Christie is intense and brusque; his stocky build and sharp eyes feel loaded with kinetic energy. He joined Apple in the 1990s, when the company was in a downward spiral, just to work on the Newton—then one of the most promising mobile devices on the market. Then, he’d even tried to push Apple to do a Newton phone. “I’m sure I proposed it a dozen times,” Christie says. “The internet was popping too—this is going to be a big deal: mobile, internet, phone.”
Now, his Human Interface team—his knobs-and-dials crew—was about to embark on its most radical challenge yet. Its members gathered on the second floor of 2 Infinite Loop, right above the old user-testing lab, and set to work expanding the features, functionality, and look of the old ENRI tablet project. The handful of designers and engineers set up shop in a drab office replete with stained carpet, old furniture, a leaky bathroom next door, and little on the walls but a whiteboard and, for some reason, a poster of a chicken.
Jobs liked the room because it was secure, windowless, tucked away from straying eyes. The CEO was already imbuing the nascent iPhone project with top-to-bottom secrecy. “You know, the cleaning crews weren’t allowed in here because there were these sliding whiteboards along the wall,” Christie says. The team would sketch ideas on them, and the good ones stayed put. “We wouldn’t erase them. They became part of the design conversation.”
That conversation was about how to blend a touch-based UI with smartphone features.
Fortunately, they’d had a head start. There were the ENRI crew’s multitouch demos, of course. But Imran Chaudhri had also led the design for Dashboard, which was full of widgets—weather, stocks, calculator, notes, calendar—that would be ideal for the phone. “The early idea for the phone was all about having these widgets in your pocket,” Chaudhri says. So they ported them over.
The original design for many of those icons was actually created in a single night, back during the development of Dashboard. “It was one of those fucking crazy Steve deadlines,” Imran says, “where he wanted to see a demo of everything.” So he and Freddy Anzures, a recent hire to the HI team, spent a long night coming up with the rectilinear design concepts for the widgets—which would, years later, become the designs for the iPhone icons. “It’s funny, the look of smartphone icons for a decade to come was hashed out in a few hours.”
And they had to establish the fundamentals; for instance, What should it look like when you fire up your phone? A grid of apps seems like the obvious way to organize a smartphone’s functions today—now that it’s like water, as Chaudhri says—but it wasn’t a foregone conclusion. “We tried some other stuff,” Ording says. “Like, maybe it’s a list of icons with the names after them.” But what came to be called Springboard emerged early on as the standard. “They were little Chiclets, basically,” Ording says. “Now, that’s Imran too, that was a great idea, and it looked really nice.”
Chaudhri had the Industrial Design team make a few wooden iPhone-like mock-ups so they could figure out the optimal size of the icons for a finger’s touch.
The multitouch demos were promising, and the style was coming together. But what the team lacked was cohesion—a united idea of what a touch-based phone would be.
“It was really just sketches,” Christie says. “Little fragments of ideas, like tapas. A little bit of this, a little of that. Could be part of Address Book, a slice of Safari.” Tapas wouldn’t sate Jobs, obviously; he wanted a full course. So he grew increasingly frustrated with the presentations.
“In January, in the New Year, he blows a gasket and tells us we’re not getting it,” Christie says. The fragments might have been impressive, but there was no narrative drawing the disparate parts together; it was a jumble of half-apps and ideas. There was no story.
“It was as if you delivered a story to your editor and it was a couple of sentences from the introductory paragraph, a few from the body, and then something from the middle of the conclusion—but not the concluding statement.”
It simply wasn’t enough. “Steve gave us an ultimatum,” Christie recalls. “He said, You have two weeks. It was February of 2005, and we kicked off this two-week death march.”
So Christie gathered the HI team to make the case that they should all march with him.
“Doing a phone is what I always wanted to do,” he said. “I think the rest of you want to do this also. But we’ve got two weeks for one last chance to do this. And I really want to do it.”
He wasn’t kidding. For a decade, Christie had believed mobile computing was destined to converge with cell phones. This was his opportunity not only to prove he was right, but to drive the spark.
The small team was on board: Bas, Imran, Christie, three other designers—Stephen LeMay, Marcel van Os, and Freddy Anzures—and a project manager, Patrick Coffman. They worked around the clock to tie those fragments into a full-fledged narrative.
“We basically went to the mattresses,” Christie says. Each designer was given a fragment to realize—an app to flesh out—and the team spent two sleepless weeks perfecting the shape and feel of an inchoate iPhone. And at the end of the death march, something resembling the one device emerged from the exhausted fog of the HI floor.
“I have no doubt that if I could resurrect that demo and show it to you now, you would have no problem recognizing it as an iPhone,” Christie says. There was a home button—still software-based at this point—scrolling, and the multitouch media manipulations.
“We showed Steve the outline of the whole story. Showed him the home screen, showed him how a call comes in, how to go to your Address Book, and ‘this is what Safari looks like,’ and it was a little click through. It wasn’t just some clever quotes, it told a story.”
And Steve Jobs did love a good story.
“It was a smashing success,” Christie says. “He wanted to go through it a second time. Anyone who saw it thought it was great. It was great.”
It meant that the project was immediately deemed top secret. After the February demo, badge readers were installed on either end of the Human Interface group’s hallway, on the second floor of 2 Infinite Loop. “It was lockdown,” Christie says. “That’s what you say when there’s a prison riot, right? That was the phrase. Yeah, we’re on lockdown.”
It also meant they had a lot more work to do. If the ENRI meetings were prologue, the tablet prototyping the beginning, then this was the second act of the iPhone, and there was much left to be written. But now that Jobs was invested in the narrative, he wanted to show it off, in high style, to the rest of the company. “We had this ‘big demo’—that’s what we called it,” Ording says. Steve wanted to show the iPhone prototype at the Top 100 meeting inside Apple. “They have this meeting every once in a while with all the important people, saying what the direction of the company is,” Ording tells me. Jobs would invite the people he considered his top one hundred employees to a secret retreat, where they’d present and discuss upcoming products and strategies. For rising Applers, it was a make-or-break career opportunity. For Jobs, the presentations had to be as carefully calibrated as public-facing product launches.
“From then until May, it was another brutal haul, to, well… come up with connecting paragraphs,” Christie says. “Okay, what are the apps we’re going to have? What should a calendar in your hand look like. Email? Every step on this journey was just making it more and more concrete and more real. Playing songs out of your iTunes. Media playback. iPhone software started as a design project in my hallway with my team.” Christie hacked the latest model of the iPod so the designers could get a feel for what the applications might look like on a device. The demo began to take shape. “You could tap on the mail app and see how that kind of works, and the web browser,” Ording says. “It wasn’t fully working, but enough that you could get the idea.”
Christie uses one word to describe how the team toiled around the clock, you might have noticed, above all others. It was “brutal, grueling work. I put people in hotel rooms because I didn’t want them
driving home. People crashed at my house,” he says, but “it was exhilarating at the same time.”
Steve Jobs had been blown away by the results. And soon, so was everyone else. The presentation at Top 100 was another smash success.
The Bod of an iPod
When Fadell heard that a phone project was taking shape, he grabbed his own skunkworks prototype design of the iPod phone before he headed into an executive meeting.
“There was a meeting where they were talking about the formation of the phone project on the team,” Grignon says. “Tony had [it] in his back pocket, a team already working on the hardware and the schematics, all the design for it. And once they got the approval for it from Steve, Tony was like, ‘Oh, hold on, as a matter of fact’—whoo-chaa! Like he whipped it out, ‘Here’s this prototype that we’ve been thinking about,’ and it was basically a fully baked design.”
On paper, the logic looks impeccable: The iPod was Apple’s most successful product, phones were going to eat the iPod’s lunch, so why not an iPod phone? “Take the best of the iPod and put a phone in it,” Fadell says. “So you could do mobile communications and have your music with you, and we didn’t lose all the brand awareness we’d built into the iPod, the half a billion dollars we were spending getting that known around the world.” It was that simple.
Remember that while it was becoming clear inside Apple that they were going to pursue a phone, it wasn’t clear at all what that phone should look or feel like. Or how it would work, on just about every level.
“Early 2005, around that time frame, Tony started saying there’s talk about them doing a phone,” says David Tupman, who was in charge of iPod hardware at the time. “And I said, ‘I really want to do a phone. I’d like to lead that.’ He said, ‘No.’” Tupman laughs. “‘You can’t do that.’ But they did a bunch of interviews, and I guess they couldn’t find anybody, so I was like, ‘Hello, I’m still here!’ Tony was like, ‘Okay, you’re it.’”
The iPod team wasn’t privy to what had been unfolding in the HI group.
“We were gonna build what everyone thought we should build at the time: Let’s bolt a phone onto an iPod,” says Andy Grignon. And that’s exactly what they started to do.
What’s It Going to Be?
Richard Williamson found himself in Steve Jobs’s office. He’d gone in to discuss precisely the kind of thing that nobody wanted to discuss with Steve Jobs—leaving Apple.
For years, he had been in charge of the team that developed the framework that powered Safari, called WebKit. Here’s a fun fact about WebKit: Unlike most products developed and deployed by Apple, it’s open-source. Here’s another: Until 2013, Google’s own Chrome browser was powered by WebKit too. It’s big-deal software, in other words. And Williamson was, as Forbes put it, “what’s commonly referred to as a ‘@#$ rock star’ in Silicon Valley.” But he was getting burned out on upgrading the same platform.
“We had gone through three or four versions of WebKit, and I was thinking of moving to Google,” he says. “That’s when Steve invited me.”
And Steve wasn’t happy.
When you think “successful computer engineer,” the stock photo that springs to mind is pretty much what Williamson looks like—bespectacled, unrepentantly geekish, brainy, wearing a button-down shirt. We met for an interview at a Palo Alto sushi joint that eschewed waiters in favor of automated service via table-mounted iPads. Seemed fitting.
Williamson is soft-spoken, with a light British accent. He seems affable but shy—there’s a slightly anxious undercurrent to his speech—and unmistakably sharp. He’s apt to rattle off ideas pulled from a deep knowledge of code, industry acumen, and the philosophy of technology, sometimes in the same breath. He was born in the United Kingdom in 1966, and his family moved to Phoenix when he was still a kid. “I started programming when I was about eleven,” he says. “My dad worked for Honeywell, which at the time, they made mainframe computers.… Back then, pretty much the only way to access a mainframe was through a teletype terminal, and my dad had one at home. And it was one of these big old teletype printers,” he recalls. “And you would dial up the mainframe by an acoustic modem—these old things where you stuck the telephone into a socket, through the receiver and a transmitter, and it would make these squirreling noises.”
He was hooked. “I spent hours and hours programming—you know, I was totally a nerd, a geek.” He wrote his own text-based adventure game. But his all-consuming computer habit was creating some problems: “I spent so much time on it that I ran out of paper.” And eleven-year-olds can’t afford to buy reams of computer paper. “I actually hacked the spooling system on the mainframe, which would spool large printouts, and you could get this spooled print job mailed to locations,” he says. “So I would print out reams and reams of paper and mail them to my house so that I could keep on using the printer to access the mainframe.”
At college, his skill set led a professor to ask him for help setting up the first computer science courses. “That’s where I learned how to make a computer do pretty much whatever I wanted it to do,” he says. A friend convinced him to start a company writing software for the Commodore Amiga, an early PC. “We wrote a program called Marauder, which was a program to make archival backups of copy-protected disks.” He laughs. “That’s kind of the diplomatic way of describing the program.” Basically, they created a tool that allowed users to pirate software. “So we had a little bit of a recurring revenue stream,” he says slyly.
In 1985, Steve Jobs’s post-Apple company, NeXT, was still a small operation, and hungry for good engineers. There, Williamson met with two NeXT officers and one Steve Jobs. He showed them the work that he’d done on the Amiga, and they hired him on the spot. The young programmer would go on to spend the next quarter of a century in Jobs’s—and the NeXT team’s—orbit, working on the software that would become integral to the iPhone.
“Don’t leave,” Jobs said, according to Williamson. “We’ve got a new project I think you might be interested in.”
So Williamson asked to see it. “At this point, there was nobody on the project from a software perspective, it was all just kind of an idea in Steve’s mind.” It didn’t seem like a convincing reason for Williamson to pass up an enticing new offer. “Google was interested in giving me some very interesting work too, so it was a very pivotal moment,” he says.
“So I said, ‘Well, the screen isn’t there, the display tech is kind of not really there.’ But Steve convinced me it was. That the path would be there.” Williamson pauses for a second. “It’s all true about Steve,” Williamson says with a quick smile. “I was with him since NeXT, and I’ve fallen under his glare many times.”
What would it be, then? Of course, Williamson would stay. “So I became an advocate at that point of building a device to browse the web.”
Which Phone
“Steve wanted to do a phone, and he wanted to do it as fast as he could,” Williamson says. But which phone?
There were two options: (a) take the beloved, widely recognizable iPod and hack it to double as a phone (that was the easier path technologically, and Jobs wasn’t envisioning the iPhone as a mobile computing device but as a souped-up phone), or (b) transmogrify a Mac into a tiny touch-tablet that made calls (which was an exciting idea but frayed with futuristic abstraction).
“After the big demo,” Ording says, “the engineers started to look into, What would it take to actually make this real? On the hardware side but also the software side,” Ording says. To say the engineers who first examined it were skeptical about its near-term viability would be an understatement. “They went, ‘Oh my God, this is—we don’t know, this is going to be a lot of work. We don’t even know how much work.’”
There was so much that needed to be done to translate the multitouch Mac mass into a product, and one with so many new, unproven technologies, that it was difficult even to put forward a roadmap, to conceive of all of its pieces coming together.
For Thos
e About to Rokr
Development had continued on the Rokr throughout 2005. “We all thought the Rokr was a joke,” Williamson says. The famously hands-on CEO didn’t see the finished Rokr until early September 2005, right before he was supposed to announce it to the world. And he was aghast. “He was like, ‘What else can we do, how can we fix it?’ He knew it was subpar but he didn’t know how bad it was going to be. When it finally got there, he didn’t even want to show it onstage because he was so embarrassed by it,” Fadell says.
During the demonstration, Jobs held the phone like an unwashed sock. At one point the Rokr failed to switch from making calls to playing music, leaving Jobs visibly agitated. So, at about the same moment that Jobs was announcing “the world’s first mobile phone with iTunes” to the media, he was resolving to make it obsolete.
“When he got offstage he was just like, ‘Ugh,’ really upset,” Fadell says. The Rokr was such a disaster that it landed on the cover of Wired with the headline “You Call This the Phone of the Future?” and it was soon being returned at a rate six times higher than the industry average. Its sheer shittiness took Jobs by surprise—and his anger helped motivate him to squeeze the trigger harder on an Apple-built phone. “It wasn’t when it failed. It was right after it launched,” Fadell says. “This is not gonna fly. I’m sick and tired of dealing with bozo handset guys,” Jobs told Fadell after the demo.
“That was the ultimate thing,” Fadell says. “It was, ‘Fuck this, we’re going to make our own phone.’”
“Steve called a big meeting in the boardroom,” Ording says. “Everyone was there, Phil Schiller and Jony Ive and whoever.” He said, “Listen. We’re going to change plans.… We’re going to do this iPod-based thing, make that into a phone because that’s a much more doable project. More predictable.” That was Fadell’s project. The touchscreen effort wasn’t abandoned, but while the engineers worked on whipping it into shape, Jobs directed Ording, Chaudhri, and members of the UI team to design an interface for an iPod phone, a way to dial numbers, select contacts, and browse the web using that device’s tried-and-true click wheel.
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