The first smartphone to be offered by Apple, the iPhone is an unparalleled object born from the intersection of design, technology, and communication, and it is hard to overstate the impact that its arrival has had on the world. Officially announced by Steve Jobs on January 9, 2007, at the Macworld Conference & Expo in San Francisco, the first-generation iPhone was the culmination of a vision Jobs had for a multi-faceted communication device operated through a glass touchscreen display.
In 2005, Apple forged a high-profile-but-secret partnership with Cingular Wireless to build the iPhone, operating under the project code name Project Purple 2. Impossibly sleek, stylus-free, and virtually button-less, the original iPhone was, as Jobs put it, "an iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator" to be held in the palm of one's hand: "These are not three separate devices," Jobs told a charged crowd, "This is one device...and we are calling it iPhone."
"You already know what the iPhone is: a tiny, gorgeous hand-held computer whose screen is a slab of touch-sensitive glass."
"Unless you’ve been in a sensory-deprivation tank for six months," wrote David Pogue for The New York Times in June 2007, "you already know what the iPhone is: a tiny, gorgeous hand-held computer whose screen is a slab of touch-sensitive glass." In summarizing the anticipation that led up to the device's release, Pogue reported that the iPhone had been the subject of 11,000 articles in print and yielded "about 69 million hits on Google." Manufactured on contract by Foxconn and issued with a 2 megapixel camera and either 4 or 8 GB of storage, the first-generation iPhone was arguably an icon of the 21st century before it was even used by the public.
This rare, factory-sealed first-generation iPhone comes to Wright via Donald Gajadhar of Fox-White Art & Antique Appraisals. "[It] slowly dawned on me when I held [this] boxed Apple cellphone," says Gajadhar, "my client not only had an unopened cellphone, but a truly unique version. A Willy Wonka, ‘24 karat' Golden Ticket." Indeed, the present lot features an upside-down Apple logo sticker bearing the words "lucky you."
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Unsurprisingly, the iPhone 1 was named 2007 Invention of the Year by Time magazine. It was followed with the release of the iPhone 3G on June 9, 2008—and the iPhone 1 was officially discontinued just over a month later, on July 15th. The rest, as they say, is history.
Photo by Microtrace, Courtesy of Fox-White Art & Antique Appraisals
