STIILL LOVE MY WORKING MY WORKING ORIGINAL IPHONE!!!!!

 STIILL LOVE MY WORKING MY WORKING ORIGINAL IPHONE!!!!!

The new iPhone 7 is packed with great tech and a fancy new shell. It's the best iPhone ever, Apple CEO Tim Cook said on stage earlier this month. And not for the first time. Apple says that about every new iPhone. Given the inexorable march of technology, it's probably true. But my favorite iPhone is not the best iPhone ever. It is nine years old. A fully functional original—no bloody 3G, 3GS, 4, 4S 5, 5S, 6, 6S, or 7.

I'll admit I was among the skeptics back in 2007 when Apple first announced it would be selling a phone. But somehow, swept up like so many others, I found myself a proud owner of that very first iPhone, which lives alongside my working models of nearly every mobile device Apple has ever made, an ever-growing collection.

That first one, though. I can't imagine my life without it.

Remember the chatter back then? "Why would you want to make a phone call on your iPod?" "How will you protect the screen if you can't flip it shut?" "You want me to type on that tiny touchscreen keyboard?" After all, in the good old days cell phones were still simply that. You could call or you could text, but unless you were rocking a Blackberry (hello there, high-powered business person!) there wasn't much else you could do with the thing. The first iPhone would begin the shift from mobile telephone to pocket supercomputer.

Not that I was thinking about any of that at the time. I wasn't one of those guys who waited in line outside the Cingular store to get my grubby fanboy hands on this hot gadget. I left that up to my buddy at work, the kind of nerd happy to pitch a tent on the sidewalk to snag a brand spanking new iPhone.

I was a cord-cutter back before there was a name for us. I put XBMC on an actual Xbox, I ripped all my DVD's and torrented like it was going out of style. Why spend money when you could, you know, not? I loved my monthly T-mobile plan, and as much as I would have loved to try the new touchscreen Apple phone, the first iPhone required a minimum $499 cash plus a two-year contract with a hefty cancellation fee, a sign of things to come. I was not going to sign a contract that would lock me into two years of cell phone purgatory.

From 2007 until 2011, Steve Jobs continued his exclusive service agreement with AT&T (or Cingular, as it was at the time). This meant, to use an iPhone outside the AT&T network, you had to get your device "unlocked." Back then, there was no officially-supported method for pulling that off. Even if you paid out your contract and owned the device outright, AT&T and Apple made no provisions to open the phone to work on other networks.

So I kept my ear to the ground and followed the jailbreak community, the hardworking hackers devoted to ripping open the iPhone's software just because it was closed. It didn't take long for them to tear themselves an opening and do some sort of black magic to make the iPhone do their bidding, to free and then recapture its soul.

Once my buddy heard the announcement for the new iPhone 3G— "the best iPhone yet" coincidentally enough—he happily offloaded his first-generation classic for a small fee. So I began my collection of iPhones. I quickly learned the process for jailbreaking and unlocking that very first iPhone, which was not for the faint of heart. Back then, many an ambitious jailbreaker would wind up with a phone as useful as a brick, and worse, a voided the warranty. I was just lucky enough to make it through unscathed.

By the time I was through with it, my new iPhone was a lot different than its locked-up brethren. Remember, the first iPhone shipped without a little thing called the App Store. "Apps" as we know them today were still a twinkle in Steve Jobs' eye, and applications still lived on installation CDs—don't lose that jewel case with the serial number stamped inside!

Technically iOS didn't even exist on the first iteration of iPhone. The operating system was instead billed as a version of OSX, the OS that runs on Macs. Nearly a year later it was redubbed iPhone OS, when Apple released the software development kit (SDK) to the public. It wouldn't be until 2010, with the release of the iPad, that Apple would adopt the now familiar term "iOS."

What do you do without an app store? Use Safari. A lot. To be fair, a full-fledged mobile browser was quite the revolution in 2007. But beyond that, there was very little else. According to Jobs, Safari was the future of apps. In this alternate future, third-party developers would go on to use the Safari engine to create Web 2.0 applications that could be accessed from the Internet. And they did at first, but mobile data bandwidth and data rate pricing in 2008 made web-based apps a nightmare, and so native apps were born. With an SDK in place, a legion of anxious software developers, guidelines in place, and an iPhone starving for software, it's no wonder the apps came. And kept coming, in a wave that hasn't let up since.