The One Device

by Brian Merchant

By insisting that the UI remain secret, Forstall made life difficult for Tony Fadell, who had recently been promoted to senior vice president and who was the only one on his team allowed to see the software. “Forstall skillfully played that off of Steve; he fed the paranoia to keep it super-secret, to keep Tony out of it,” Grignon says.

  That secrecy was bleeding into the general culture at Apple, creating a wedge between friends and impeding actual progress on the phone.

  Nitin Ganatra and Andy Grignon were and remain good buddies. When I was doing a batch of interviews around Silicon Valley, I met Grignon in Half Moon Bay, where we chatted at a seaside pub. The next day, I met Ganatra for lunch at a Mexican joint in Palo Alto. I told him that I’d seen his old friend Andy Grignon the day before, and he had given me a message to deliver. Ganatra cut me off.

  “Did he tell me to go fuck myself?” Ganatra says, grinning. He had indeed. “Yeah? Well, next time you see him, make sure you tell him the same.” See? Friends. But here’s what Grignon told me about working together under the iPhone era:

  “People may be best buddies off the field, but on the field, it’s anything goes. And I may have to do some dirty things, and that’s horrible. So there were moments where, you know, Nitin and I are close friends to this day, outside all of the bullshit, I count him as a really close friend. I love hanging with him—but at the time I wouldn’t have thought twice about throwing him under the bus, or if there was an opportunity where I thought it could help us to break his balls a little bit or make his life a little bit harder, just to apply some pressure, I would have done it. And he did the same to me, and I know that. But then we go and drink and smoke and do whatever, and it’s all good.”

  Before Grignon left to join the iPod team, he had worked closely with Ganatra, Scott Herz, and other members of what was now the Purple team. They used to eat lunch together—“We’d gripe about whatever the fuck we were working on, Mail or iChat, and we’d break balls or whatever, that was cool”—but over the course of the iPhone development, the mood changed.

  “Lunch became one of those Mexican standoffs. We would still go through the ritual of lunch. And they would talk in code names and go, ‘What do you think about XYZ,’ and it would be some code name. And I would be like, ‘What’s that?’ And they’d be like, ‘We can’t talk about it,’” Grignon says. “It got really weird there for a while. Very passive-aggressive. It depends on who can withhold what information… And sometimes we’d just sit there and eat real quiet. Idle chitchat, but so obviously we couldn’t wait to get back out of the environment we were in. And these were also my friends. I’m not supposed to be honest with my friends? It was really fucking weird.”

  To this day, Tony Fadell sounds exasperated when the conversation turns to iPhone politics. “The politics were really hard,” he says. “And they got even worse over time. They became emboldened by Steve, because he didn’t want the UI—I could see it—but he wouldn’t let anyone else on the hardware team see it, so there was this quasi-diagnostics operating system interface. So it was super-secretive, and it emboldened the other team… You had to ask permission for everything, and it really built a huge rift between the two teams.”

  The team that was building the iPhone’s hardware and the team that was designing the software were distinctly at odds. “The teams didn’t want to work together. Or they just wanted to blame each other,” Fadell says. “And it’s like, no, that’s not how it works.” It’s a pretty remarkable way to build a product, especially one in which the hardware and software are so tightly and powerfully integrated. Eventually, the secrecy made it too difficult to make any meaningful progress.”

  “It got to the point of absurdity,” Grignon says, “where I was like, we couldn’t make progress, and we were moving slow because we couldn’t work with the actual UI, so Tony had to go directly to Steve and be like, ‘Look, I need Andy to see the UI.’ And Forstall argued, but then gave in. Tony was able to successfully negotiate that path and say, ‘We can’t build a fucking product if at least some of our close people can’t see it.’ It was absurd.”

  The move pushed Jobs to allow five or so more people to the UI-disclosed list, and, amazingly, Scott Forstall himself used it as an excuse to grant access to a number of people on his own team who didn’t have access. The secrecy was out of control, even for Apple, Grignon says, and ultimately detrimental to the project.

  “Oftentimes, it’s just hidden under ‘Oh, Apple being secretive again; oh, those guys!’ but it was stupid,” Grignon says. “Even in that Apple-rarefied space of paranoia, it’s still stupid, and that’s where politics come in. Can you have good products without politics? I would say you can. I think some politics are good. But it does burden the development process unduly. You do more working together.”

  Industrial Design

  The Industrial Design group had been involved in the inception of the phone nearly every step of the way: Duncan Kerr was an influential participant in the ENRI sessions, ID was responsible for the form-factor designs that helped skyrocket the iPod to popularity, and executives like Mike Bell had used a batch of ID’s prototypes as an argument that an Apple phone could succeed in the first place.

  It’s fitting, then, that the very first known design sketch Jony Ive made of a touchscreen very closely resembles the iPhone screen that actually ended up shipping.

  “Some of our early discussions about the iPhone,” Ive said, centered on the idea of “this infinity pool, this pond, where the display would sort of magically appear.” From the earliest talks, the emphasis was on elevating the screen; as he put it, everything should defer to the display.

  Those early discussions about a magical future took place around a regular old kitchen table. That’s where the fifteen or so industrial designers, including Ive, Kerr, Richard Howarth, Eugene Whang, Shin Nishibori, Douglas Satzger, and Christopher Stringer, would regularly meet. “We’ll sit there with our sketchbooks and trade ideas,” Stringer said. “That’s where the really hard, brutal honest criticism comes in.”

  The ID team made innumerable designs variants, which were discussed, examined, and ruled out. Inspiration struck and then vanished. At one point, Nishibori was instructed to look at what Sony was doing; as a lark, he modeled one iPhone design on the Japanese company’s style, complete with a tongue-in-cheek Jony logo.

  Two concepts came to the fore: One, put forward by Stringer, was inspired by the aluminum-bodied iPod Mini and came to be known as Extrudo. Made of extruded aluminum, with its hard edges and smaller screen, it had an aggressive, sharp feel. It looked a bit like a cross between an iPod and an electric shaver. Like the Mini, it could be minted in various colors of anodized aluminum. The other design was Howarth’s and came to be known as the Sandwich—a rectangle with rounded edges, it was made of two sheets of plastic with a metal band running around the length of the body.

  The ID group wasn’t allowed to see the user interface either, so they worked on devices using stickers with cartoon versions of the apps on the screen. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given Ive’s well-known affinity for aluminum, the team preferred the Extrudo model. Plus, Apple already had factories pumping out palm-size aluminum gadgets, and it would make for a less painful bridge when it came to ramping up supply. Extrudo was the first design the ID group sent to the hardware team to build out.

  “We went through two different form factors,” David Tupman tells me. “The first one was just like a very big iPod Mini that was literally screwed into an aluminum tube and cut out for a screen.

  “We built working prototypes with electronics in it,” Tupman says. “It was beautiful, as Jony makes all these things beautiful, but it just had hard edges to it.” Those hard edges bothered just about anyone who tested it. Extrudo, sadly, was uncomfortable to the face, a pretty serious disqualifier for a phone.

  Meanwhile, the solid-metal enclosure made it nearly impossible to deliver a signal. Two engineers, Phil Kearney and Rubén Caballero, Apple’s antenna expert, had to go deli
ver the bad news in a boardroom meeting with Jobs and Ive. “And it was not an easy explanation,” Kearney said. “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 ask, ‘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.”

  So the team tried to accommodate both the rough edges and the radio problem. “We made books and books filled with pages of designs, trying to figure out how not to break up the design because of the antenna, how not to make the earpiece too hard and sharp, and so on,” Doug Satzger said. “But it seemed like all the solutions that added comfort detracted from the overall design.”

  Eventually, Jobs decided to kill it. “I didn’t sleep last night,” he said, “because I realized that I just don’t love it.” He said he felt that the design didn’t defer enough to the screen, that it was too masculine. “I remember feeling absolutely embarrassed that he had to make the observation,” Ive said, as he agreed immediately that Jobs was right.

  “Jony and Steve one day just decided, ‘We need to redo this,’” Tupman says with a cheerful sigh. “So we had to kind of redo that for the second one. And it was absolutely the right thing to do. But it was a big challenge.” After Extrudo was killed, the team briefly turned to Howarth’s Sandwich design. But those prototypes came back too fat and ugly—ID would shelve them until the iPhone 4, which would be based on the design, once the chips and mechanics could be appropriately slimmed down.

  They’d eventually settle on an earlier design, one that looks a lot like the team’s first ideas. It’s impossible to know where all the inspiration ultimately came from, but it’s fair to say that they too ran the gamut—and we can find clues in the citations of the first iPhone’s design patent. The very first citation on one of the very first iPhone design patents the team won was for a drawing board patented in 1944 by José Ugalde, a Mexican physician. There’s little record left of his work besides two archived newspaper articles about a rainmaking “ionization” machine he invented shortly before his death—and his iPhone-influencing drawing board.

  “With something like the iPhone, everything defers to the display,” Ive said. “A lot of what we seem to be doing in a product like that is getting design out of the way. And I think when forms develop with that sort of reason, and they’re not just arbitrary shapes, it feels almost inevitable. It feels almost undesigned. It feels like—of course it’s that way, why would it be any other way?”

  Engineering 101

  David Tupman had the unenviable job of coordinating the mercurial pre-phone’s hardware with a tiny, overworked crew. “My team, which was all the electronic systems inside the phone, its RF systems, you know, the GSM systems, the Wi-Fi, the apps processor, codecs, camera, audio, and speakers and all that—that team was actually quite small,” David Tupman says. “Six people? Something like that.” A former Apple executive called Tupman “the hero” of the iPhone hardware effort.

  Tupman hails from England, and his cheerful manner complements a boundless know-how of engineering and logistics. He’d worked on an aborted Motorola smartphone before coming to Apple to serve as a driving force in engineering the iPod. He eagerly took on the challenges of building out the iPhone. First, it was a constant battle for space—already, Jobs and the ID team wanted the phone to be as slender as possible. “We’d been doing that all the way through iPod. That was the mantra: ‘Thin is in,’” Tupman says. That led to constant debates over form and function. “Can we get a battery to last long enough,” Tupman says, “and get it to look like what Jony wanted it to look like?”

  From the beginning, Fadell says, Ive pushed to have the headphone jack and the SIM-card slot removed from the iPhone. “We had to fight tooth and nail to make sure we didn’t remove the SIM card from the very first iPhone,” Fadell says.

  Jony’s drive to make it as thin as possible would help set the phone apart from its competitors. But it needed to work too. “I mean, we could make it an inch thick and add that to the battery life,” Tupman says. “You’re fighting over every micron. Every micron of thickness and square millimeter of thickness and board area, and you just try to be as innovative as you can to make it work.”

  Solder in the Lion

  Thinness was also why the iPhone would start a trend—which many would bemoan—of shipping a phone with a difficult- or impossible-to-remove battery. “My past experience is that whenever there’s a connector, that causes you a problem,” Tupman says. “And so, the battery, that is your main power source. If you get any resistance or impedance in that line, and especially with 2G radio systems, you’re pulling amps of current out of the battery. If you’ve got any impedance in that line at all, it just gives you poor performance all over,” Tupman says. “So the best way of lowest impedance is a solder joint. It doesn’t deteriorate over time like a connector.”

  He adds, “We weren’t given the mission of ‘make this reparable’; we were given the mission of ‘make a great product that we can ship.’ We don’t care about removable batteries. We’ve never made any of our batteries removable on the iPod. So, when you’re new to doing something like this, you’re not tied. We were all very naive as well. It wasn’t like we were phone engineers.”

  One of the biggest decisions they had to make was not doing 3G. The chipsets were too big and power-hungry, and they decided to prioritize longer battery life. “It was something we got knocked for, but having the Wi-Fi was a big plus,” Tupman says. “No one else had really put Wi-Fi in cell phones.

  “It was hard work. There were a thousand problems every day we were trying to sort out.

  “Every two weeks we’d have a divisional meeting with Steve and Jony Ive and Tim Cook and all the operational teams, ourselves, myself and Tony and the other iPhone leaders. And we would just sit down and go through all of our problems.” Tupman laughs. “Steve hated that. Steve hated status meetings. They would drive him crazy. He hated hearing about problems. He just wanted them all solved. You had to tell him, ‘Oh, we’re worried about this,’ because in two weeks when you tell him, ‘Oh, this thing didn’t work out,’ he would be like, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ So you had to balance it—how much you told him so he was informed versus he doesn’t get too bored and frustrated and he goes down a rabbit hole.”

  How Samsung Helped Build the iPhone

  And one of those problems was that they didn’t have a central processing unit. They didn’t have a chip nailed down that could serve as the iPhone’s brain. Which was sort of an important detail. “It got to a point in February 2006 where we were thinking, ‘We’ve got to ship a product in a year, and we don’t have the main processor,’” Tupman says. “‘We don’t even have a timeline for that main processor. How the hell are we going to do this?’”

  Fortunately, the hardware team just happened to be meeting with Samsung, which made chips for the iPod, and Fadell asked them if they had anything with an ARM 11 in it. They did—it was a chip for a cable box, but the specs were right.

  “So we said, ‘Okay, we want to modify it, and here’s how we want to do it,’” Tupman says. “‘And by the way, we have to move really fast.’ We said, ‘We need a chip in five months.’” Chip development normally takes a year to eighteen months. “And we were trying to do this in the latest processor technology and have the first sample in five months.”

  Samsung was never told it was building chips for the iPhone, of course, but the iPod was already big business and Apple was an important client. “Samsung just turned the world over to make this happen,” he says. “I mean, they did everything. They brought teams over to Cupertino, we were working with teams of engineers in Korea, and just getting everything done.” Apple’s engineers were collaborating closely with Samsung, since they weren’t even finished designing the chip yet. “I mean, we’re developing the spec at the same time that they’re developing the chip.

  “In reality, the iPhone
wouldn’t have shipped on that timeline if we hadn’t had them helping us with that.”

  iWork

  Tensions were running high in the Purple Dorm. Shouting matches broke out, animosities percolated, and everyone was under immense pressure. Plus there were stress multipliers of a more primordial nature.

  “It stank,” Williamson says. “Because we were spending all kinds of time there.” There was rotting food piled up by the door; an amalgam of BO and leftovers wafted through the place. An older engineer would take breaks to go on runs and leave his sweaty clothes in the office.

  Amid the stink, the demands of the project, as promised, consumed iPhoners’ lives. Vacations and holidays were out of the question. So, apparently, was paternity leave.

  “It was definitely intense,” Williamson says. “I had recently gotten married. I had three iPhone babies. For the first one, I think I went to the hospital—then I went right back to work. I didn’t take any paternity leave. And then for the other two, I took maybe a couple of days. Yeah, it was intense. Very intense.”

  The engineers spent night and day in the Purple Dorm, crashing there or wobbling out of Cupertino in the late night. “I remember the hallway as being dark, because so much of the time we were there was at night,” one engineer said.

  Those late nights and never-ending coding sessions were exhilarating to some but toxic to others. The all-consuming, embryonic iPhone eroded relationships.

  “My experience of looking back and thinking about it is not a pleasant one,” Grignon says. He was working every day of the week, constantly stressed, and he gained fifty pounds. “It was especially hard on the married guys,” one engineer says. “There were a lot of divorces.”

  And it only got worse as the project drew on.