The back is a curve you can read with your thumb — not quite a half-cylinder, not quite a flat slab, a profile arrived at by machining thousands of prototypes and then stepping away from the machine. It's warm where your hand has been, cool where it hasn't. The edges are chamfered but not sharp. Look closely and you'll see the antenna bands, those two faint plastic lines running across the shell, the compromise that radio physics extracts from any metal body. At the time they looked like flaws. In hindsight they look like signatures — a record of the argument between what the industrial designer wanted and what the laws of the universe would permit.
Loading model
0.0 / — MB
Could not load model
The volume rockers sit on the left, exactly where your index finger falls when you lift the phone to your ear. The silent switch is above them — a little sliver of orange when flipped, a private promise to the room you're sitting in. The headphone jack is a small black dot at the top or bottom depending on the year. That dot is the reason a million people still have one of these in a drawer somewhere. It accepts whatever you plug into it. It asks nothing of you. And the home button, pressed more times than almost any other object in consumer history, was a promise that wherever you were, whatever you had opened, whatever you had broken, one press could return you to a place you recognised.