Apple iPhone 18 with AI Siri.
Credit: DenPhotos – Shutterstock.
Apple’s iPhone has just turned 18 years old. That’s how long it has been since Steve Jobs unveiled the revolutionary, world-changing device at Macworld Expo 2007 in San Francisco.
Jobs told the world he was introducing three products. ‘An iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator. Are you getting it? These are not three separate devices,’ he announced.
The iPhone went on sale on June 29, and around 300,000 sold in the first weekend. Apple decimated the then world-favourite Nokia, who failed to respond quickly enough to the changeover from a tactile keyboard to the full touchscreen functionality introduced by the iPhone.
18 years after its release, Apple has sold over 1.5 billion iPhones and raked in somewhere in the region of $46 billion in revenue.
Apple iPhone revolutionised way we live
Since its introduction, culture and society have been profoundly influenced, with almost everyone in the world being online all the time, rather than the old dial-up model of yore. It has virtually done away with the need for a separate camera, dictaphones, calendars, phonebooks, and, to a certain extent, notebooks, bringing a plethora of everyday tools into one pocket-sized device.
With the 18th birthday of the iconic iPhone comes iOS 18, the latest operating system more focused on artificial intelligence than any of its predecessors, with the possibility of writing texts, correcting them, creating images, and having (finally) a Siri much better equipped to carry out tasks. Siri will now be able to give tips on cooking a recipe or even suggestions on decorating a room.
