The One Device

by Brian Merchant

  In a nod to the toll the development process had taken on his employees’ lives, Jobs concluded the demo by thanking their families. “They haven’t seen a lot of us, ’specially in the last six months,” he said. “And, uh, as I’ve said often, you know, without the support of our families, we couldn’t do what we do. We get to do this amazing work and they understand when we’re not home for dinner on time and when commitments we’ve made we can’t keep, ’cause we gotta be in the lab, working on something ’cause the intro is coming up. And, uh, you don’t know how much we need you and appreciate you. So thank you.”

  The thanks may have been just a bit premature, however, since the work was anything but done. There was still a six-month marathon session left before the device would ship. And the Purple team was going to need a little more help.

  The day of the announcement, Evan Doll put in a request to join the iPhone team. Until then, like most of Apple, he’d had no idea that the iPhone was bubbling over.

  “I remember interviewing with Scott Forstall,” Doll says, “and partway through the interview, he had his iPhone sitting on the table. No one else in the world could even touch an iPhone. And it started to ring and he picked it up and showed it to me. It said: Steve Jobs calling. And he was like, ‘I’ve got to take this, give me one second.’ And he walks out, so I sit there in this conference room for like fifteen minutes, waiting for him to come back. I’m like, ‘Is he fucking with me? Is this a test?’ I didn’t have my own iPhone, of course, to screw around and pass the time on, so I’m just like, ‘Hhmmm hmmm hmmm.’” He taps on the desk. “We used to just, like, sit there in rooms and stare at the wall and think and wait for people.” He laughs. “Eventually he came back.”

  Two weeks later, he was on the team, and he was thrown into the fire. “You look at that first phone, and the apps on the screen, and most of them had one person working on them, sometimes a fraction of a person working on them.” Doll quickly became a jack-of-all-trades, helping on the clock, on mail, on whatever needed doing as the engineering team barreled down the homestretch to a June launch. Of course, there were hiccups.

  “One of the engineers on the team was trying to debug an issue in the address-book app,” Doll recalls. The engineer wasn’t sure if the code he was writing was actually having any effect on what he was seeing on the screen. So he changed the City field in the address book to “Go fuck yourself.” “He was frustrated,” the iPhoner says, “and he was like, Is this even working? And then he accidentally committed that change to the repository. And that, and before he noticed it and reverted it, that was the version that went out to the carrier build that AT&T was testing out in the wild.”

  Before long, Scott Forstall got this phone call from the CEO of AT&T saying, “Why is my iPhone telling me to go fuck myself?” Management was not amused. “That engineer had to send an email out to the whole team apologizing for bringing dishonor to the family.” A security engineer, meanwhile, had taken his pre-launch phone on a trip and had shown it to a sommelier—who turned around and published a full rundown of the new phone on an Apple-rumor website. The engineer would have been fired, but he was the only one with knowledge of some of the phone’s encryption systems. “And so he also had to send out a penalty-box apologetic ‘Oh, sorry, our hard work,’ and blah-blah-blah.”

  Some of the younger engineers thought it was weird that teammates had to be punished in such a public way among the team. “Very kind of echoes-of-a-totalitarian-regime sort of public humiliation,” one recalled thinking. Similar to, for instance, how factory workers had to do penance in front of their peers at Foxconn. “Yeah, there are some eerie parallels there.”

  The work would continue at a frantic pace for the next three months as the engineers scrambled to move the phone beyond the golden path. With the help of Samsung’s tireless chip team, the custom ARM was finished and slotted in. A month after the demo, Jobs made his famous decision to switch from a plastic screen to glass and pushed Corning to churn out enough Gorilla Glass to cover the first iPhone’s screens. Bugs were debugged. The address book was profanity-free. The phone stopped dropping (as many) calls.

  Richardson’s team killed the baby web in one swoop and successfully squeezed Safari onto the iPhone. Given the rapturous reception to the Maps demo, Jobs approved the last-minute addition of YouTube. With Google’s help, the engineers had it up in running in a matter of weeks.

  “We didn’t realize at the time what we were doing,” Lamiraux says. “I will always remember him sitting on the couch—we just had the YouTube app up and running, and he was sitting there playing with the YouTube app, and he said, ‘You guys, you probably have no idea, what you’re doing is more important than what we did with the original Mac.’ And we were like, ‘Okay. Thanks, Steve.’ But I think he was right.”

  Launching an Icon

  When the iPhone launched in June 2007, lines snaked around Apple Stores around the world. Diehards vying to be the first to own the Jesus phone waited outside for hours, even days. The media covered the buzz exhaustively. But despite all the spectacle, after a strong opening weekend—when Apple says it moved 270,000 units in thirty hours or so—sales were actually relatively slow. For now, the app selection was locked, the phone ran only on painfully slow 2G networks, and nothing was customizable, not even the wallpaper. And it was lambasted for being too expensive. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer famously scoffed, “Five hundred dollars? Fully subsidized? With a plan?… That is the most expensive phone in the world.”

  The hit features were probably Safari and Maps—two media-rich, multitouch-powered experiences that set the stage for everything the iPhone was capable of. That, and the touchscreen itself. That small team that had Explored New Rich Interactions starting five years before had indeed nailed their vision of how people were hoping to interact with devices. Bas, Imran, and company’s groundbreaking user interface was inviting, intuitive—and addictive.

  When Apple lowered its price and added the App Store the following year, the iPhone would rise to a global powerhouse. Yet it’s still striking to consider how little the fundamentals have changed since that first iteration. The screen’s bigger, but we all still open our phones to a grid of round-edged icons. We still rely on Safari to search, Messages to chat. We navigate by multi-fingered touch; we still watch videos on its black mirrored screen. The immediacy of the core animations still entices us to swipe, press, and tap; we still scroll through lists of information with the flick of a finger.

  “It stands the test of time,” Tony Fadell says. “You look at the base assumptions, and what’s changed? The business model changed. Sure, better camera, better whatever. But the fundamentals have not shifted since. It’s always bigger, faster. But nothing has really changed. There was no fundamental shift in the idea that would allow you to use it all. Version one was the right thing. Even though you had to iterate and kill, kill, kill—that’s what happens when you get it fundamentally correct. That’s what tells you you have a classic device.”

  Classic is one way to put. Like water is another.

  “The impact of the iPhone has been so huge and so fast,” Lamiraux says. “Compared to the Mac… I think the iPhone has had more impact on the life we have today. But if you think about it, this is a Mac. We took a Mac and we squished it into a little box. It’s a Mac Two. It’s the same DNA. The same continuity.”

  And that’s an important point. Even the engineers who made it all possible know that they’re standing on the shoulders of giants or, as Bill Buxton would say, part of the long nose of innovation. The iPhone may have seemed like a new leapfrog invention, but not only were its creators relying on a spate of technologies developed for decades outside of Apple, they were seizing on and refining a legacy long built within its ranks.

  “Products like multitouch were incubated for many, many years,” Doll says. “Core Animation as well had been worked on for quite a while prior to the phone. Scott Forstall, who led up the whole iPhone effort as a VP, was a
rank-and-file engineer working on these same frameworks that evolved into what you use to build iPhone apps,” he says. “And those were not invented in a year, or created in a year, they were created over probably twenty years, or fifteen years before the iPhone came around.”

  Those frameworks are made of code that’s been written, improved, and recombined since the 1980s—since the days of NeXT, before the modern Apple era—by some of the same people who were instrumental in building the iPhone. “If you use any of the frameworks now, on iPhone, they have an NS prefix. Anything that has an NS prefix is NeXTSTEP code, and it pretty much is exactly the same code,” Williamson says. “Now, things evolve quite a bit, and things have gotten more complex,” but from NeXT to Mac to iPhone, “it’s not like an unclear path; it’s direct.”

  Apple had been banking code, ideas, and talent for twenty years at that point. “There was a compounding interest effect that was happening,” Doll says. “I think that’s the best way to describe it. Your bank account has been accruing interest for a while, suddenly your three percent a year, when you’re twenty years in, you start to see this ramp up in the curve. I do think that was a big part of it.” Another big part of it? Simple luck.

  The ENRI team created a batch of interaction demos on an experimental touchscreen rig—right before Apple needed a successor to the iPod. FingerWorks came to market with consumer-friendly multitouch—just in time for the ENRI crew to use it as a foundation. Computer chips had to shrink. “So much of it is timing and getting lucky,” Doll says. “Maybe the ARM chips that powered the iPhone had been in development for a very long time, and maybe fortuitously had reached a happy place in terms of their capabilities. The stars aligned.” They also aligned with lithium-ion-battery technology, and with the compacting of cameras. With the accretion of China’s skilled labor force, and the surfeit of cheaper metals around the world. The list goes on. “It’s not just a question of waking up one morning in 2006 and deciding that you’re going to build the iPhone; it’s a matter of making these nonintuitive investments and failed products and crazy experimentation—and being able to operate on this huge timescale,” Doll says. “Most companies aren’t able to do that. Apple almost wasn’t able to do that.”

  When the right market incentives arrived at its doorstep, Apple tapped into that bank of nonintuitive investments that had been accruing interest for decades. From its code base to its design standards, Apple drew from its legacy of assets to translate the ancient dream of a universal communicator into a smartphone. It also tapped its formidable talent pool. Hundreds of people. And not just the Purple team that wrote the magic software and the iPod team that harnessed the hardware, but so many other teams inside Apple and outside it—Samsung’s chip team, Corning’s Gorilla Glass crew, and a long list of third-party suppliers. Carrier relations. They all worked like hell to envision, invent, and carry out the grunt work of creating the device.

  Steve Jobs would routinely shout out the “Apple team” or the “great team” at demonstrations and in interviews, but he would rarely name them, unless they were executives. He told his biographer Walter Isaacson that his favorite Apple product was the Apple team—but it was the one product he was apparently unwilling to show off to the world.

  “Apple was lucky to have people that loved each other so much, working on a project so key to its future,” Imran says. “I can’t think of another collaboration like it I’ve ever had.”

  One iPhone designer told me that he doesn’t think there’s a single picture of the original design team in existence. “It’s like if Michael Jordan was a ghost,” he told me. “There’s this thing that scores and slam-dunks and wins all these games; nobody knows it actually exists.” The truth is, the designers, engineers, and programmers who contribute to it know. Especially when they worked so hard they sacrificed their families, their health, everything, to create a product for Apple.

  “My family did suffer, in the early days, from me not being around,” Richard Williamson says. His wife died from brain cancer around the same time he left Apple. “I’m making up for that now, because I’m a full-time dad now. I cook dinner for my kids every day. It’s the right thing for me, and the right thing for them. But I wouldn’t exchange the experience of building the iPhone for anything.”

  Brett Bilbrey, who wasn’t a core member of the iPhone team but who was involved in some of the research and engineering projects around it at the time, puts it like this: “I retired because of many reasons. And stress was one of them. It was a time of chaos, politics gone wild, fiefdoms. Steve was the one ring to rule them all. And people around me were dying. From heart attacks, from cancer. I do miss Apple. It was my dream job,” he says, and his wife chimes in from the background, “Until it almost killed you!” His doctor, he says, gave him an ultimatum. Do these two things or risk dying—lose weight and quit. “Thirty-six people I worked with at Apple have died,” he says. “It is intense.”

  That intensity is also likely the reason that the team that built the iPhone has since scattered to the winds. As of 2017, besides Jony Ive, none of the executive staff at Apple was seriously involved in creating the iPhone. Fadell exited the year after its launch. Scott Forstall was pushed out after the faulty release of Apple Maps in what many speculate was the culmination of long-brewing tensions with Tim Cook and Ive. Richard Williamson was fired too, despite over a decade and a half of service to the company. Burned out, Andy Grignon quit shortly after the iPhone launch. Bas Ording left in 2013 to take a job at Tesla—he was tired of spending his time defending patents in court. Henri Lamiraux retired after the rollout of iOS 7, also in 2013, for health reasons. Greg Christie, the head of the human-interaction team, left in 2014. David Tupman left that year too. Imran Chaudhri, perhaps the last father of the iPhone standing, left in early 2017.

  “I don’t think there’s anyone left there who understands the iPhone stack from the ground up,” Williamson says. In fact, the story of how the iPhone was made and who helped create it isn’t even well understood inside Apple.

  The iPhone project is no longer about assembling a fresh constellation of interaction ideas or inventing new ways to bring mobile computing for the masses—it’s about selling more iPhones, which of course makes sense. It’s business. “It’s interesting to see how people perceive the company now versus then, how that has changed,” one original iPhone team member says. “It’s not that kind of Rebel Alliance vibe—we’re Big Brother now.”

  Some companies might have tried to preserve the team that innovated so brilliantly together, to promote its members, or even to replicate its ingredients. But there would be only one Purple Project. At least its legacy would be formidable.

  “Nobody says ‘I don’t know computers’ anymore,” Imran Chaudhri says. “That went away because of the work we did.”

  Iterating

  The first computers were people. Skilled laborers working for astronomers and mathematicians, completing lengthy, complex calculations, often in teams, always by hand. Usually apprentices or women, they would spend days, even weeks, working out equations that could be solved today in a nanosecond with the tap of a button. But from the seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth, when these computers helped the military calculate weapons trajectories or NASA map out flight plans, the term computers described working people. And not only laborers, but laborers who were mostly invisible, working to benefit a man or institution that would ultimately obscure their participation.

  In fact, the actual origin of computing as we know it today probably begins not with the likes of Charles Babbage or Alan Turing or Steve Jobs but with a French astronomer, Alexis Clairaut, who was trying to solve the three-body problem. So he enlisted two fellow astronomers to help him carry out the calculations, thus dividing up labor to more efficiently compute his equations. Two centuries later, six women computers programmed the ENIAC, one of the first bona fide computing machines, but they were not invited to its public unveiling at the University of Pennsylvania nor m
entioned at the event. Today, the iPhone hides the fact that it contains a computer at all.

  Of course, the meaning of the word has changed, but it’s worth thinking about the computer—especially this, the bestselling computing device of all time—as being powered by human work. Because the iPhone, more expertly than its many predecessors, hides the immense amount of effort and ingenuity that’s gone into it. As the screens get sharper, the apps get more addictive, and the phone becomes more seamlessly integrated into our daily routines, we’re drifting further away from grasping computing as the work of human beings—at a time when they are in fact the work of more human beings than ever.

  That’s beings, plural. Now, Steve Jobs will forever be associated with the iPhone. He towers over it, he introduced it to the world, he evangelized it, he helmed the company that produced it. But he did not invent it. I think back to David Edgerton’s comment that even now, in the age of information animated by our one devices, the smartphone’s creation myth endures. For every Steve Jobs, there are countless Frank Canovas, Sophie Wilsons, Wayne Westermans, Mitsuaki Oshimas. And I think back to Bill Buxton’s long nose of innovation, and to the notion that progress drives ideas continually into the air. Proving the lone-inventor myth inadequate does not diminish Jobs’s role as curator, editor, bar-setter—it elevates the role of everyone else to show he was not alone in making it possible. I hope my jaunt into the heart of the iPhone has helped demonstrate that the one device is the work of countless inventors and factory workers, miners and recyclers, brilliant thinkers and child laborers, and revolutionary designers and cunning engineers. Of long-evolving technologies, of collaborative, incremental work, of fledgling start-ups and massive public-research institutions.