It’s been 15 years since the iPhone was first shown off by Steven Jobs in 2007– and, during this presentation, Apple showed off the iPhone’s first-ever wallpaper which was orange clownfish. Finally, it seems it is making its way to the 2023 devices — at least for some developers running the latest iOS 16 build.
Twitter user Jack Roberts shed light on the wallpaper, sharing a screen capture of the Clownfish option under the Collections section in iOS 16 Beta 3. The tweet then gained large attention after it was retweeted by Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman. The magical photo of a baby and adult clownfish living in a green anemone is the first image ever presented during Steve Jobs’ reveal of the original iPhone and its glorious-at-the-time 3.5-inch display, but oddly, Apple never shipped it as a built-in wallpaper image. The full version of the image was later released on the Mac: for example, in 2009’s Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard release, it could be found under the Nature folder in Desktop & Screen Saver.
We are not yet sure if the clownfish wallpaper will make its way to the upcoming public release of the iOS 16 beta, and those with access to the developer version aren’t guaranteed to get it either, as it seems to be rolling out in stages. It’s certainly something to look forward to now that it’s also enhanced from the original in a higher resolution. And as demonstrated by Reddit user ActorVMU, it has a cool swipe-up parallax animation, too.
If you’d like a copy of the macOS version of the clownfish wallpaper, it was archived in 2018 by Evgenii Bogun, an art student at the time who started collecting every Mac wallpaper, and you can get it here.
