---
title: "Which came first, the iPhone or the Macintosh?"
description: "the iPhone vs the Macintosh: the Macintosh came first, by 23 years — 1984 against 2007. What happened in each case, and why the dates are often given differently."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/iphone-vs-macintosh/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, the iPhone or the Macintosh?

**Which came first, the iPhone or the Macintosh?: the Macintosh**

1984 — 23 years before the iPhone

the Macintosh came first, by 23 years. Apple launched the first Macintosh, two days after the Super Bowl advert.

## Side by side

|  | the iPhone | the Macintosh |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 2007 | 1984 |
| Date | 2007-06-29 | 1984-01-24 |
| Category | technology | technology |
| What happened | The first iPhone went on sale after a January announcement. | Apple launched the first Macintosh, two days after the Super Bowl advert. |

## the iPhone

Announced on 9 January 2007 and on sale from 29 June, the first iPhone had no app store, no copy and paste, no 3G and no video recording. The App Store arrived over a year later in July 2008. Android Inc. had been founded in 2003, four years before the iPhone, but the first Android phone shipped fifteen months after it.

## the Macintosh

The Macintosh launched in January 1984 with a graphical interface and a mouse, and beat Windows to market by almost two years. Neither invented the idea — Xerox PARC had built the Alto in 1973, and both Apple and Microsoft were working from what they had seen there. Mac OS X, the ancestor of today's macOS, arrived much later in 2001 and is Unix underneath.

## Common questions

### Which came first, the iPhone or the Macintosh?

the Macintosh, by 23 years — 1984 against 2007.

### When did the iPhone start?

2007. The first iPhone went on sale after a January announcement.

### When did the Macintosh start?

1984. Apple launched the first Macintosh, two days after the Super Bowl advert.

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## Sources

- Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (https://www.wikidata.org/) [CC0 1.0]