The phone project gained the internal code name Purple. Early prototypes were patched together that were merely that: existing iPods, with attached cellular and WiFi radio antennas. But as straightforward as the concept was, iPod+phone simply didn’t pan out in real-world use cases. The problem was that the iPod’s vaunted click wheel—while a brilliant user interface breakthrough when selecting songs from a list of albums—was not ideal for dialing a phone, much less inputting things like text messages. “We were having a lot of problems using the wheel. . . . It was cumbersome,” Fadell told Walter Isaacson in his biography of Jobs.15
An Apple engineer named Andy Grignon was tasked with demoing one of the first iPod prototypes to include WiFi. To browse the web on the iPod’s tiny screen, “You would click the wheel, you would scroll the web page, and you could click on it, and you could jump in,” Grignon said. “And [Jobs] was like, ‘This is bullshit.’ He called it right away. . . . ‘I don’t want this. I know it works, I got it, great, thanks, but this is a shitty experience.’ ”16
Fortunately, there was another possible solution waiting in the wings. It just so happened to be an idea that Jobs had also dismissed—at least a first.
Back when Steve Jobs returned to Apple and saved the company from oblivion, he did so, in part, by drastically reducing Apple’s focus to only a few core products and technologies. Apple engineers continued to work on skunkworks projects, but they were forced to do so on the down-low, lest Jobs learn of their efforts and shut them down. In the early 2000s, a cadre of Apple engineers was interested in exploring new computer interfaces beyond the typical keyboard or mouse. To stay off Jobs’s radar, the engineers often met in Apple’s abandoned user-testing lab. In the Steve Jobs era of Apple, focus groups and user testing were superfluous. Only one person (Jobs, of course) decided whether products were worth producing or not.
The secret group was focused on the future of traditional computing, not gadgetry. “Phones weren’t even on the table then,” says Joshua Strickon, one of the underground engineers. “They weren’t even a topic of discussion.”17 The group was more interested in the sort of computer wizardry that had been shown off in the recent sci-fi film Minority Report. Gestural input, waving your hands around to manipulate data, etc. The group became fascinated with technology from a small Delaware technology company called FingerWorks. FingerWorks produced a plastic touchpad that allowed users to interact with data directly, in a manual, tactile way, using what was known as multitouch finger tracking.18
Someone brought in a Mac, set up a projector over a table and positioned the FingerWorks trackpad beneath it. Soon there was a table-sized demo that showed how a user could interact with a full computer operating system using just their hands. The group shared their demo with Jony Ive and the rest of Apple’s industrial design team. Ive was more than impressed.
Dubbing the demo the “Jumbotron” since it was the size of a Ping-Pong table, he told the team to wait until the time was right to show it to Jobs. “Because Steve is so quick to give an opinion, I don’t show him stuff in front of other people,” Ive explained later. “He might say, ‘This is shit,’ and snuff the idea. I feel that ideas are very fragile, so you have to be tender when they are in development. I realized that if he pissed on this, it would be so sad, because I knew it was so important.”19
Indeed, when Ive finally did demo the Jumbotron for Steve, in the summer of 2003, “he was completely underwhelmed,” says Ive. “He didn’t see that there was any value to the idea. And I felt really stupid because I had perceived it to be a very big thing.”20
But every so often, ideas that Steve Jobs dismissed at first could grow on him over time. One day’s stupid idea could become tomorrow’s brilliant breakthrough. “As far as I know,” says Brian Huppi, one of the engineers responsible for the Jumbotron, “Jony showed him the demo of multitouch and then it was clicking in his mind. . . . Steve does this, you know: He comes back later and it’s his idea.”21
The idea clicking in Steve’s mind was the notion that somehow the multitouch technology could be used to solve the phone problem.
“I was sitting with Steve at lunch one time,” remembered Scott Forstall. “And Steve said, ‘Do you think we could take that demo we’re doing with the tablet and multitouch, and shrink it down to something big enough—or small enough—to fit in your pocket?’ ”22
Work on the Jumbotron had continued in fits and starts, with the assumption that the end result might be some kind of tablet, what would eventually become the iPad. But in late 2004, the word came down from Jobs officially: “We’re gonna do a phone. There’s gonna be no buttons. Just a touchscreen.”23 Apple purchased FingerWorks for the multitouch technology, and soon the phone project was split into two competing tracks. P1 (shortening the Purple designation) became the code name for the existing iPod+Phone version. P2 became this new, multitouch, shrunk-down tablet idea.
In order to make either version work, Apple would need to design the software as well as the hardware. Forstall, who had worked on the Mac’s OS X operating system, was put in charge of software development. With Jobs’s famous obsession with secrecy, Forstall was told he couldn’t hire anyone from outside the company to work on his part of the project; but he was nonetheless free to pick liberally from internal talent. Forstall didn’t tell recruits what, exactly, they would be working on. He only divulged that they would be expected to “give up untold nights and weekends and that you will work harder than you have ever worked in your life.”24
As eventually became standard practice at Apple, the phone team was segregated even from other Apple employees. “The team took one of Apple’s Cupertino buildings and locked it down,” Forstall would recall in later court testimony. “It started with a single floor with badge readers and cameras. In some cases, even workers on the team would have to show their badges five or six times.”25
The floor became known as the “purple dorm.”
“On the front door of the Purple Dorm we put a sign up that said ‘Fight Club’ . . . because the first rule of that project was to not talk about it outside those doors,” Forstall testified later.
Early on, the software teams came up with the user interface features that would go on to make the eventual iPhone feel so magical. There were the features inherent to multitouch, of course, like pinching or widening your fingers to zoom in and out on pictures or graphics. And scrolling through items was a simple as flicking one’s finger up or down the screen. Forstall himself came up with the idea of the double tap to zoom in on text when browsing the web. An Apple UI whiz named Bas Ording came up with the famous rubber band effect, whereby the screen would seem to bounce when a user scrolled to the bottom. To organize the various programs the phone would need, the now-familiar grid of icons was settled upon relatively quickly. Little, squarish, chiclet-like icons seemed to make the most sense for fingers to target. “It’s funny, the look of smartphone icons for a decade to come was hashed out in a few hours,” says Imran Chaudhri, a senior Apple designer.26
Meanwhile, the P1 design was still in the running, pushed by Fadell’s iPod team. Given the limitations of the scroll wheel, some were pushing for a hardware keyboard like that on the BlackBerry. “It was definitely discussed,” Fadell said later. “It was a heated topic.”27 The software-only keyboard was, in fact, proving to be the biggest problem arguing against the P2 track. It was one thing to implement typing on a multitouch keyboard as big as a table. It was another thing entirely to type on a tiny piece of glass only a few inches in surface area.
Still, after six months of running a bake-off between the P1 and P2 options, Jobs was ready to pick a horse and go with it. “We all know this is the one we want to do, so let’s make it work,” Jobs said, pointing to the touchscreen P2.28 It was a risk to go with the untested technology, especially with the keyboard issue still unresolved, but in the end, the possibilities inherent in multitouch were just more exciting.
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IF THE SOFTWARE
was problematic, the hardware was even more so. It didn’t help that the engineers working on the hardware were forbidden from seeing the software that they were ostensibly designing for—and vice versa. The main issue was that Apple simply hadn’t dealt with the basic realities of cell-phone design before. Apple also had no experience with the rigorous testing required to (a) function on Cingular’s network and (b) pass FCC muster. Handset manufacturers usually left this process to the carriers to sort out, since they were the ones that knew their networks the best. But Apple was keeping AT&T at arm’s length, jealously guarding its design even from its nominal partner. And so, the team instigated an intensive “dogfooding” regimen among Apple employees. In technology parlance, dogfooding is when you test your beta product yourself, eating your own dogfood, as it were, in order to work out the bugs. Apple engineers were instructed to live on their iPhones exclusively, to catch bugs in every possible use case.
Dogfooding was coupled with a signal-testing regimen that was nothing if not ad hoc. Often, the process involved little more than driving the phones around in cars and finding dead zones and diagnosing dropped calls on the spot. “Sometimes it would be ‘Scott [Forstall] had a call drop. Go figure out what’s going on,’ ” an engineer named Shuvo Chatterjee remembered. “So, we’d drive by his house and try to figure out if there was a dead zone. That happened with Steve too. There were a couple of times where we drove around their houses enough that we worried that neighbors would call the police.”29
Parallel to these efforts, the industrial design team under Jony Ive was churning out prototype after prototype. One intermediate hardware design that Ive was particularly fond of was based on an iPod-like design from the P1 track. The device was made of brushed “aluminium,” of course, so Jobs and Ive loved it. But in this instance, the master aesthete had to bow to the laws of physics. “I and Ruben Caballero [an antenna expert] had to go up to the boardroom and explain to Steve and Ive that you cannot put radio waves through metal,” Apple engineer Phil Kearney said. “And it was not an easy explanation. Most of the designers are artists. The last science class they took was in eighth grade. But they have a lot of power at Apple. So they asked, ‘Why can’t we just make a little seam for the radio waves to escape through?’ And you have to explain to them why you just can’t.”30
When it came to other hardware decisions, Jobs’s exacting demands won out, often to the eventual benefit of the final product. The screen of the phone was originally supposed to be composed of the same plastic that iPod screens were made of. But after a day in Jobs’s pocket, one prototype unit suffered from deep and permanent scratches thanks to his car keys. Jobs switched the screen from plastic to Gorilla Glass, even talking the glass maker Corning into converting an entire factory in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, just to produce the quantities Apple needed. This actually further complicated things for the hardware team, since the multitouch sensors now had to be embedded in glass, and glass was an entirely different proposition from embedding in plastic.
Other issues were solved by a clever combination of hardware and software. To make sure the screen turned off when a user pressed it to her face to answer a call, a proximity sensor was embedded. The problem of the phone accidentally turning on in a user’s pocket was solved when a UI designer noticed the sliding lock and unlock mechanism on airplane bathroom doors. Thus, “slide to unlock” was born. Small but meaningful details were added as a result of the dogfooding feedback; details like a ringer switch to silence phone calls that came at inopportune times. The first person to actually receive a phone call on an iPhone was Andy Grignon. He was in a meeting and didn’t recognize the caller’s number, so he hit the ringer switch to ignore the call. “Instead of being this awesome Alexander Graham Bell moment,” Grignon recalled that the first iPhone call was anticlimactic, “it was just like, ‘Yeah, fuck it, go to voicemail.’ ”31
But the biggest headache, until late in the development period, remained the functionality of the software keyboard. The problem was finger size. If you tried to type, say, the letter “e,” your finger might trigger a range of other letters instead. The solution, as ever, came from clever design. Apple engineers used artificial intelligence techniques to create an algorithm that would predict which letter a user might want to type next. For example, if someone types the letter “t,” there is a very high probability that they will want to type “h” next. So, the letter “h” would, to the naked eye, look like it stayed the same size on the keyboard when, in fact, the “hit area” for the letter h would get bigger. After that, the “e” would likely be huge as a hit region. “The,” after all, is a common word. This predictive typing algorithm saved the iPhone from repeating the failures of the Newton.
Even weeks and days before Apple was scheduled to announce the iPhone at the Macworld Conference in January 2007, the phone was still incredibly buggy. Demoing a half-baked product was not how Steve Jobs was used to doing things, but his hand was forced in this case. The fact that an Apple phone was coming was common knowledge. Reviewers, bloggers and reporters had whipped up an incredible frenzy of excitement over what they dubbed the “Jesus Phone.” It had to debut.
Just after New Year’s Day 2007, Apple took over the Moscone Center in San Francisco to host the iPhone launch event. A lone Apple employee was tasked with shepherding all twenty-four of the demo units in the trunk of his Acura, driving up from Apple headquarters in Cupertino, and delivering them to San Francisco. He was followed by a second car piloted by Apple security. The engineer wondered what would happen if he got into an accident and the demos were destroyed.
Jobs rehearsed his presentation for six solid days, but at the final hour, the team still couldn’t get the phone to behave through an entire run-through. Sometimes it lost Internet connection. Sometimes the calls wouldn’t go through. Sometimes the phone just shut down. In these moments, Jobs’s notorious temper blazed to life. “It quickly got very uncomfortable,” Andy Grignon said. “Very rarely did I see him become completely unglued. It happened. But mostly he just looked at you and very directly said in a very loud and stern voice, ‘You are fucking up my company,’ or, ‘If we fail, it will be because of you.”32
At the last minute, the engineers identified a “golden path,” a specific set of demo actions that Jobs could perform in a specific order that afforded them the best chance of the phone making it through the presentation without a glitch. For example, Jobs could send an email and then surf the web, but if he reversed the order, the phone tended to crash. The engineers also masked the WiFi that Jobs would be using onstage so that audience members couldn’t jump on the same network and possibly clog it up. AT&T brought in a portable cell tower to make sure Jobs would have a strong signal when he made his own first demo phone call. But, just to be on the safe side, the engineers hard-coded all the demo units to display five bars of cell strength, whether that happened to be true or not.
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IT’S A SIGN OF THE technologically obsessed era we live in that Steve Jobs’s Macworld keynote presentation on January 9, 2007, has gone down as a seminal moment in popular culture.
“This is a day I’ve been looking forward to for two and a half years,” Jobs said somberly, walking across the width of the stage. “Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.”
Apple executive Eddy Cue would say later: “It was the only event I took my wife and kids to because, as I told them, ‘In your lifetime, this might be the biggest thing ever.’ Because you could feel it. You just knew that this was huge.”33
The words Jobs used to unveil the iPhone have become mythical:
So . . . Three things: A widescreen iPod with touch controls. A revolutionary mobile phone. And a breakthrough Internet communications device. An iPod . . . a phone . . . and an Internet communicator . . . An iPod . . . a phone . . . are you getting it? These are not three separate devices. This is one device! And we are calling it iPhone.
Somehow, the demo went o
ff without a hiccup. Watching the video now, as hundreds of millions have done on YouTube, Jobs is masterful, seemingly at the very height of his powers as a showman. You can feel him simultaneously stoking and feeding off the excitement emanating from the crowd. It is almost as if Jobs can’t believe what he is demoing at the same time the audience can’t believe what they’re seeing.
The original iPhone that went on sale June 29, 2007, was based on the Purple 2 prototype, code named M68, with device number iPhone1,1. With more than a decade of perspective, perhaps the most remarkable thing about the first iPhone was that it was so completely, conceptually perfect, right out of the gate. Automobiles had to evolve for almost forty years until they settled into the standard configuration we are familiar with today. On their first attempt, the team at Apple managed to stumble upon the perfect form factor, the perfect incarnation of the modern smartphone. Smartphones had, of course, existed for several years previous to the iPhone, but the standard form of the smartphone as we know it today—no physical keyboard, a single slab of screen, a “black mirror” that is both a reflection of, and a conduit for all of our hopes and desires—they nailed it on the first try. And that’s quite remarkable. There’s a very good reason why, to this day, almost all smartphones essentially look like that first iPhone.
The iPhone, of course, solved the threat to Apple’s iPod franchise by basically obsoleting the stand-alone MP3 player, just as it was designed to do. But what’s often overlooked now is how important that “third” thing was that Jobs declared the iPhone to encompass at its core: an Internet communicator. Smartphones and PDAs had been gaining the ability to browse the web for years. But the iPhone had that comparatively enormous LCD screen that took up nearly the entire surface real estate of the device. And it had all of the multitouch advancements like pinch to zoom and double-tap to center on text. These were the things that made browsing the mobile web useful and enjoyable for the first time. Jobs himself would later say the miracle of mobile browsing was what truly made the first iPhone stand out. The iPhone delivered the “real” Internet like a “real” computer did. The iPhone finally made the mobile web a self-evident, useful feature. “It’s the Internet in your pocket for the first time,” Jobs said.34
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