iPhone Birthday: Watch the original iPhone announcement that was nearly a disaster

Ten years ago Monday, late Apple cofounder Steve Jobs introduced the first iPhone at the Macworld conference in San Francisco, California. While onstage Jan. 9, 2007, Jobs described the iPhone as "a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone and a breakthrough internet communications device."

According to Apple, the iPhone has sold more than 1 billion units in the past decade. The first iPhone was a 3.5-inch device featuring a 2-megapixel camera with no video recording capability, screen resolution of 320 x 480 pixels and a maximum storage capacity of 16GB.

While things went smoothly, it could have been disastrous. In 2013, the New York Times Magazine reported that the original iPhone had a lot of bugs and glitches. Fred Vogelstein wrote:

The iPhone could play a section of a song or a video, but it couldn't play an entire clip reliably without crashing. It worked fine if you sent an e-mail and then surfed the Web. If you did those things in reverse, however, it might not. Hours of trial and error had helped the iPhone team develop what engineers called "the golden path," a specific set of tasks, performed in a specific way and order, that made the phone look as if it worked.

In the official Steve Jobs biography, writer Walter Isaacson disclosed that Jobs made changes to the device as the company "neared completion" — the iPhone's glass screen was initially set in an aluminum case but was replaced to rest on a "thin stainless-steel bezel."

For a walk down memory lane, watch Jobs debut the first iPhone in 2007 below: