- In January 2007, the founder of the famous apple brand, which celebrates its fifty years this Wednesday, April 1, presented a new product: the iPhone.
- The device has since sold hundreds of millions of copies around the world.
- The TF1 news teams traced the history of this brand, now well known to the French.
Follow the full coverage
The 1 p.m.
If we had to remember just one moment in Apple’s fifty years of history, perhaps this would be it. On January 9, 2007, in San Francisco, Steve Jobs took the stage and announced the marketing of a new device: “What we’re going to do is we’re going to get rid of all these buttons and just make a giant screen.”
That day the now well-known iPhone was born. (nouvelle fenêtre)sold nearly 250 million copies in 2025, and with it, the touch screen which today equips almost all phones in the world.
Olivier Frigara, host of the podcast “On refait le Mac”, was one of the rare French journalists present that evening: “It simply put the Internet in the pocket of everyone. There was no keyboard, there was a touch interface, a screen that covers the entire surface of the front chassis. And these very simple gestures, like pinching to zoom in a photo”
he explains to our camera. Steve Jobs himself summed it up in a phrase that became famous: “We’re going to use the best tool in the world, the one we were all born with. We have ten of them. We’re going to use our fingers.”
Many failures
But before the iPhone, there were many other stories, successes but also failures. To see them, you have to go to Bastia, in Corsica, where Hervé Ghirlanda, architect and enthusiast of the apple brand, has put together one of the collections of Apple objects (nouvelle fenêtre) the most important in the world. A collection that he had never shown anyone before, and that the JT teams show you in the report visible at the top of the article.
It all started in 1977, with the Apple 1, “no more and no less than a card with large electronic components
says the enthusiast. Ordinary people could not use this card without having a screen, a keyboard and, at the time, a cassette player.”
Then came the first attempts at portable computers.
But far from the brand’s current success (nouvelle fenêtre)which has now risen to second place among the largest stock market capitalizations on the planet, the company has experienced numerous failures. “Steve Jobs, when he saw that (certain) machines were not working even though he had made hundreds of them, he had them buried near Las Vegas, in the desert. And you still have people today looking for these machines.”
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Because what we often forget is that Apple came close to bankruptcy. In 1997, when Steve Jobs returned to the helm of the company he had founded, the situation was desperate. “Within a hundred days, he closed the doors”
says Hervé Ghirlanda. Then a range of colorful computers arrives, the iMac G3: “That’s what relaunched Apple. It revolutionized the perception of computers. And people really liked it.”
Since then, the brand has continued to surprise, with phones of course, but also the development of applications, connected watches and headsets. With ever higher prices: you will have to pay more than a minimum wage to obtain the brand’s latest smartphone. The price of innovation, some will say. Because one thing is certain, Apple now seems to be focusing more on the improvement of its products than on real technological breakthroughs, like that day in January 2007.
