“Seating was always a problem. We had to double people up in offices, and the smell got even worse,” Williamson says. “People were sleeping in there. Not official bunks. There was a couch and a cot, and it wasn’t comfortable.”
“There was a huge list of problems we’re trying to get through,” Tupman says. “And everybody’s working late, all hours. All hours of the day to try to make it work. Nobody had vacation. You know, I got married in the middle of all of this. And didn’t have a honeymoon until the next year.” If you worked at Apple, you were on call 24/7, 365. “You don’t have vacations, you don’t have holidays, you don’t have any of that stuff.”
Perhaps the most storied event in the lore of iPhonic overworking involves John Wright, the software engineer. He had worked all morning on a Saturday, and in the afternoon, he packed up his things and started to leave. It was his son’s birthday. Kim Vorrath, the product manager, saw him leaving and asked if he was planning on attending a meeting that was scheduled a bit later. When he said no, she began to chew him out: “You think any of us want to be here?” she reportedly said. “I’ve got kids too!” They argued in the hallway, and Vorrath stormed off. She slammed the door to her office so hard that the handle broke and left her stuck in the room. Scott Forstall found an aluminum bat and used it to break in and bust her out.
“Security came by,” Williamson says. “Then it was right back to work.”
That’s just how it was at the time, iPhone team members say. Broken doors and screaming fits were barely a blip during the marathon work sessions.
“In retrospect, it’s easy to measure the cost,” Greg Christie says. “While you’re doing it, you’re just kind of doing it. It was shockingly easy to just devote ourselves completely to this thing. At the potential expense of every other part of our lives. And I can’t exactly say why that is. For some period of time, this was the most important part of our lives. Not family. Not personal health. Not physical health.”
Kim Vorrath is another polarizing figure in the history of the iPhone; in more than one of my interviews, she was called a battle-ax—although once with the qualifier “in good and bad ways.” She drove things forward, it’s said, but rubbed people the wrong way. So let’s pause to note the immense gender disparity on the project. For a time, there were no women at all working on the design, engineering, or development process. Dozens of men, mostly white, no women. Grignon says that eventually, the gender breakdown would come to reflect the company as a whole, which was sadly representative of the industry at the time; that is, 10 to 15 percent women. And that includes quality assurance and administrative positions. All the names on the original iPhone patents belong to men. Abigail Brody, a creative director, wasn’t UI-disclosed, though she says some of her work would be integrated into the look and feel of the phone.
It could also occasionally be an uncomfortable place to work for the handful of minorities on the staff. One iPhoner overheard another discussing some rare after-work plans, saying something to the effect of “What time do you want to meet? In my hood or yours?” That drew a rebuke from one of the managers, who told him, “We don’t talk like that here.” When the iPhone employee, who was not white, complained, he was reportedly treated to a very weird talk from the head of the iPhone software program, who informed him that he understood where he came from because one of his most transformative experiences was seeing Public Enemy at a concert at Stanford.
Because the iPhone has proven to be such a mammoth success, it’s worth considering the fact that the device was created by an almost totally male, mostly white team. It’s hard to gauge the effect that any design biases exerted there—however unintentional—might have on perhaps the largest shift in personal-computing paradigms in history. And though the devices were tested by women in Apple’s quality assurance department, the design and development choices were made with men’s hands on the screen, and their fingerprints shaped everything from the form factor to onscreen navigation.
If things were intense before, they were about to get worse. It was October, 2006, mere months from the phone’s public announcement. Many engineers had no idea that Jobs aimed to unveil the iPhone at Macworld in January 2007, but that was the plan. And he had a problem: their main chip was catastrophically buggy.
“Chips nowadays are basically software,” Grignon says. “When you make a new piece of silicon, there’s some dude in Korea that’s gotta actually type out code, and it gets compiled into a piece of metal, silicon. Like any software program, there’s bugs in there, and we hit several of those.” One, in particular, “ground the entire program to a halt. There was a pretty bad bug that manifested itself between the main chip, the CPU, and the baseband, the chip that handles the phone calls.”
The Samsung team had manufactured the chip per Apple’s designs, and the first ones were arriving in Cupertino. It would boot up just fine, but when the engineers tried to push it, it would crash. “We weren’t getting the bandwidth out of the memory that we thought we’d be getting,” Grignon says.
“Steve was ready to start firing everybody,” Tupman says. “That was an emergency crisis. We’re two months from announcing it, and we had a major problem with our system chip.” So all of the experts at Apple’s disposal were called in. “Some of the best computer scientists in the world,” Tupman says. “They came on board and sat down with Samsung and went into detail. ‘How can we fix this, how can we get more bandwidth?’” The result of the all-hands-on-deck chip-designing spree? A working brain for the iPhone.
“Samsung did it,” Tupman says. “They built a chip as fast as they’ve ever built a chip in a fab. Normally it’s days per layer, and it’s twenty or thirty layers of silicon you’re trying to build. Normally it’s months and months you have to wait to get your prototypes. And they were turning this around in six weeks or something crazy.”
Maps
In 2006, Apple and Google were still on friendly terms. The Purple software crew wanted to use Google as its default search engine in Safari, as it was already far and away the industry standard. In a meeting with Larry Page, Jobs happened to show him the iPhone prototype.
“Larry was blown away and thought it was awesome,” Williamson says. “And during that meeting he suggested that we add Maps. Steve said, ‘Ah, this makes total sense.’ We were a short ways away from actually shipping. So Steve said, ‘We gotta add Maps.’”
Lamiraux and Williamson headed to Mountain View. “In a couple hours we hashed out a plan where we could take the core of the code they had and run it on the iPhone,” Williamson says. The Apple engineers walked out with the source code for Google Maps without any formal contractual agreement—“just a handshake between Larry and Steve.” Contract negotiations would take too long, they figured, and the launch was coming up; they could work out the details later. That would never happen today, of course. But then, two of the biggest tech giants could still make a casual deal to port one of the most important software programs onto one of the most important consumer devices of the era.
“We collaborated freely,” Williamson says, “so they gave us the source code and we ported it and built an application around it, and we did it incredibly quickly. Like, in a couple of weeks. At this point our relationship with Google was really good.” It also established the relationship between teams; the Apple crew would do essentially the same thing with YouTube. Both apps would become major selling points on a phone that, initially, was a closed system.
There ended up being three major Google products embedded on that first iPhone: Maps, YouTube, and Search. When Apple’s team did return to the negotiating table, they apparently proved successful, leaving a fascinating footnote in the iPhone saga. “We generated enough money from that search field to fund pretty much the entire software development for the iPhone,” Williamson says. “And then some.” The entire development of the iPhone has been reported to have cost Apple $150 million—so that deal with Google was lucrative indeed.
Testing
, Testing
“I have two records for iPhone, which is great, because you can never take them back,” Grignon says. “The first is, I was the first person to ever receive a phone call from an iPhone. Because my team did all the software for all that.”
As the chips were being fitted, the hardware clicked into place, and the software was improving at a rapid clip. The early prototypes had to be tested, of course, to make sure that they’d work in the wild. “We had just gotten these devices out of Asia; they went to my team—the software simulators and things like that, we put the software on,” Grignon says. “And I was in a meeting one day with somebody from my office, and I get this number, this phone call to my office. I didn’t recognize the number, so I was like, fuck it, so I sent it to voicemail. And at the end of the meeting, I checked my voicemail, and it was my guys! They were like, ‘Dude! We’re calling you from a phone, this is the first call!’”
Andy Grignon had just become the first person to decline a call on his iPhone. “Instead of being this awesome Alexander Graham Bell moment, it was just like, ‘Yeah, fuck it, go to voicemail.’ I think it’s very apropos, given where we are now.”
His second record was a little less savory, though almost as apropos. “I was the first guy to actually browse porn on the phone. We had just got these devices, we had the ability to make phone calls,” he says. “So we’re all just, like, getting our first bit of it, of time, actually seeing it in the flesh. We’re sitting in the hallway, we’re all browsing the web and checking out some of the apps. I don’t know what it was, but I just felt like being a fucking weirdo, and I went over to this website called Foobies, which was Fark Boobies, and I just started looking at all these booby pictures. I was like, ‘Ah, check this out,’ and I’m doing pinch and zoom, and we’re all laughing about it. Yeah, that was the first porn site on an iPhone.”
Bas Ording had gotten one of the first finalized iPhones, and, like the other testers, he was expected to use it all the time. “Which was kind of cool, but at the same time kind of sucked too, because that’s your main phone, and that thing would run out of batteries or crash or the reception wasn’t always that great.” That, of course, was the point—figuring out where and how the phone failed in real life. “Battery life, or things you discover when you’re at your desk—‘Oh, we need a ringer switch,’ or when the alarm goes off, there’s no way to stop it,” Ording says. “Little stuff like that you discover real quick.”
Jobs himself was testing the phone too, which made for some interesting troubleshooting sessions. A team was sent over to Jobs’s house because the CEO had found that his Wi-Fi reception was nonexistent. The culprit? “It was this brick house with two-foot-thick walls,” Evan Doll recalls. “One of my friends was on that team that got sent there to debug the Wi-Fi situation, and he was, like, not sure why he got sent there. He was a software engineer who didn’t know that much about Wi-Fi so he just got there and opened up his laptop and started programming away, kind of pretending to do something to help the situation.”
Soon all the member of the Purple team were given proto-iPhones and instructed to use them as their primary devices, with discretion, and to test them in as realistic environments as possible.
“I hate to bring this up, because I sound like a moron when I talk about it now,” Nitin Ganatra says, “but I was actually testing what it was like to SMS somebody while I was driving my car! At the time, yes, I had a message to send, but the way we developed things at Apple was to live with them and mimic what other people are going to be doing with things as best you can, to try to anticipate how people are going to use these things… so part of my flimsy justification for texting people while I was driving was this, well, when you’re distracted and trying to use the keyboard, how well does it work for you? You know, if you don’t have time to sit there and watch every finger hit the screen, yet you’re trying to use the keyboard, how is that experience compared to if you’re sitting an office in a chair that’s not moving.
“Now, I was doing something that’s now illegal, and it’s horribly irresponsible to do, and thank goodness I didn’t hit any kids or hit anybody in the car while I was doing this,” Ganatra says. “I guess my point is that we were learning what the impact of what this device was along with everyone else.”
Macworld
The pace of work had ramped up to breakneck speeds. Macworld was coming in early January. The iPhone was, to put it mildly, not ready. It dropped calls. The software crashed. It sometimes failed to connect to networks at all.
But delaying the phone was not an option. There was too little else to fall back on. Macworld events were legendary for new product debuts, and if Apple didn’t have anything substantive to show off, the company’s stock could suffer. So could its reputation; despite its best efforts to prevent leaks, the rumor mills were churning that Apple was about to announce a phone, even if nobody knew what it would look or feel like.
The main chip still wasn’t ready, so the software engineers had to hack around the busted version’s shortcomings. They designed what’s known as a “golden path”—a sequence of actions to make it appear to the hushed crowds of tech journalists that the iPhone worked seamlessly.
The Moscone Center, naturally, was on lockdown too. Security guards policed the place, and Jobs initially tried to make it so that anyone who was on-site the night before had to sleep inside the venue, an insane idea that was shot down by other executives. But Jobs was serious about keeping the demonstration top secret.
“The graphic design group, they were going to show Steve the posters, the banners, a week before,” Ording says. “And he heard there were going to be posters and he killed it right away. He said, ‘No, no, no, no, there’s not going to be any print stuff.’ Because he didn’t want to risk the night before that someone at the printing press would see those posters and go, ‘Oh, an iPhone.’ And it was pretty impressive, because it didn’t leak at all.”
“At first it was just really cool to be at rehearsals at all—kind of like a cred badge,” Grignon says. “But it quickly got really uncomfortable. 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.’ He was just very intense. And you would always feel an inch tall.”
Yet a single engineer was tasked with driving the twenty or so iPhone prototypes up from Cupertino to San Francisco in the trunk of his Acura.
The One Device
“I don’t think it set in for me until the morning of the announcement, in January 2007, when it was already on the front page of the newspapers,” Ganatra says. “When that happened, it was like, ‘Oh, wow.’ I had worked at Apple for quite a while up until then and had been through some big releases for Macintoshes and things like that, but none of them had appeared on the front page on the day they were announced. It was like, ‘Holy shit—people had never even seen this thing and that’s a story.’”
The engineers, designers, and iPhone VIPs gathered at Moscone Center on the morning of January 9, 2007. A sort of terrified excitement coursed through the place. One of the iPhoners saw Phil Schiller messing with the device in the back—apparently seeing it for the first time, he said. “It did make me wonder why Phil got to introduce the phone, since so many other people had actually worked on it.”
Like, for instance, Wayne Westerman. In a major oversight on the part of Apple’s PR department, the multitouch pioneer whose technology inspired and undergirded the entire iPhone project from the beginning and who had been hired by Apple in 2005 was not invited to the announcement of the product he helped build—even as Jobs took the stage and announced that Apple had invented multitouch.
Grignon had brought a flask. “It felt like we’d gone through the demo a hundred times, and each time something went wrong,” he says. “It wasn’t a good feeling.”
Jobs paused twenty minutes into the presentati
on. “Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything,” he began, and the rest is history. He effortlessly wheeled through the demo, showing off what he believed the key functionalities would be: the phone, with special emphasis on visual voicemail, the iPod touch, with its cover flow display, and the internet communicator, with its all-grown-up web. He demonstrated multitouch, showing off the perfected inertial scrolling and pinch-to-zoom feature, which drew massive applause. He brought Google CEO Eric Schmidt onstage, opened up Google Maps, searched for a local Starbucks, clicked the store name to call—and ordered four thousand lattes. A confused barista didn’t have time to respond before he hung up to rapturous laughter inside Moscone.
The iPhone had successfully captured the technology world’s undivided attention. The applause would continue onto the blogs and the headlines everywhere. It was quickly dubbed the Jesus phone by Apple watchers and warily denounced by competitors. The phone’s media-rich, touchscreen-based interface and its beautiful design was a hit. Grignon’s team drained his flask and spent the day drinking in the city to celebrate. Abigail Brody, the creative director, says she saw some of the design ideas she’d put together for the mystery P2 project, including the big lettering and clownfish wallpaper, in Jobs’s demo for the first time. She was as surprised as anyone, she says, and honored. “I did not know it would be the first iPhone.”
Inside Apple, the successful launch meant that Forstall had triumphed, Grignon says. “It set the stage politically for what was eventually going to happen, which was Tony being ousted. That was foretold. You saw that in the intro, when he swiped him to delete. In the introduction, Steve is showing how easy it is to manage your contact list, right? And he’s introducing swipe to delete. And he’s like, If there’s something here you don’t want, no complicated thing, blah blah blah, you just swipe it away—and it was Tony Fadell. You just flick it, I can delete him, and he’s gone. And I was like, Ahhhh, and the audience was doing this clap-clap—except for at Apple, everyone who was on the project was like, ‘Holy fuck.’ That was a message. He was basically saying, ‘Tony’s out.’ Because in rehearsals, he wasn’t deleting Tony. He just deleted another random contact.” In our interview, I do a double take; that can’t possibly be true—it seemed so cruel. “That’s what Steve would do,” Grignon says. “I mean, when you look at how, you know, there was a lot of foreshadowing, and he would do stuff like that. That was one of the more visible ones. That was so obvious to everybody. Everyone was like, ‘Jesus, did you see what just happened?’”
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