Chapter 1. Introduction
How do you make the point that the iPhone has changed the world? The easy answer is “use statistics”—1 billion sold, 2 million apps available on the iPhone App Store, 140 billion downloads.... Trouble is, those statistics get stale almost before you’ve finished typing them.
Maybe it’s better to talk about the aftermath. How since the iPhone came along, cell carriers (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and so on) have opened up the calcified, conservative way they used to consider new cellphone designs. How every phone and its brother now have a touchscreen. How Google (Android) phones, Windows phones, and even BlackBerry phones all have their own app stores. How, in essence, everybody wants to be the iPhone.
Apple introduces a new iPhone model every fall. In September 2016, for example, it introduced the tenth iPhone models, the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus, with more features and faster guts.
More importantly, there’s a new, free version of the iPhone’s software, called iOS 10. (Why not “iPhone OS” anymore? Because the same operating system runs on the iPad and the iPod Touch. It’s not just for iPhones, and saying “the iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch OS” takes too long.)
You can run iOS 10 on older iPhone models without having to buy a new phone. This book covers all the phones that can run iOS 10: the iPhone 5, iPhone 5c, iPhone 5s, iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, iPhone SE, and iPhone 7 and 7 Plus.
About the iPhone
So what is the iPhone? Really, the better question is what
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