The Sky of the Night of the First iPhone Launch
On June 29, 2007, the first iPhone went on sale in the United States. Steve Jobs had unveiled the device six months earlier with those now-famous words: 'An iPod, a phone, an internet communicator.' That evening, lines stretched around Apple Stores across the country. This star map captures the starry vault as it shone above San Francisco that night — the firmament of a new era that would transform our relationship with the world.
Historical context
On January 9, 2007, at the Macworld Conference in San Francisco, Steve Jobs took the stage wearing his eternal black turtleneck and jeans. "Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything," he declared with his trademark sense of suspense. Then he announced not one, but three products: a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communications device. When the audience realized it was a single device, the room erupted. The iPhone was born.
Five months and twenty days later, on June 29, 2007, at 6 PM Pacific Time, the doors of Apple Stores opened across the United States. Lines had begun forming days earlier. Outside the Fifth Avenue Apple Store in New York, some had been camping for more than four days. In San Francisco, outside the Market Street store, the queue snaked for several city blocks. The atmosphere was that of a rock concert: excitement, camaraderie, feverish anticipation.
The original iPhone was an object of pure desire: a 3.5-inch screen (revolutionary for the time), an all-glass-and-aluminum design, no physical keyboard. Its price — $499 for the 4GB model and $599 for the 8GB — placed it in the category of technological luxury. Its memory was limited, it only supported the Edge network (before 3G), it had no App Store (which wouldn't arrive for another year), no copy-and-paste, no MMS. But none of that mattered. The iPhone was not an improved phone: it was a window onto a new world.
Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple in 1976 in his parents' garage in Los Altos, had been ousted from his own company in 1985, had founded NeXT and Pixar, then returned to Apple in 1997 when the company was on the brink of bankruptcy. In ten years, he had launched the iMac, the iPod, iTunes, and now the iPhone. Each product had redefined its category. The iPhone would redefine civilization itself.
But what could be seen in the sky above San Francisco that evening? The city, bordered by the Pacific Ocean and the bay, enjoys a unique microclimate. The summer fog, nicknamed "Karl" by San Franciscans, often invades the city in the late afternoon, creeping beneath the Golden Gate Bridge like a white tide. But when the sky was clear, late-June nights offered a remarkable celestial spectacle.
The Summer Triangle dominated the east: Vega, in Lyra, shone with an intense blue-white brilliance, like the luminous screen of the new iPhone; Deneb marked the tail of the Swan; Altair, in Aquila, completed the figure. Arcturus, the sentinel of Bootes, dominated the southern sky with its characteristic orange glow. Spica, in Virgo, twinkled lower, its pure blue forming a striking contrast with the coppery hue of Arcturus.
The Great Bear crossed the northern sky, its familiar dipper pointing toward Polaris. From San Francisco, at latitude 37.7 degrees North, the northern constellations were clearly visible while Scorpius, to the south, barely rose above the horizon, Antares glowing red like a distant sentinel. Jupiter shone in the constellation Ophiuchus, adding its imposing brilliance to the nocturnal panorama.
In the weeks following the launch, technology analysts were divided. Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, openly mocked: "$500? With a phone plan? It's not a product that will appeal to the mass market." The makers of BlackBerry, then kings of the professional smartphone, considered the iPhone a consumer gadget. They were all wrong.
In 74 days, Apple sold one million iPhones. The figure may seem modest compared to the hundreds of millions of units sold each year today, but one must remember that in 2007, the very concept of a touchscreen smartphone did not exist in the public imagination. The physical QWERTY keyboard was the norm. The idea of browsing the internet, listening to music, watching videos, and making phone calls on the same device seemed futuristic.
The iPhone's impact went far beyond technology. It transformed photography — Instagram, launched in 2010, would be nothing without it. It revolutionized music — Spotify, Shazam, and podcasts owe their existence to the smartphone. It changed journalism, commerce, transportation (Uber), accommodation (Airbnb), finance (banking apps), health (smartwatches), and romance (Tinder). It gave birth to the app economy, a market that would generate hundreds of billions of dollars.
But the iPhone also had consequences Steve Jobs had not anticipated. Screen addiction became a public health concern. Social media, permanently accessible in everyone's pocket, transformed public debate, politics, and the very notion of truth. The boundary between private and public life, between work and leisure, between physical presence and digital presence, became blurred, then nonexistent.
Steve Jobs died on October 5, 2011, four years after this historic launch, taken by pancreatic cancer at the age of 56. He had lived to see the iPhone 4, the iPad, and the App Store transform the world he had imagined. But he never saw the iPhone become what it is today: an extension of the human body, a digital organ that more than three billion people consult an average of 150 times per day.
The stars above San Francisco on June 29, 2007 were the silent witnesses to the birth of an object that would change how we see the world — and, ironically, diminish our capacity to look up at them. The Summer Triangle that shone in the California sky that evening still shines, immutable, above a humanity now riveted to its screens.