This week on The CultCast: You’d never know it from Steve Jobs’ effortless keynote introduction, but the original iPhone was plagued with huge design and production issues that almost made Apple call it quits — right up until the day it was released! To commemorate the iPhone’s 10th anniversary, we’ll recount some of the incredible stories behind iPhone’s beleaguered early days, and celebrate how Apple pulled off one of the greatest device launches in history.

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When the iPhone was announced 10 years ago, it reinvented the phone. But in doing so, it has taken the place of so many other products.

As part of Cult of Mac’s collaboration with Wired UK to mark the 10th anniversary of the iPhone, we’ve taken a look at everything the iPhone replaced in 2007. Check out the video below to see how much changed thanks to one device.

By Chris Brantner

The Tour de France is the premier cycling race in the world. Anyone can enjoy watching the event as the cyclists put themselves through one of the most grueling physical tests in all of sports. If you want to watch during the three-week race, you can easily stream the Tour de France on Apple devices, with or without cable.

The Tour de France starts Saturday, July 1, and finishes on the Champs-Élysées in Paris on Sunday, July 23. Throughout the race, NBCSN will air live coverage on a daily basis. Thankfully, there are some great ways for you to stream the race on any of your Apple devices.

We’ve seen Oaxis’ e-ink cases a few times here on Cult of Mac. The InkCase is a relatively slim iPhone case with an e-ink screen embedded in the back, and a Bluetooth connection to the host iPhone. The idea is that you can use the low-power e-ink display that covers its back as an always-on second screen to so that you don’t have to keep waking up your iPhone to check things like shopping lists or calendar events.

And now, the case is available for the iPhone 7 Plus

Thanks to the new screen-recording feature in iOS 11, you can now make a video of whatever you’re doing on your iDevice, and share it. I use this for how-tos (although ironically, not this one), developers can use it to make videos of their apps for the App Atore (the new iOS 11 App Store features videos quite prominently), and regular folks can use it to record a snippet of a YouTube video or suchlike. But what if you prefer to share your optimized video as a huge, bandwidth-hogging GIF instead?

Well, iOS has you covered there, too, but you’ll need to download Apple’s free Workflow app.

Apple is famous for its iconic designs, but is the company slowly losing its way?

Products like the Apple Pencil and Smart Battery Case suggest that Apple’s design team might be missing a certain spark. Even the iPhone, once the prettiest smartphone by a long shot, is now being outshone by rivals from the likes of Samsung and LG.

Join us in this week’s Friday Night Fight as we battle it out over whether Apple design has become lazy and boring. And be sure to have your say!

America’s National Parks are getting a big boost from Apple during the month of July in the form of a new campaign aimed at raising awareness to preserve the classic landscapes.

Apple revealed today that it is starting a new Apple Pay promotion aimed at making it easier for anyone to help preserve the country’s national parks. Now whenever you use Apple Pay at any of Apple’s online or physical retail locations the iPhone-maker will donate $1 to the National Park Foundation.

The new album from Jay Z is nearly impossible to stream through legal methods this week, but if you are one of the lucky few that gets to listen to it, you’ll hear the Jigga Man taking shots at one of his biggest rivals: Apple Music.

On one of the tracks for his album 4:44, Jay Z — owner of the struggling music streaming service Tidal — calls out Apple Music boss Jimmy Iovine and talks about his beef with Apple saying he wants more than what Apple offers artists.

Jay Z’s new album 4:44 has landed, but good luck trying to hear it.

Not only has the rap superstar blocked it from the likes of Apple Music and Spotify, but he’s even restricting its availability on Tidal, his own music streaming service. You can’t listen if you weren’t signed up before the album launched.

Because we live and work on Wi-Fi, we notice right away when the signal goes weak. Even though wireless signals are invisible, it’s amazing how sensitive we can become to where the blind spots are.

Apple has posted a short film online, shot on iPhone by Michel Gondry, the director of 2004’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Called “Detour,” the short French language comedy tells the somewhat surreal story of a girl’s lost tricycle — which just so happens to also include plenty of slapstick pratfalls and some singing fish. Because why the heck not?

Check it out below.

Samsung won all the orders for the iPhone 8’s OLED displays, and according to a new report it now wants to make itself even more indispensable by building the world’s biggest OLED plant, so as to be able to churn out more displays than ever.

According to sources, Samsung Display’s new “A5” facility will give it the ability to produce up to 270,000 OLED panels per month. At present, Samsung is able to produce around 135,000 panels per month: a number it aimed to achieve only after Apple began expressing an interest in OLED displays.

This an excerpt from Unsung Apple Hero, an e-book about UI designer Bas Ording’s career at Apple. Ording is responsible for a big chunk of today’s computing interfaces, but is little-known because of Apple’s super-strict privacy policies. Hit the link at the bottom of this post to get a free copy of the e-book.

One of the key design decisions that Apple’s Human Interface Team made early on while developing the iPhone was to go all in on big, simple gestures. They wanted to make a single, simple swipe accomplish as much as possible.

It’s a bit ironic. After investing so much in multitouch technology, which relies on multiple touch inputs, one of Apple’s key edicts was to make as many gestures as possible work with a single finger.

The iPhone’s success has been nothing short of spectacular. With more than 1 billion units sold as of June 2016, rival consumer electronics companies can only dream of building a product that popular.

It’s not easy to foresee how the iPhone will evolve in the future. Some things are obvious — like faster processors, more advanced cameras, and even better displays — but we must look beyond these to get a sense of Apple’s biggest ambitions. Here’s some of the many ways the iPhone might get better, stronger and faster in the next 10 years.

Apple calls developers’ rapid response to ARKit “unbelievable.” The company unveiled the framework for making augmented reality apps at the Worldwide Developers Conference earlier this month. Already, coders have created tons of amazing AR experiences that inject virtual objects into the real world.

“They’ve built everything from virtual tape measures [to] ballerinas made out of wood dancing on floors,” said Greg “Joz” Joswiak, Apple’s vice president of product marketing. “It’s absolutely incredible what people are doing in so little time.”

An alleged iPhone 8 prototype with a significantly larger display and slimmer bezels has made its way into the wild. Although it almost certainly doesn’t carry the handset’s final design, it’s still surprisingly ugly for an Apple device.

If, indeed, it really is an Apple device.

With the Apple Pencil getting so useful in the upcoming iOS 11, you might consider purchasing one for use with your iPad Pro. There are already a slew of accessories for the Pencil, most of which are utterly ridiculous, like this leather case — from Apple itself, no less.

As a longtime Apple Pencil user, though, one accessory has caught my eye. It’s the FRTMA magnetic sleeve, and it solves a whole bunch of Apple Pencil “problems” all at once.

Public testers can finally get their first taste of Apple’s new operating system for Mac starting today with the release of the first public beta of macOS High Sierra.

Apple’s new operating system was unveiled earlier this month at WWDC 2017 where the company showed off macOS High Sierra’s new features and improved design. Developers have been testing the new software since June 5th, but now anyone can get macOS High Sierra which is being billed as Apple’s best desktop operating system ever.

Housework is by far my least favorite thing to do. So when I was recently asked to do a bit more around the house, I started thinking: Could I mix my love of tech with housework?

Thankfully there are tons of products, but the one that caught my eye was the Aircraft Pilot Max — a robot vacuum to take the effort out of my most hated chore. Its features, build quality and convenience make it a dirt-busting dream machine. Check out my video review, along with a full write-up below.

The iPhone has changed enormously in the 10 years since it launched, but some people still think the first iPhone was the best.

Take, for instance, Minnesota photographer Joe Cunningham, who owns not one but two of Apple’s breakthrough smartphones. He doesn’t view them as investments, either. Even though the original iPhone goes for big bucks on eBay these days, Cunningham continues to use both handsets on a daily basis.

The Boomerang network has updated its streaming app to add support for Apple TV. Users can enjoy classic cartoons like Tom & Jerry, Scooby-Doo, and The Flintstones on the big screen — so long as they cough up for a subscription.

Almost all electronic products are still assembled by hand, even hundreds of millions of iPhones.

But that’s changing. Apple’s supply chain is rapidly automating using AI and robots.

At the forefront of this is an ex-Apple product design engineer, Anna-Katrina Shedletsky, who is using her expertise to help other manufacturers build their products.

On this episode of the Apple Chat podcast, we talk to Shedletsky about her new AI startup, Instrumental; Apple’s giant manufacturing operation; the role of product design; and much more.

If you’re curious how Apple makes its products, listen to the podcast or check out the full transcript below.

Over the past decade, the iPhone has changed pretty much everything, from communication and gaming to the way in which we consume news and pay for our groceries. But how has the device impacted the lives of tech titans?

Find out from Eben Upton, creator of Raspberry Pi; Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia; Tony Fadell, founder of Nest and “godfather” of the iPod, and more.

PALO ALTO, California — The first iPhone “prototype” was strung together using bits of wood, duct tape and some old Polaroid lenses.

Key members of the Apple team reminisced about those early DIY efforts Wednesday night during a discussion led by Brian Merchant, author of The One Device, a new book about the birth of the iPhone.

“This thing was really kludged together,” said Brian Huppi, a former Apple engineer who helped build the first system. “It was built out of wood, duct tape and old lenses from the ’60s.”

Apple collector Hap Plain can observe the iPhone’s 10th anniversary today by powering up two extremely rare iPhone prototypes — and you can see them in action, too.

The prototypes, which likely passed through the hands of Apple execs including Steve Jobs, Tony Fadell and Scott Forstall, offer a unique glimpse at iPhone development. You can see Plain fire them up in the video below, the latest entry in Cult of Mac’s collaboration with Wired UK to recap a decade of the iPhone.