Engineering Education “Today in History” Blog: First iPhone is sold
by Alice Agogino
closeAuthor: Alice Agogino
Name: Alice Agogino
Email: agogino@berkeley.edu
Site: http://www.me.berkeley.edu/faculty/agogino/
About: Alice M. Agogino is the Roscoe and Elizabeth Hughes Professor of Mechanical Engineering and is affiliated faculty at the Haas School of Business in their Operations and Information Technology Management Group. Her research interests include: community-based design; sustainable engineering; intelligent learning systems; information retrieval and data mining; multiobjective and strategic product design; nonlinear optimization; probabilistic modeling; intelligent control and manufacturing; sensor validation, fusion and diagnostics; wireless sensor networks; multimedia and computer-aided design; design databases; design theory and methods; MEMS/NEMS synthesis and computer-aided design; artificial intelligence and decision and expert systems; and gender/ethnic equity.
She has served in a number of administrative positions at UC Berkeley, including Chair of the Faculty Senate, Associate Dean of Engineering and Faculty Assistant to the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost in Educational Development and Technology. Prof. Agogino also served as Director for Synthesis, an NSF-sponsored coalition of eight universities with the goal of reforming undergraduate engineering education, and continues as PI for the NEEDS (www.needs.org) and SMETE.ORG digital libraries of courseware in science, mathematics, engineering and technology.
Prof. Agogino received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of New Mexico (1975), M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering (1978) from the University of California at Berkeley and Ph.D. from the Department of Engineering-Economic Systems at Stanford University (1984). Prior to joining the faculty at UC Berkeley, she worked in industry for Dow Chemical, General Electric and SRI International. She has authored over 150 scholarly publications; has won numerous teaching, best paper and research awards; and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). At NAE she served on the Committee on Engineering Education, working on the Technologically Speaking and the Engineer 2020 projects. She is currently a member of the National Research Council's Board on Education and the Women in Academic Science Engineering Committee. She has supervised 66 MS projects/theses, 26 doctoral dissertations and numerous undergraduate researchers.See Authors Posts (864) · June 29th, 2011 · Add a Comment
Today in History – June 29, 2007 -The first Apple iPhone is sold. The initial price tag of $600 limited sales to early adapters and Apple fans, of which there were many (photo of waiting line upper left). The price was reduced to $400 soon afterwards and in 2008 the iPhone 3G at $200 released the flood gates of demand. Apple sold over 10 million iPhone 3G units worldwide within five months of its release.
Three years later there is competition from other vendors, but the release of Apple’s iPhone 4 sales still topped 1.7 million in a few days after its launch on June 24, 2010. “This is the most successful product launch in Apple’s history,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Even so, we apologize to those customers who were turned away because we did not have enough supply.”
Photo caption (upper right): “Wearing iPhone placards on their heads, two Japanese customers show off their iPhone 4 at a mobile phone store in Tokyo on June 24. Hundreds of Apple fans braved sweltering humidity to form giant queues in an upscale Tokyo district in a race to be among the first in the world to get their hands on the latest iPhone.”
I do have an older iPhone and am still learning the features on this one. I think I’ll wait for more before I get an upgrade. I am reminded though of HP’s first pocket calculator, the HP35 released on February 1, 1972. I was an undergraduate engineering student and my parents bought me the next version, the HP45. I still carried both it and my slide rule around on my belt – really. Primates love our gadgets. Did you know that the the first ball point pen went on sale in 1945 at a price tag equivalent to $150 in today’s money? 8,000 people are reported to have swarmed a New York Department story to by them on the first day of sale.
For more information, see the Engineering Pathway’s resources on iPhones, smart phones and cell phones. For related educational resources, visit the Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Design, and Engineering Management education disciplinary communities.
Also on this date in 1995, the US Shuttle docks with the Russian Space Station. This is the first time in 20 years that American and Russian spacecraft have successfully docked in orbit.
Tags: Computer Engineering · Computer Science · Computing · Electrical Engineering · Engineering Design · Engineering Management · General Engineering, Engineering Science · Information Systems · Information Technology · Software Engineering
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