It’s been 15 years since Apple turned the world upside down with the iPhone. For many, this may feel like half an eternity, but in the fast-paced world of technology, 15 years is just the blink of an eye. A lot has changed during this time, but the basic concept of the iPhone has largely remained the same.
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design
When you hold tech devices from 2007 in your hands today, most of them probably feel outdated, unfamiliar, or just plain retro. Not so with the iPhone from 2007. The very first iPhone – also called iPhone Original or iPhone Classic – doesn’t feel foreign in 2022 either. It is small compared to modern smartphones. Very small even. The 2007 iPhone’s display was just 3.5 inches – which is crazy considering it was perceived as huge at the time. Today’s smartphones can’t be big enough: With a 6.7-inch Super Retina XDR display, the iPhone 14 Pro Max has a resolution that is around 23 times greater than the iPhone.
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Precisely because the trends have changed and the small has become bigger, I wonder why the iPhone Classic still looks modern today. It probably has something to do with the design. Basically, the iPhone has only gone through a few phases of change: the housing was sometimes rounded, sometimes angular, but the home button only disappeared ten years after the presentation of the first iPhone. The displays got bigger over time, notches were added and replaced with a dynamic island in the current model. iOS has also undergone a major transformation, but the overall user experience has remained fairly similar.
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perfomance
15 years ago you could only buy the iPhone with 4, 8 or 16 GB flash memory. Of course, we would no longer be able to get by with such storage sizes today, the smallest storage capacity on the iPhone 14 Pro Max is 128 GB, and if that is not enough, you can even buy up to 1 TB of storage if necessary. Everything was a bit smaller back then: displays, memory and the battery. 1,400 mAh were enough to surf the Internet for up to nine hours back then. Not that anyone would have done this, because the prices for surfing the Internet were different then than they are today.
Of course, when we talk about performance, we also have to talk about the chip. This was so strong 15 years ago that we were able to complete complex tasks with a smartphone via Muli-Touch for the first time. The first game apps from back then would probably only make us yawn today, because today we get enormous power with the A16 chip in the iPhone 14 Pro. You can create your own songs, play games in console graphics, and record and edit 4K videos. And that brings us to another big difference: the camera.
cameras
The iPhone had a 2MP camera on the back but it was built into the body – a feature Apple would like to see included in its current models. Videos could not be recorded with the iPhone Classic or only via detours that Apple did not want. The image quality was of course poor and in no way comparable to today’s quality. The triple camera system in the iPhone 14 Pro (Max) is one of the best you can get in a smartphone. With the new 48 MP sensor, you can capture stunning images with incredible detail in ProRAW format. The videos also benefit from the new sensor, not to mention the image stabilization sensor. In our camera test, we will tell you how ingenious the iPhone camera is.
An unfair comparison?
The comparison between the current iPhone 14 Pro and the original iPhone is almost unfair. Because of course there is no feature in the very first iPhone that could hold its own against functions from the modern Pro devices. As we mentioned at the beginning, a lot has happened in 15 years. User behavior has changed and, of course, so have smartphones. Or is it maybe the other way around?
Tag: iphone design, iphone 14, apple iphone, iphone release