It seems incredible to remember it, but they said that the iPhone would have no chance in the cell phone market when it was launched by Apple. What will Steve Ballmer think now?

Ballmer currently owns the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team, but the businessman served as CEO of Microsoft from 2000 to 2014. In that role, he made a wildly ill-advised forecast for Apple’s iPhones.

In an interview with USA Today, the billionaire investor declared after the launch of the first phone from the apple company: “There is no possibility that the iPhone will obtain a significant market share. There is no chance”.

But we already know the story. The iPhone is the phone that almost everyone wants. The exclusive Apple device, in its different versions, has been acclaimed since the launch of its first model, and the success of the line has been so great that Ballmer himself regretfully acknowledged it in 2016, admitting to Bloomberg that Microsoft was got into the smartphone business very late.

When was the first iPhone released?

The first iPhone was announced on January 9, 2007, at that year’s Macworld event. The device finally hit stores in the United States in June 2007, followed later that year with a European release, and then finally an Asian release in 2008.

In its first generation, the device was described as ” a revolutionary mobile phone “, a “breakthrough of the internet” and Steve Jobs ‘s “gem of communications”.

The first iPhone had a 3.5-inch screen and a 2-megapixel camera, a small sensor but which at the time was branded as powerful, and it did not come as a cheap device, far from it. The 4GB version was priced at $499 and the 6GB version at $599. Cheap it was not.

For Jobs, the iPhone put the “ internet in your pocket ”, and in doing so, brought with it a reinvention of mobile devices, both at Apple itself and at other cell phone companies. For the launch of the first phone from the Cupertino company, the competition was betting on cell phones with a Diviva screen and QWERTY keyboard, or they brought to the market some device that could slide.

Steve Jobs claimed that the iPhone was a revolutionary, magical product and that it was “literally five years ahead of any other phone”.

There are over a billion iPhones in active use today according to a report by Slash Gear. For its part, Statista ensures that the company has sold at least 2 billion units in the last decade.

Apple has gone from being an IT giant with a thriving side business in MP3 players to a $1 trillion global megacorporation with over 150,000 full-time workers, and they most likely owe it all to the first iPhone. and the success of its later versions.