Pressing and holding text and saying "Copy" is so natural today that it's hard to imagine it was once impossible. Yet the first iPhone, regarded as one of the devices that started the smartphone revolution, came to market without this simple feature. Users waited about two years to see it.
2007: a big screen, a short feature list
The first iPhone was introduced at Macworld 2007 on January 9, 2007 and went on sale in the US on June 29, 2007. According to Wikipedia, with a two-year contract it cost $499 for the 4 GB model and $599 for the 8 GB model. With its fully touch screen and finger-scrolling interface, it was very different from the keypad phones of the day.
But looking from today, the list of what it lacked is surprising:
- There was no copy and paste.
- There were no third-party apps and no app store.
- There was no 3G support.
- There was no MMS (picture messaging).
- There was no real GPS support.
Even so, according to Wikipedia, the one-millionth iPhone was sold 74 days after it went on sale. People knew what was missing and bought it anyway. Apple also updated the model quickly: the price of the 8 GB model dropped to $399, and in February 2008 a $499 16 GB model arrived. But all these changes concerned hardware and price; the gaps in software stayed where they were.
First the store, then copy and paste
The first big leap came on July 11, 2008 with iPhone OS 2.0: the app store opened, and the iPhone 3G went on sale the same day. Installing apps written by other developers on the phone was now possible. But selecting and copying text still wasn't.
Copy and paste arrived with iPhone OS 3.0, announced on March 17, 2009. The update was released on June 17, 2009. According to Wikipedia, "Cut, Copy, Paste" options appeared in a bubble menu that opened when you pressed and held text. The same update also brought Spotlight, system-wide search; opened by swiping right on the home screen, it let you find contacts, emails, calendar entries, music and apps in one place. iPhone OS 3.0 was the software that shipped with the iPhone 3GS, which went on sale that same month, but it was also offered as an update for older models.
The update came to the first iPhone too. So those who bought a phone in 2007 finally got copy and paste, but, as you'll see below, not everything the same update brought.
From June 29, 2007, when the first iPhone went on sale in the US, to June 17, 2009, there are exactly 719 days. If you count from the announcement (January 9, 2007), that stretches to 890 days.
Why the long wait?
Apple hasn't explained in our sources why copy and paste wasn't in the first version, so it wouldn't be right to state a definite reason. What's known is this: on phones of that era text selection was usually done with keys or a stylus, and how to do it on a screen operated entirely by finger was a new design problem. The solution in 3.0 was to press and hold text and drag selection handles; this approach is still in use today.
In this post we deliberately don't give a definite answer to the "why" question; we couldn't find an official statement from Apple from that period in a source we could verify.
The interesting side of this story is that the missing features didn't stop the product's success. The first iPhone wasn't flawless but it set the direction; the missing parts were completed with later updates.
| Then (2007) | Now |
|---|---|
| No copy and paste | Copying across apps and devices |
| No app store (arrived in 2008) | Millions of apps |
| No 3G | 5G |
| No MMS | Photos, video, voice messages |
A phone that grew through updates
The first iPhone was one of the early examples of the idea of "a phone that keeps improving after you buy it". Copy and paste, the app store and other features were added not out of the box but through software updates that came later. We take the big updates our phones get every year for granted today; in 2007 this was still a new habit.
Which feature missing from your phone today do you think we'll look back on in a few years and say "how did we not have that?"