---
title: "Which came first, the iPhone or Windows?"
description: "the iPhone vs Windows: Windows came first, by 22 years — 1985 against 2007. What happened in each case, and why the dates are often given differently."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/iphone-vs-windows/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, the iPhone or Windows?

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

1985 — 22 years before the iPhone

Windows came first, by 22 years. Microsoft shipped Windows 1.0.

## Side by side

|  | the iPhone | Windows |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 2007 | 1985 |
| Date | 2007-06-29 | 1985-11-20 |
| Category | technology | technology |
| What happened | The first iPhone went on sale after a January announcement. | Microsoft shipped Windows 1.0. |

## 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.

## Windows

Windows 1.0 shipped in November 1985, twenty-two months after the Macintosh, and it was not an operating system — it was a graphical shell running on top of MS-DOS, and remained so until Windows NT in 1993 and the consumer transition with Windows XP in 2001. Version 1.0 could not even overlap windows: they tiled, because Apple's legal position on overlapping windows was unresolved.

## Common questions

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

Windows, by 22 years — 1985 against 2007.

### When did the iPhone start?

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

### When did Windows start?

1985. Microsoft shipped Windows 1.0.

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## Sources

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