According to Axelrod, Steve Jobs met with Obama before he became president, showing him the soon-to-be unveiled iPhone. Obama was impressed.
In 2007, Obama got a sneak peek at the iPhone during a private meeting with Apple's Steve Jobs. "If it were legal, I would buy a boatload of Apple stock. This thing is going to be really big," Obama said after the meeting.
Of course, Obama's prediction turned out to be correct, but it's interesting as Obama was likely one of only a handful of people who laid eyes on the iPhone before its public unveiling on Jan. 9, 2007.
A FedEx employee famously almost glimpsed the original iPhone during a late-night delivery to Steve Jobs' home, where Jobs was working with the iPhone team to debug a problem with the phone's Wi-Fi.
"Steve goes out to meet him because he has to sign for this package, but he's got the iPhone in one of his hands," said a former Apple employee was with the iPhone team at the time. "Steve just walks out casually, [hides] the phone behind his back, signs the package, and the FedEx dude marches off."
It was a close call, and the entire series of events came as a surprise to the iPhone team, all of who were used to following Apple's extreme secrecy measures.
"You have to understand, when we carried the phones to his house, we carried them in these Pelican lock boxes," the employee told Business Insider. "These phones were never to leave Apple's campus, and Steve just casually throws it behind his back. That was the first time I saw someone casually come close to seeing the iPhone before it was announced, and he didn't even know it. If the FedEx guy had just tilted his head, he would have seen it."
You can read more about that story right here, or watch Steve Jobs unveil the iPhone for the first time to the public below.