One of Apple’s greatest strengths is that it makes its technology look and feel easy to use. There was nothing easy about making the iPhone, though its inventors say the process was often exhilarating.
Forstall’s prediction to the iPhone team would be borne out.
“The iPhone is the reason I’m divorced,” Andy Grignon, a senior iPhone engineer, tells me. I heard that sentiment more than once throughout my dozens of interviews with the iPhone’s key architects and engineers. “Yeah, the iPhone ruined more than a few marriages,” says another.
“It was really intense, probably professionally one of the worst times of my life,” Andy Grignon says. “Because you created a pressure cooker of a bunch of really smart people with an impossible deadline, an impossible mission, and then you hear that the future of the entire company is resting on it. So it was just like this soup of misery,” Grignon says. “There wasn’t really time to kick your feet back on the desk and say, ‘This is going to be really fucking awesome one day.’ It was like, ‘Holy fuck, we’re fucked.’ Every time you turned around there was some just imminent demise of the program just lurking around the corner.”
Making the iPhone
The iPhone began as a Steve Jobs–approved project at Apple around the end of 2004. But as we’ve seen, its DNA began coiling long before that.
“I think a lot of people look at the form factor and they think it’s not just like any other computer, but it is—it’s just like any other computer,” Williamson says. “In fact, it’s more complex, in terms of software, than many other computers. The operating system on this is as sophisticated as the operating system on any modern computer. But it is an evolution of the operating system we’ve been developing over the last thirty years.”
Like many mass-adopted, highly profitable technologies, the iPhone has a number of competing origin stories. There were as many as five different phone or phone-related projects—from tiny research endeavors to full-blown corporate partnerships—bubbling up at Apple by the middle of the 2000s. But if there’s anything I’ve learned in my efforts to pull the iPhone apart, literally and figuratively, it’s that there are rarely concrete beginnings to any particular products or technologies—they evolve from varying previous ideas and concepts and inventions and are prodded and iterated into newness by restless minds and profit motives. Even when the company’s executives were under oath in a federal trial, they couldn’t name just one starting place.
“There were many things that led to the development of the iPhone at Apple,” Phil Schiller, senior vice president of worldwide marketing, said in 2012. “First, Apple had been known for years for being the creator of the Mac, the computer, and it was great, but it had small market share,” he said. “And then we had a big hit called the iPod. It was the iPod hardware and the iTunes software. And this really changed everybody’s view of Apple, both inside and outside the company. And people started asking, Well, if you can have a big hit with the iPod, what else can you do? And people were suggesting every idea, make a camera, make a car, crazy stuff.”
And make a phone, of course.
Open the Pod Bay Doors
When Steve Jobs returned to take the helm of a flailing Apple in 1997, he garnered acclaim and earned a slim profit by slashing product lines and getting the Mac business back on track. But Apple didn’t reemerge as a major cultural and economic force until it released the iPod, which would mark its first profitable entry into consumer electronics and become a blueprint and a springboard for the iPhone in the process.
“There would be no iPhone without the iPod,” says a man who helped build both of them. Tony Fadell, sometimes dubbed “the Podfather” by the media, was a driving force in creating Apple’s first bona fide hit device in years, and he’d oversee hardware development for the iPhone. As such, there are few better people to explain the bridge between the two hit devices. We met at Brasserie Thoumieux, a swank eatery in Paris’s gilded seventh arrondissement, where he was living at the time.
Fadell is a looming figure in modern Silicon Valley lore, and he’s divisive in the annals of Apple. Brian Huppi and Joshua Strickon praise him for his audacious, get-it-done management style (“Don’t take longer than a year to ship a product” is one of his credos) and for being one of the few people strong enough of will to stand up to Steve Jobs. Others chafe at the credit he takes for his role in bringing the iPod and iPhone to market; he’s been called “Tony Baloney,” and one former Apple exec advised me “not to believe a single word Tony Fadell says.” After he left Apple in 2008, he co-founded Nest, a company that crafted smart home gadgets, like learning thermostats, and was acquired by Google for $3.2 billion.
Right on time, Fadell strode in; shaved head save for some stubble, icy blue eyes, snug sweater. He was once renowned for his cyberpunk style, his rebellious streak, and a fiery temper that was often compared to Jobs’s. Fadell is still undeniably intense, but here, speaking easy French to the waitstaff, he was smack in the overlap of a Venn diagram showing Mannered Parisian Elite and Brash Tech Titan.
“The genesis of the iPhone, was—well, let’s get started with—was iPod dominance,” Fadell says. “It was fifty percent of Apple’s revenue.” But when iPods initially shipped in 2001, hardly anyone noticed them. “It took two years,” Fadell says. “It was only made for the Mac. It was less than one percent market share in the U.S. They like to say ‘low single digits.’” Consumers needed iTunes software to load and manage the songs and playlists, and that software ran only on Macs.
“Over my dead body are you gonna ship iTunes on a PC,” Steve Jobs told Fadell, he says, when Fadell pushed the idea of offering iTunes on Windows. Nonetheless, Fadell had a team secretly building out the software to make iTunes compatible with Windows. “It took two years of failing numbers before Steve finally woke up. Then we started to take off, then the music store was able to be a success.” That success put iPods in the hands of hundreds of millions of people—more than had ever owned Macs. Moreover, the iPod was hip in a fashionably mainstream way that lent a patina of cool to Apple as a whole. Fadell rose in the executive ranks and oversaw the new product division.
Launched in 2001, a hit by 2003, the iPod was deemed vulnerable as early as 2004. The mobile phone was seen as a threat because it could play MP3s. “So if you could only carry one device, which one would you have to choose?” Fadell says. “And that’s why the Motorola Rokr happened.”
Rokring Out
In 2004, Motorola was manufacturing one of the most popular phones on the market, the ultrathin Razr flip phone. Its new CEO, Ed Zander, was friendly with Jobs, who liked the Razr’s design, and the two set about exploring how Apple and Motorola might collaborate. (In 2003, Apple execs had considered buying Motorola outright but decided it’d be too expensive.) Thus the “iTunes phone” was born. Apple and Motorola partnered with the wireless carrier Cingular, and the Rokr was announced that summer.
Publicly, Jobs had been resistant to the idea of Apple making a phone. “The problem with a phone,” Steve Jobs said in 2005, “is that we’re not very good going through orifices to get to the end users.” By orifices, he meant carriers like Verizon and AT&T, which had final say over which phones could access their networks. “Carriers now have gained the upper hand in terms of the power of the relationship with the handset manufacturers,” he continued. “So the handset manufacturers are really getting these big thick books from the carriers telling them here’s what your phone’s going to be. We’re not good at that.” Privately, he had other reservations. One former Apple executive who had daily meetings with Jobs told me that the carrier issue wasn’t his biggest hang-up. He was concerned with a lack of focus in the company, and he “wasn’t convinced that smartphones were going to be for anyone but the ‘pocket protector crowd,’ as we used to call them.”
Partnering with Motorola was an easy way to try to neutralize a threat to the iPod. Motorola would make the handset; Apple would do the iTunes software. “It was, How can we m
ake it a very small experience, so they still had to buy an iPod? Give them a taste of iTunes and basically turn it into an iPod Shuffle so that they’ll want to upgrade to an iPod. That was the initial strategy,” Fadell says. “It was, ‘Let’s not cannibalize the iPod because it’s going so well.’”
As soon as the collaboration was made public, Apple’s voracious rumor mill started churning. With an iTunes phone on the horizon, blogs began feeding the anticipation for a transformative mobile device that had been growing for some time already.
Inside Apple, however, expectations for the Rokr could not have been lower. “We all knew how bad it was,” Fadell says. “They’re slow, they can’t get things to change, they’re going to limit the songs.” Fadell laughs aloud when discussing the Rokr today. “All of these things were coming together to make sure it was really a shitty experience.”
But there may have been another reason that Apple’s executives were tolerating the Rokr’s unfurling shittiness. “Steve was gathering information during those meetings” with Motorola and Cingular, Richard Williamson says. He was trying to figure out how he might pursue a deal that would let Apple retain control over the design of its phone. He considered having Apple buy its own bandwidth and become its own mobile virtual network operator, or MVNO. An executive at Cingular, meanwhile, began to cobble together an alternative deal Jobs might actually embrace: Give Cingular exclusivity, and we’ll give you complete freedom over the device.
Fix What You Hate
From Steve Jobs to Jony Ive to Tony Fadell to Apple’s engineers, designers, and managers, there’s one part of the iPhone mythology that everyone tends to agree on: Before the iPhone, everyone at Apple thought cell phones “sucked.” They were “terrible.” Just “pieces of junk.” We’ve already seen how Jobs felt about phones that dropped calls.
“Apple is best when it’s fixing the things that people hate,” Greg Christie tells me. Before the iPod, nobody could figure out how to use a digital music player; as Napster boomed, people took to carting around skip-happy portable CD players loaded with burned albums. And before the Apple II, computers were mostly considered too complex and unwieldy for the layperson.
“For at least a year before starting on what would become the iPhone project, even internally at Apple, we were grumbling about how all of these phones out there were all terrible,” says Nitin Ganatra, who managed Apple’s email team before working on the iPhone. It was water-cooler talk. But it reflected a growing sense inside the company that since Apple had successfully fixed—transformed, then dominated—one major product category, it could do the same with another.
“At the time,” Ganatra says, “it was like, ‘Oh my God, we need to go in and clean up this market too—why isn’t Apple making a phone?’”
Calling All Pods
Andy Grignon was restless. The versatile engineer had been at Apple for a few years, working in different departments on various projects. He’s a gleefully imposing figure—shaved-head bald, cheerful, and built like a friendly bear. He had a hand in everything from creating the software that powered the iPod to working on the software for a videoconferencing program and iChat. He’d become friends with rising star Tony Fadell when they’d built the iSight camera together.
After wrapping up another major project—writing the Mac feature Dashboard, which Grignon affectionately calls “his baby” (it’s the widget-filled screen with the calculator and the calendar and so on)—he was looking for something fresh to do. “Fadell reached out and said, ‘Do you want to come join iPod? We’ve got some really cool shit. I’ve got this other project I really want to do but we need some time before we can convince Steve to do it, and I think you’d be great for it.’”
Grignon is boisterous and hardworking. He’s also got a mouth like a Silicon Valley sailor. “So I left,” Grignon says, “to work on this mystery thing. So we just kind of spun our wheels on some wireless speakers and shit like that, but then the project started to materialize. Of course what Fadell was talking about was the phone.” Fadell knew Jobs was beginning to come around to the idea, and he wanted to be prepared. “We had this idea: Wouldn’t it be great to put Wi-Fi in an iPod?” Grignon says. Throughout 2004, Fadell, Grignon, and the rest of the team worked on a number of early efforts to fuse iPod and internet communicator.
“That was one of the very first prototypes I showed Steve. We gutted an iPod, we had hardware add in a Wi-Fi part, so it was a big plastic piece of junk, and we modified the software.” There were click-wheel iPods that could clumsily surf the web as early as 2004. “You would click the wheel, you would scroll the web page, and if there was a link on the page, it would highlight it, and you could click on it and you could jump in,” Grignon says. “That was the very first time where we started experimenting with radios in the form factor.”
It was also the first time Steve Jobs had seen the internet running on an iPod. “And he 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,’” Grignon says.
Meanwhile, Grignon says, “The exec team was trying to convince Steve that building a phone was a great idea for Apple. He didn’t really see the path to success.”
One of those trying to do the convincing was Mike Bell. A veteran of Apple, where he’d worked for fifteen years, and of Motorola’s wireless division, Bell was positive that computers, music players, and cell phones were heading toward an inevitable convergence point. For months, he lobbied Jobs to do a phone, as did Steve Sakoman, a vice president who had worked on the ill-fated Newton.
“We were spending all this time putting iPod features in Motorola phones,” Bell says. “That just seemed ass-backwards to me. If we just took the iPod user experience and some of the other stuff we were working on, we could own the market.” It was getting harder to argue with that logic. The latest batches of MP3 phones were looking increasingly like iPod competitors, and new alternatives for dealing with the carriers were emerging. Meanwhile, Bell had seen Jony Ive’s latest iPod designs, and he had some iPhone-ready models.
On November 7, 2004, Bell sent Jobs a late-night email. “Steve, I know you don’t want to do a phone,” he wrote, “but here’s why we should do it: Jony Ive has some really cool designs for future iPods that no one has seen. We ought to take one of those, put some Apple software around it, and make a phone out if ourselves instead of putting our stuff on other people’s phones.”
Jobs called him right away. They argued for hours, pushing back and forth. Bell detailed his convergence theory—no doubt mentioning the fact that the mobile phone market was exploding worldwide—and Jobs picked it apart. Finally, he relented.
“Okay, I think we should go do it,” he said.
“So Steve and I and Jony and Sakoman had lunch three or four days later and kicked off the iPhone project.”
ENRI Redux
At 2 Infinite Loop, the touchscreen-tablet project was still chugging along. Bas Ording, Imran Chaudhri, and company were still exploring the contours of a basic touch-focused user interface.
One day, Bas Ording got a call from Steve. He said, “We’re gonna do a phone.”
Jobs hadn’t forgotten about the multitouch interaction demos and the Q79 tablet project, but a tangle of obstacles—not least of which was that it was too expensive—shut it down. (“You’ve got to give me something I can sell,” he told Imran.) But with a smaller screen and scaled-down system, Q79 might work as a phone.
“It’s gonna have a small screen, it’s gonna be just a touchscreen, there’s not gonna be any buttons, and everything has to work on that,” Jobs told Ording. He asked the UI wiz to make a demo of scrolling through a virtual address book with multitouch. “I was super-excited,” Ording says. “I thought, Yeah, it seems kind of impossible, but it would be fun to just try it.” He sat down, “moused off” a phone-size section of his Mac’s screen, and used it to model the iPhone surface. Those years in the touchscreen wil
derness were paying off.
“We already had some other demos, a web page, for example—it was just a picture you could scroll with momentum,” Ording says. “That’s sort of how it started.” The famous effect where your screen bounces when you hit the top or bottom of a page was born because Ording couldn’t tell when he’d hit the top of a page. “I thought my program wasn’t running because I tried to scroll and nothing would happen,” he says, and then he’d realize he was scrolling in the wrong direction. “So that’s when I started to think, How can I make it so you can see or feel that you’re at the end? Right? Instead of feeling dead, like it’s not responding.”
These small details, which we now take for granted, were the product of exhaustive tinkering, of proof-of-concept experimenting. Like inertial scrolling, the wonky-sounding but now-universal effect that makes it look like and feel like you’re flipping through a Rolodex when you scroll down your contact list.
“I had to try all kinds of things and figure out some math,” Ording says. “Not all of it was complicated, but you have to get to the right combinations, and that’s the tricky thing. ” Eventually, Ording got it to feel natural.
“He called me back a few weeks later, and he had inertial scrolling working,” Jobs said. “And when I saw the rubber band, inertial scrolling, and a few of the other things, I thought, ‘My God, we can build a phone out of this.’”
Scott Forstall walked into Greg Christie’s office near the end of 2004 and gave him the news too: Jobs wanted to do a phone. He’d been waiting about a decade to hear those words.
The One Device Page 21