Don’t worry, this is a safe space. (Inspired by Max Fisher .)
So. Uhh. *Looks both ways, lowers voice.* What is an iPhone?
The iPhone is a phone made by Apple. You control it by touching the screen, which is made of of glass. It makes calls like a phone and sends text messages. It has a pretty good camera. To enter text you type on a simulated, on-screen keyboard, which is easier than it sounds.
It also has add-ons called "apps." You download these from the internet, which the iPhone can access from pretty much anywhere. Some of these are free, some aren't. These apps let you do basically anything you can do with a computer: edit documents, play games, use sites like Facebook, watch movies. The iPhone usually costs about $200 to buy, on contract, and then costs between $75 and $100 a month, because a $20–$30 internet plan is required.
You might feel embarrassed to ask what an iPhone is in 2013, but it's actually a pretty good question. The iPhone today is a very different device than it was when it first came out in 2007. If you've never owned one, or haven't spent much time with one, you're right to wonder: What the hell are all these people staring at all day, and why? Well, they're staring at their iPhones, mainly because iPhones are kind of fun.
But wait, what makes the iPhone so special? Why do people make such a big deal about this?
The iPhone was a big deal because it was first. Not the first phone with the internet, or the first phone with a touchscreen, but, in 2007, the first phone with a touchscreen and the internet that was nice to use. You could open entire websites, and they worked. Text messages, on that big screen, held together and looked like conversations. It was cool, and there was nothing quite like it. It worked. It was much better designed, in terms of its hardware and its software, than anything else at the time.
But it was expensive and kind of limited — you couldn't send picture messages when it came out, for example. It was a luxury item. Then, just as other companies were starting to release their own similar glass touchscreen phones, Apple opened the App Store, and let iPhone users install free and paid applications. This coincided with a price decrease — to about $200 — and made the iPhone not just useful, but the most useful. So, it was the first nice-to-use touchscreen phone, and then the first phone with a lot of good apps. But that was 2008.
The iPhone and the iPad, which is, no matter what people tell you, pretty much just a larger iPhone, have always been easy to use, and Apple is known for spending a lot of time making sure they work well and look nice. Apple is known for polish — it's first on big ideas, like touchscreen smartphones, but can be slow on smaller upgrades, like faster internet connections and larger screens. Fans will tell you that's because Steve Jobs was a perfectionist; others might say Apple is arrogant. Either way, it has worked. Apple announced today that it has sold 700 million iOS devices.
