iPhone (Original)

Overview

The original iPhone — announced by Steve Jobs on January 9, 2007 and released in the United States on June 29 of the same year — is the most consequential consumer product of the twenty-first century. It consolidated three separate devices that had previously existed independently (a phone, a media player, and an internet communicator) into a single multi-touch device whose form factor and interaction model defined the next fifteen years of consumer electronics.

For industrial designers, the original iPhone is significant for what it removed as much as for what it added: physical keyboards, styluses, buttons, hinges, bezels, and bezel-based ornament were all displaced by a full-face glass sheet, a single home button, and a metal rim.

Design

The industrial design was led by Jony Ive at Apple. The finished object was a slab — 115 × 61 × 11.6 mm, 135 g — with three distinct visual elements:

• A glass front covering the entire touch screen, fused to the chassis without a visible gasket.
• A chrome-plated stainless steel band wrapping the perimeter, visible as a continuous metallic rim and serving as the primary structural element.
• A black plastic or aluminium rear panel (the rear was aluminium on the 2007 original, plastic on the 2008 3G).

The object had no visible fasteners, no openings except the speaker grille, microphone, and 30-pin connector, and no ornament of any kind. It was designed to be held, seen, and understood as a single continuous object.

Materials and manufacturing

• Glass front — Corning Gorilla Glass, a chemically strengthened alkali-aluminosilicate glass developed by Corning in the 1960s and revived specifically for the iPhone. The choice introduced a material that had not previously been used at scale in consumer electronics.
• Stainless steel band — machined and chrome-plated. This is the design element that most clearly announces the phone's quality.
• Internal structure — a die-cast magnesium frame and a dense printed circuit board, both of which had to be engineered to fit inside the 11.6 mm thickness.

The rear aluminium panel (original model) was later replaced by plastic (3G/3GS) and then by aluminium unibody (iPhone 4 onward) — a longer material story that would come to define Apple's visual identity.

Influence

The original iPhone's influence on industrial design has been enormous and continuous:

• It established the full-face glass, minimal-button device as the default form of the smartphone, in contrast to the physical-keyboard models (BlackBerry, Nokia E-series) that preceded it.
• It introduced multi-touch as a consumer interaction model, displacing physical controls not only in phones but in tablets, music players, watches, and cars.
• It accelerated the adoption of glass, aluminium, and ceramic as alternatives to plastic in premium consumer products.
• Its visual language — one button, no ornament, seamless surface — is often compared to Dieter Rams' Braun products, and the comparison is not coincidental: Rams' work was displayed in Apple's design studio as reference material, and the Ten Principles of Good Design are visible throughout Apple's output.

Critiques

The iPhone has been criticized on grounds that apply equally to the model's influence on design:

• Non-repairability — the sealed enclosure, glued battery, and proprietary connector made user repair difficult and contributed to the broader shift toward non-repairable electronics.
• Planned obsolescence — the annual release cycle and the difficulty of upgrading individual components shortened the working life of the device well below its physical durability.
• Ecological impact — rare-earth metals, cobalt, and other materials in the supply chain have significant environmental and human-rights costs.

These critiques matter for designers because they show that the design values embodied in the original iPhone — clarity, restraint, coherence — are not sufficient on their own; they must be reconciled with material and lifecycle ethics.

Related Terms

• Jony Ive
• Dieter Rams
• Ten Principles of Good Design
• Aluminium