And he certainly knew how to play a room. A master showman, Jobs kept the crowd of reporters, analysts, developers and Apple fans in a state of anticipation and wonder throughout the nearly two-hour keynote. He talked first about the move to Intel chips in Macs the year before, saying Mac sales proved the change over to the new architecture was a success. And he welcomed the loads of "switchers," who'd jettisoned Windows-based PCs for Macs. He touted the iPod, introduced more than five years earlier, calling it the world's most popular music player and the world's most popular video player. He got huge laughs from the crowd after cracking a joke about the mediocre launch of Microsoft's rival Zune player two months before. He played the latest iPod TV ad featuring neon-colored silhouettes of dancers rocking out to "Flathead," by indie Glasgow band The Fratellis.

Oh, and he officially introduced Apple TV, And all the while I sat on the floor and typed out a steady stream of short, all-cap headlines -- a kind of primeval Twitter story, By the time Jobs reached the crux of his presentation, my headline only needed 19 characters: "Apple unveils phone." He'd been on stage for 20 minutes, The stock chart for Apple looked like a hockey stick just seconds iphone screen protector currys after the news was out, Apple's always been a magnet for speculation, Almost a year before Jobs stepped on that stage, rumors started flying that Apple was planning to enter the crowded mobile phone market with a cool new device..

Talk turned from "if" to "when" in July 2006, after Peter Oppenheimer, then chief financial officer of Apple, pretty much confirmed the effort during in an earnings call with financial analysts. "We are very confident in our ability to compete in the marketplace, and we are very excited about what we have in the product pipeline," Oppenheimer said when asked how the company planned to compete against Sony and other rivals. "As regards cell phones, we do not think that the phones that are available today make the best music players. We think the iPod is. But over time, that is likely to change, and we are not sitting around doing nothing."That was an aha moment for financial types, especially since Apple doesn't make off-the-cuff comments about anything it's working on. The aha turned into "coming soon" three months later when news broke that Apple had filed a trademark application for iPhone. (Fun fact: Cisco owned the rights to the iPhone name when Apple launched the phone, but let Jobs have the trademark after reaching a legal settlement a few weeks later.).

It's hard for many to remember now, but back then few people could imagine how the iPhone's 3.5-inch touchscreen display and sleek design would upend a market that Nokia and BlackBerry ruled, BlackBerry's maker, then known as Research In Motion, later admitted it had underestimated the iPhone -- dissing it for its eight-hour battery life and because the iphone screen protector currys phone ran only on AT&T's older, slower, second-generation wireless network, "By all rights, the product should have failed," David Yach, RIM's chief technology officer, told the Wall Street Journal in May 2015..

I remember the iPhone was a big deal because it was such a big risk for Apple. Up until that day, Apple Computer Inc. was known for its Macs and the iPod. Jobs knew he was staking Apple's future on getting an even bigger slice of the consumer electronics market. He reinforced that idea when he announced at the end of his keynote that the company was dropping "Computer" from its name and would just be called Apple Inc. And he promised that the iPhone, which he called a "revolutionary and magical product that is literally five years ahead of any other mobile phone," would be a success if Apple could capture even 1 percent market share of the mobile market in 2008. That would mean selling 10 million iPhones.