, even after News Corp. launched an app for Samsung’s Galaxy Tab, but it’s a good illustration of the hopes pinned on Apple’s tablet.

The first iPad was powered by Apple’s A4 chip, the first of its kind designed in-house for even more efficient performance, and an early sign that mobile Arm-based chips would prove to be more than enough for most people’s computing needs. Apple later ported the A4 to the iPhone 4, starting a trend of custom-designed chips that made it all the way to the Mac. The fact that the original iPad ran “iPhone OS” before it was rebranded as iOS was also an indicator of how much Apple’s mobile operating system would influence future software, for good and for bad. The iPad was the first modern computer that plenty of people over the age of 50 bought and still use to this day because of how easy it was to understand. Its bigger touchscreen only made it easier to use.

The Tablet Revolution

As Jobs later revealed during an interview at the 2010 All Things D conference , Apple thought up the iPad before the iPhone, but the multitouch screen was compelling enough the company decided it could be used on a product that needed an even bigger shakeup, the cellphone. Both the iPad and iPhone fit into a lineage of PDA devices Apple used to make like the Newton and the MessagePad. But they were also responses to the popular devices of their moment. In the case of the iPhone, the Palm Treo and BlackBerry Pearl. In the case of the iPad, the trend of Windows-based tablet PCs.

Apple’s kernel of insight, that tablets should be run on mobile operating systems rather than desktop ones (even though the original iPhone OS was a descendant of Mac OS X) had repercussions across the industry. Android tablets sprung up as an alternative not long after the iPad was released, porting the Android operating system to bigger screens. Google would continue to tinker with the idea, even making a serious play for a tablet version of Android with the Honeycomb update it released in 2011, but none of it ever stuck. The biggest critical tablet success Google ever had were ones that hewed closer to smartphones in terms of screen size, like the Nexus 7. And credit to Apple’s relationship with developers at the time, there weren’t nearly as many great tablet-first apps on Android as there were on the iPad.

Microsoft settling on the beloved design of Surface Pro clearly influenced the iPad Pro...

The iPad was popular, but it wasn’t immune to the influences of the wider market. Microsoft settling on the beloved design of Surface Pro clearly influenced the iPad Pro, which was the first to officially support stylus input and a new keyboard case accessory. In 2016, Apple had put most of its eggs in the iPhone and iPad basket. New Macs came out, but they weren’t the most powerful or the best designed. Apple increasingly seemed to believe that the iPad was the entry-level computer of the future, a vision set in motion when Jobs compared personal computers to “pickup trucks,” during that same All Things D interview. Laptops like the MacBook were useful computers, but increasingly specialized in a world where you could interact with websites and apps with your fingers.

The iPad’s Changing Identity

There’s no reason the iPad should be forced to work like a laptop.

Since 2020, Apple has seemingly swung back the other way. Thanks to the improved performance and battery life the company’s M-series chip brought to the Mac , the iPad’s role as a laptop alternative isn’t nearly as important. Apple was right that the way people used computers was changing, but the phone did most of the work for them. Carrying a computer in your pocket was more impactful than carrying a tablet in your backpack or bag.

That leaves the iPad in an odd place. It’s still as fun to use as it’s ever been, but it has all of the baggage of its years as a Surface Pro competitor and laptop wannabe. It’s also increasingly a device designed to be used in landscape , when the original had no preferred orientation.

If there’s any path forward for the iPad, it’s leaning into what makes it different , rather than dragging it ever closer to the Mac. Leaning into the casual, even intimate, feeling communicated by settling into a comfortable chair and reading. Apple’s been able to redesign its professional apps like Logic and Final Cut Pro for the iPad, and made apps that returned editing to the more tactile experience they used to be. That’s the potential of a device you have to physically touch to use, and it could easily be applied to other applications and other parts of using the iPad. Anything else adds layers of complexity to an already confused product.

Smartphone maker Xiaomi switches from Apple to Tesla challenger as its first EV racks up 120,000 orders in 36 hours

Anyone who’s tried a Xiaomi smartphone knows it’s a worthy competitor to the iPhone. Now the question is, will Xiaomi present the same kind of challenge to Tesla as to Apple? 

On Thursday, the Chinese juggernaut launched its first electric vehicle, the SU7 sedan. Billionaire founder and CEO Lei Jun—a household name in China— said at the presentation in Beijing, “Many people ask me who the Xiaomi SU7 is built for. My answer is, isn’t it time for Tesla Model 3 users to upgrade?”

The entry of yet another deep-pocketed rival in China comes at a difficult time for Elon Musk’s carmaker. Last week, Bloomberg reported that Tesla had reduced EV production at its Shanghai factory amid intense competition and sluggish growth in China. Tesla’s market cap has fallen about 30% this year, spurring the company to scrap Musk’s no-advertising mantra . Tesla also faces competition from China’s Warren Buffett–backed BYD , which dethroned it a few months ago as the world’s top EV seller.

Of course, Tesla has already proved itself as a leading EV maker, while Xiaomi is new in the space.

“In the three years of developing this car, my biggest realization is that making cars is extremely difficult,” Lei said on Thursday. “Even a giant like Apple gave up on it.”

In February, Lei responded to Apple ending its EV project, saying he was “ shocked ” by the decision. He’s cited Apple cofounder Steve Jobs as a primary inspiration to become an entrepreneur.

Xiaomi, which also makes smart TVs and home appliances, enjoys Apple-like popularity in China.

Big bet on EVs

Lei claimed on Thursday that the SU7, available only in China to start, beats the Tesla Model 3 on 90% of specifications, with Xiaomi needing a few more years to catch up on the rest. He said the sedan had a minimum driving range of 700 kilometers (nearly 435 miles) versus 606 for the Model 3. The base model will sell for under $30,000, cheaper than the Model 3 in China.

Lei admitted his company will be losing money on every vehicle it sells for the time being. In December, he said that Xiaomi would spend 10 times the labor and investment carmakers usually commit to a new model. But, he added on Thursday, “Xiaomi has enough cash reserves to cope with any fierce competition in the next five years.” 

Time will tell if Lei made the right call by entering the EV market or if Xiaomi should have veered away as Apple did. Plenty of EV startups once valued in the billions are now struggling .

“The risk is that they focus too much on the EV space and lose focus on the sectors and products that got them there,” Tu Le, founder of consultancy Sino Auto Insights, told Reuters.

But Xiaomi is off to a strong start , at least, with the company reporting that it had received 120,000 firm orders for the SU7 in 36 hours, meaning this year’s production capacity is sold out.

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