The One Device

by Brian Merchant

  Amid all that, the team had no clear idea of what, exactly, they were trying to make. A fully powered Mac you could touch? A mobile device on a completely different operating system? Try to transport your brain to the distant reaches of the turn of the twentieth century—there were no touchscreen tablets in wide use; they were still more familiar as Star Trek-esque fictions than actual products.

  The ENRI team was in uncharted territory.

  UI for U and I

  Freed from the confines of point-and-click, Ording and Chaudhri continued to embrace the possibilities of direct manipulation. Their demos became more finely tuned, more ambitious. “You had the feeling that you could come up with whatever—it’s great for UI design. You have almost a clean slate,” Ording says.

  “For the first time, we had something that’s like direct manipulation, as opposed to what we used to call direct manipulation—which was clicking on an icon, but there was a mouse,” Greg Christie says. There was still one extra intermediary between you and the computer. “It’s like operating a robot.” Now, it wasn’t: It was hand-to-pixel contact.

  That sort of direct manipulation meant the rules that governed point-and-click computing were out the window. “Because we could start from scratch, and we could do whatever, so there was much more animation and nice transitions to get the whole thing a certain feel that people hadn’t seen before,” Ording says. “Combined with actual multitouch, it was even more magical. It was all very natural in some ways, its own little virtual reality.”

  To craft that new virtual reality, Ording followed his instincts toward playful design. A longtime player and admirer of video games, he baked in gamelike tendencies to try to make even the most insignificant-seeming interactions feel compelling. “My interest is in how you can make something that’s fun to use but also of course functional,” Ording says, “like the scrolling on the iPhone with the little bouncing thing on the end. I describe it as playful, but at the same time it’s very functional, and when it happens, it’s like, ‘Oh, this is kind of fun,’ and you just want to do it again, just to see the effect again.”

  Early video games like Pac-Man or Donkey Kong—the kind a young Bas Ording played growing up—were highly repetitive affairs that hooked players with a series of tiny carrots and rewards. With an extremely limited repertoire of moves—go up, go down, jump, run—getting to the next level was all about mastering the narrow controls. When you did, it became satisfying to move fluidly through a level—and then to rack up your score and discover what lay in store with the next one.

  “Games are all about that, right? They make you want to keep playing the game,” Ording says. So his design sensibility makes you want to discover the next thing, to tinker, to explore. “For some reason, software has to be boring. I never got that, why people wouldn’t put the same kind of attention to the way things move or how you interact with it to make it a fun experience, you know?” They’d come up with the blueprint for a new brand of computing, laying the basic foundation with pleasant, even addictive, flourishes. Ording’s design animations, embedded since the earliest days, sharpened by Chaudhri’s sense of style, might be one reason we’re all so hooked on our smartphones.

  And they did it all on basic Adobe software.

  “We built the entire UI using Photoshop and Director,” Chaudhri says, laughing. “It was like building a Frank Gehry piece out of aluminum foil. It was the biggest hack of all time.” Years later, they told Adobe—“They were fucking floored.”

  Glitches

  By the end of 2003, Apple still hadn’t completed its rebound into a cash-rich megacompany. And some employees were beset by standard-issue workplace woes: low pay and bad office equipment. Inventing the future is less fun with stagnant wages. “Money was pretty tight at that time,” Strickon says. Salaries were “pretty low; people weren’t so happy and not getting raises and not getting bonuses.” Strickon’s and Huppi’s computers were buggy, and frequently malfunctioning. They couldn’t manage to get Apple to replace their Macs.

  And it turned out they’d need more than just Macs for touch prototyping. “It was funny because we had to buy a PC,” Strickon says. “All the firmware tools were for Windows. So we ended up building a PC out of parts… but that was easier to get than a working Mac.”

  As Q79 built momentum, the marketing department remained skeptical about the product, even with Jobs on board. They couldn’t quite imagine why anyone would want to use a portable touch-based device.

  Strickon recalls one meeting where tempers flared after the younger engineers tried to make the case for the tablet and saw their ideas shot down. They were gathered in the ID studio with Tim Bucher, one of the first Apple executives to throw his weight behind the project. One of the reps from marketing got so incensed, Bucher had to stop the meeting. He said, “‘Look, anyone here is allowed to have an idea,’” Strickon recalls. “That was the biggest problem.… We were trying to define a new class of computing device, and no one would really talk to us about it,” Strickon says, to understand what they were trying to do.

  The marketing department’s ideas for how to sell the new touch-based device didn’t exactly inspire confidence either. They put together a presentation to show how they could position the tablet to sell to real estate agents, who could use it to show images of homes to their clients. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is so off the mark,’” Strickon says.

  Jobs had increased secrecy for the Q79 project—whenever products were moved around the company, they had to be covered in black cloth—and that was becoming burdensome too. “How can you communicate on projects like this if you can’t trust your employees?” Strickon asks.

  Few events demonstrate the paradox of working on a secret Jobs-backed project at Apple quite as well as the innovation award the Q79 team was given for—well, it couldn’t say exactly.

  From time to time, Apple’s entire hardware division would gather for an all-hands meeting. “Every meeting, they would give out an award,” Strickon says, for quality, performance, and so on. At one meeting, deep into the touchscreen project’s development, Tim Bucher, the VP of Mac Engineering, stood up and delivered a speech. “With a total straight face, he says, ‘We’re giving out a new award—for innovation,’” Strickon recalls. He brought the Q79 team up on stage and gave them trophies: life-size red polished apples made of stone. He wouldn’t, or couldn’t, say anything else about it. “They literally said nothing. Nothing,” Strickon says. “They’re giving this team an award and couldn’t tell you what it was.”

  Imagine the polite applause and raised eyebrows in Cupertino as a number soup codename was rewarded for innovating something that no one else was allowed to hear about. It’d be like the Academy giving an Oscar to a new Coen brothers film that only its members had been allowed to see.

  “Classic internal secrecy bullshit,” Huppi says. “I still have that award somewhere.”

  Meanwhile, the input team searched for a supplier that could churn out the panel tech at quality and scale. There were late-night conference calls and trips to Taiwan. The market for LCD screens was going crazy at that point, Strickon says, so finding time on a production line was tough.

  When they finally did, there was a major issue. “We got back our first panels from WinTech to test,” Strickon says, “and you stuck it on the screen, and the next thing you know, you had a plaid screen.”

  The touch sensors were creating an obtrusive highway of electrodes over the tablet surface. So Strickon hid the traffic with another invention: he whipped up a “dummy pattern in between that would make it appear like it was a uniform, solid sheet.” That was one of the key touch patents to be developed during the process, though at the time Apple’s legal team rejected it, Strickon recalls. “Once [the iPhone] started taking off, they went, ‘Oh, we need to revisit this!’”

  Untouched

  A chip was cooking. Multitouch technology was working on glass. Dozens of tablet prototypes were circulating around the Infini
te Loop. But just as the tablet program should have been hitting critical mass, it was ensnared by a series of setbacks.

  First, it was unclear what the software was going to look like—what operating system the touch device was going to run on and so forth. “I guess we got a little stuck with where the project was going to go,” Ording says. “There was no iOS at that point. Just a bunch of weird prototype demos that we built.”

  “There was no product there,” Christie says. “Bas had a couple of demos, one was twisting this image with two fingers and other was scrolling a list. That was all lacking a compelling virtue. It was like, okay—why? There was always a little skepticism.… Apple’s trackpad was so good at that point compared to the competition.”

  Second, it was fast becoming obvious that the tablet would be expensive.

  “I remember one particular meeting where we were all standing around one of the ID tables and we decided to ask everybody, ‘What would you use this thing for and how much would you be willing to pay for it?’” Huppi recalls. “Most of us were like, ‘Well, I guess we’d use it to, like, look at pictures, and maybe surf the web if I’m sitting on the couch, maybe. But I don’t really have a reason for email because it really wouldn’t have a good keyboard.’” There seemed to be a creeping uncertainty. “The bottom line was, everybody would be willing to pay maybe five to six hundred dollars for it.”

  The problem was that the materials were putting the device in the thousand-dollar range, basically the same cost as a laptop. “And I think that’s when Steve made that call; Steve Jobs was like, ‘We can’t sell this—it’s too expensive,’” Huppi says.

  Finally, and not least, Jobs had fallen seriously ill, and he would take multiple months off in 2004 to have long-overdue surgery to remove a malignant tumor on his pancreas. “Steve getting sick the first time, that sort of stopped things in the tracks,” Strickon says. “Nothing was happening when Steve was out. It was just completely odd.”

  And so Q79 began to sputter.

  Strickon grew frustrated with the project that seemed to be going nowhere. “There were so many hurdles to try to get people on board,” he says. He watched the marketing department waffle. He listened to fruitless debate in Jobs’s absence.

  And he reached a breaking point. Upset by the lack of progress, the uncertainty of the project’s future, and the impedance of management, Strickon was burned out. At the end of the day, he just wanted to build things.

  Huppi says, “He told me something like, ‘These guys don’t really want to do this,’ and he was just kind of getting ticked off and didn’t think Apple was serious about it. So he kind of bugged out.” He quit.

  Josh Strickon left Apple believing the touch project would never come to fruition. He doesn’t regret anything about leaving, except maybe selling his stock. “It was fun stuff, but it was also like, well, I was always interested in getting stuff out there. Not doing something in a corner that nobody sees.”

  The iPhone

  The project languished until the end of 2004 when an executive decision came down. Jobs had decided Apple needed to do a phone.

  “I got a call from Steve,” Ording says. “‘We’re gonna do a phone. There’s gonna be no buttons. Just a touchscreen.’ Which was big news.”

  But it was bittersweet for the hardware team, who had hoped to turn their multitouch tech into a suite of input devices that used the same cybernetic language. “It was classic Steve Jobs,” Huppi says. “‘Drop everything else. We’re doing the phone.’… Forget about all that other stuff. A lot of us were kind of bummed out because we were like, ‘A phone? Like, really?’”

  At first, it seemed like their work was getting downsized. “But this is where, again, Steve Jobs had to give us that vision. And he was like, ‘No, it’s perfect for the phone.” For one thing, its small size would reduce accidental touches. For another, it would help move the touch tech into the marketplace. “It’s brilliant in the phone market,” Huppi says. “It’s sort of subsidized by the carriers. You can have this thing that’s eight hundred bucks selling for two hundred because they know they’re going to have you hooked on it. ”

  Jobs would soon pit the iPod team against a Mac software team to refine and produce a product that was more specifically phone-like. The herculean task of squeezing Apple’s acclaimed operating system into a handheld phone would take another two years to complete. Executives would clash; some would quit. Programmers would spend years of their lives coding around the clock to get the iPhone ready to launch, scrambling their social lives, their marriages, and sometimes their health in the process.

  But it all had been set into motion years before. The concept of the iPhone wasn’t the product of Steve Jobs’s imagination—though he would fiercely oversee, refine, and curate its features and designs—but of an open-ended conversation, curiosity, and collaboration. It was a product born of technologies nurtured by other companies and then ingeniously refined by some of Apple’s brightest minds—people who were then kept out of its public history.

  Huppi likens it to Jobs’s famous visit to Xerox PARC, when they first saw the GUI, the windows and menus that would dominate computer user interfaces for the coming decades. “It was like that… this strange little detour that turned into this big thing that’s been highly influential, and it’s kind of amazing that it worked out,” Huppi says. “Could have just as well not, but it did.”

  Thanks to the ENRI group’s strange little detour, the prototype of the UI you use more than any other—through your smartphone’s home screen, a grid of icons that open with a touch, to be swiped, pinched, or tapped—had been brought to life.

  “It’s like water now,” Imran Chaudhri says, “but it wasn’t always so obvious.”

  In fact, it’s still not entirely obvious. The iPhone UI may be ubiquitous, but running that water only looks easy. A vastly complex system sits behind the iPhone’s multitouchable, scratchproof screen. This next section explores the hardware—the tiny battery, camera, processor, Wi-Fi chip, sensors, and more—that powers the one device.

  CHAPTER 5

  Lion Batteries

  Plugging into the fuel source of modern life

  Chile’s Atacama Desert is the most arid place on Earth apart from the freeze-dried poles. It doesn’t take long to feel it. The parched sensation starts in the back of your throat, then moves to the roof of your mouth, and soon your sinuses feel like an animal skin that’s been left under the desert sun for a week. Claudio, at the wheel, is driving me and my fixer Jason south from Calama, one of Chile’s largest mining towns; the brown-red crags of the Andes loom outside our pickup’s windows.

  We’re headed to Salar de Atacama, home to the largest lithium mine in the world. SQM, or Sociedad Química y Minera de Chile, or the Chemical and Mining Society of Chile, is the formerly state-owned, now-son-in-law-of-a-former-dictator-owned, mining company that runs the place. It’s the leading producer of potassium nitrate, iodine, and lithium, and officials have agreed to let me and Jason take a private tour.

  Atacama doesn’t look ultradry; in the winter, snowcapped mountains are visible in the distance. But the entire forty-one-thousand-square-mile high desert receives an average of fifteen millimeters (about half an inch) of rain a year. In some places, it’s less. There are weather stations here that have not registered rainfall in over a century of record-keeping.

  Hardly anything lives in the most water-scarce regions of the Atacama, not even microbes. We stop at one of the most famously barren zones: the Valley of the Moon. It resembles Mars to such a degree that NASA used the region to test its Red Planet–bound rovers, specifically the equipment they use to search for life. And we have this barren, unearthly place to thank for keeping our iPhones running.

  Chilean miners work this alien environment every day, harvesting lithium from vast evaporating pools of marine brine. That brine is a naturally occurring saltwater solution that’s found here in huge underground reserves. Over the millennia, runoff from the n
earby Andes mountains has carried mineral deposits down to the salt flats, resulting in brines with unusually high lithium concentrations. Lithium is the lightest metal and least dense solid element, and while it’s widely distributed around the world, it never occurs naturally in pure elemental form; it’s too reactive. It has to be separated and refined from compounds, so it’s usually expensive to get. But here, the high concentration of lithium in the salar brines combined with the ultradry climate allows miners to harness good old evaporation to obtain the increasingly precious metal.

  And Atacama is absolutely loaded with lithium—Chile currently produces a full third of the world’s supply and holds a quarter of its total proven reserves. Thanks to Atacama, Chile is frequently called the “Saudi Arabia of lithium.” (Then again, many, many nations could be called the “Saudi Arabia of lithium”—neighboring Bolivia has even more, but it’s not mining it—yet.)

  Lithium-ion batteries are the power source of choice for laptops, tablets, electric cars, and, of course, smartphones. Lithium is increasingly described as “white petroleum” by those who recognize its key place in industry. Between 2015 and 2016, lithium doubled in value because projected demand shot through the roof.

  Although other mines are being developed, the best place on Earth to get lithium is nestled right here in the Chilean highlands.