I was in that earliest launch cluster, among the first batch of people to have an iPhone in Chattanooga…remember, upon launch in June 2007 it was Cingular (AT&T) only. I got stopped/asked about it
constantly…grocery store, restaurants, pub, etc. if I had it out and using it.
It wasn’t the “everybody has one” thing it came to be, so that first year or two you were treated like Bigfoot piloting a UFO if someone saw you with one. And if you saw another person with one, you’d just do this smiling nod thing like “hey, nice phone!”
I lost count of how many random strangers would come up to me…”is that one of those iPhones?”, “that’s the Apple phone, isn’t it?”, etc.
Back then, we didn’t know what we didn’t have (storage, video, third-party apps, etc.). Even that lowly 4GB model I got in mid-July felt like The Future compared to anything else out there then.
Good, fun times, being in on the “ground floor” of such a thing.
