Inside the high drama of the iPhone 4

By 2010, the iPhone era was in full swing. Smartphones were still a new and unfinished idea — the iPhone had only just gotten copy and paste! — but it was clear that these big slabs of glass were going to change the way we did pretty much everything.

Apple was also already on an annual launch strategy, so we all knew there was another iPhone coming. Then an Apple employee left a prototype in a bar. Gizmodo bought it, took it apart, published all the sordid details, and pretty much broke the internet. And thus, the story of the iPhone 4 began well before the launch of the iPhone 4.

And that’s just the beginning of the drama! For this episode of Version History, we tell the full story of the iPhone 4, from its leak to its launch to the post-launch Antennagate backlash that was so fierce Apple CEO Steve Jobs had to give a press conference to address the issue. David Pierce, Nilay Patel, and longtime tech columnist and thinker Walt Mossberg get together to tell the whole story, from Walt’s long calls with Jobs to Nilay’s surprising (and sometimes entirely unknown) intersections with the story as it broke.

You can debate whether the iPhone 4 was the best iPhone ever (and you better believe we do), but there’s no question it was the most dramatic. It was also maybe the most influential: the iPhone 4 introduced Apple’s own chips to its smartphone line, was the first model to get off AT&T’s network, and became the default silhouette of smartphones for years to come.

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And if you want to look back at the whole saga of the iPhone 4, here are some links to get you started: