Forget the iPhone Duo — the First iPhone Had More Hype and a More Shocking Price
Tech > Mobile > Phones Forget the iPhone Duo — the First iPhone Had More Hype and a More Shocking Price CNET reviewed the first iPhone 19 years ago. We found it innovative and easy to use, but it lacked too many features and wasn't worth the $499 price. Patrick Holland Director of Content As Director of Content, Hardware, I lead CNET's team of journalists and editors, covering news and testing on smartphones, laptops, wireless carriers, AI, and pretty much anything with a battery.
- ▪Tech > Mobile > Phones Forget the iPhone Duo — the First iPhone Had More Hype and a More Shocking Price CNET reviewed the first iPhone 19 years ago.
- ▪We found it innovative and easy to use, but it lacked too many features and wasn't worth the $499 price.
- ▪Patrick Holland Director of Content As Director of Content, Hardware, I lead CNET's team of journalists and editors, covering news and testing on smartphones, laptops, wireless carriers, AI, and pretty much anything with a battery.
CNET files mainly under tech. We currently carry 643 of its stories.
Story provenance
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | CNET |
| Canonical URL | https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/forget-the-iphone-duo-the-first-iphone-had-more-hype-and-a-more-shocking-price/ |
| Publication time | 2026-09-16T11:00:00Z |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-16T11:18:41.532Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-16T11:18:41.532Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | XE8C1guMALvx · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Tech > Mobile > Phones Forget the iPhone Duo — the First iPhone Had More Hype and a More Shocking Price CNET reviewed the first iPhone 19 years ago. We found it innovative and easy to use, but it lacked too many features and wasn't worth the $499 price. Patrick Holland Director of Content As Director of Content, Hardware, I lead CNET's team of journalists and editors, covering news and testing on smartphones, laptops, wireless carriers, AI, and pretty much anything with a battery. Patrick Holland Director of Content Read full bio September 16, 2026, 7:00 am ET 1 min read The first iPhone was launched in 2007 after years of rumors and hype. Sarah Tew/CNET I’ve been reviewing the iPhone since 2020 and wasn’t even working at CNET when the original iPhone launched in 2007.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at CNET.
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