The One Device

by Brian Merchant

  And all of those forces continue to shape it today. The iPhone is drawn from ideas, materials, and parts taken from every continent in the world; it was designed and prototyped in one corner, mined in another, manufactured in another still—and its influence is shipped right back to all those places and many more.

  I made it a point in my interviews to ask those who worked on the original iPhone project how they felt about the device they’d unleashed upon the world—and was surprised to find a near-universal ambivalence. Most were awed by the reach of the device, by the boom of apps it begot. Most also mentioned the downsides of its constant distraction, lamenting couples eating dinner together gazing silently into their devices.

  One, Greg Christie, whose dream was to make a mobile computer, has a first-generation iPhone buried under his house. “I had the hardware guys pull the battery out of the original iPhone, and it’s in there along with the newspaper from that day. Picture of my family. And a note,” he says. “It’s encased in the base of the porch. It’s kind of my life’s work.”

  But it was the man who oversaw the software engineering for the most influential device of our time gave me the response that startled me most.

  “I see people carrying their phone everywhere all the time,” Lamiraux says. “I’m like, okay, it’s kind of amazing. But, you know, software is not like—my wife is a painter. She does oil painting. When she does something, it’s there forever. Technology—in twenty years, who’s going to care about an iPhone?”

  Technology is an advancing tide, he means, and even the achievements that led to something as popular and influential as the iPhone will eventually be swept away. “It doesn’t last,” he says. He has been writing code for decades, he says, and it’s almost all been erased and replaced. “The frameworks are still there, though.” That’s a pretty nice metaphor for technological progress, actually. His work contributed to a larger, more permanent body, a framework that other people will build on, plug into, advance, and exploit.

  “It’s not like you created something, a piece of music that’s going to be appreciated for a long, long time,” he says. “It’s just going to disappear and be replaced by something better, and be gone.” If not gone, then close to invisible. A step forward, toward who knows what, in an ocean of compiled progress. That work may ultimately be unseeable, but it’s also indispensable and adds to the glue that holds our improving technologies, our frameworks for interfacing with the world, together.

  Computers were human once, and they always will be, to a certain extent. Because that something better is surely inching along with the help of hundreds of thousands of discoverers, engineers, laborers, designers, scientists, dealmakers, researchers, and miners. The next one device is no doubt already in the process of being pulled out of the earth.

  Notes on Sources

  The iPhone truly is a convergence technology, or, as computer historian Chris Garcia terms it, a confluence technology. There are so many highly evolved and mature technologies packed into our slim rectangles, blending apparently seamlessly together, that they have converged into a product that may resemble magic. Investigating the origins and inspirations of such a device was therefore a complicated undertaking, one that required making certain choices about which technologies, locations, and personalities to examine.

  It meant identifying what I came to believe were the key ingredients of the iPhone—the dream of an audiovisual communicator, multitouch technology, a low-power/high-performance processor, groundbreaking user interface design, and so on—and exploring their roots. So I approached each chapter by interviewing a technology’s inventors and innovators, as well as historians and analysts who study that technology, sifting through the published research and patents relevant to the field and traveling to key locales that have felt the subject’s influence or contributed to its rise. On multitouch, for instance, I interviewed Bill Buxton, an early pioneer of the field, traveled to CERN to witness the environment in which a step of its evolution unfolded, and looked back through the patent filings of touchscreen pioneer E. A. Johnson. This helped give me a robust sense of the oft-overlooked history of the technology, and rendered a vital rebuke to Steve Jobs’s more popular claim that Apple “invented multitouch.” Speaking with Buxton, and touch innovator Bent Stumpe, helped me present a portrait of an unfathomably complex tapestry of invention, laced together by personalities with complex relationships to their work and place in history.

  Meanwhile, perhaps the most crucial part of understanding the origins of the iPhone was interviewing miners, factory workers, and e-waste recyclers and repairers, which revealed difficult truths about the most ubiquitous device of our time. I was willing to “trespass” onto Foxconn’s grounds because I believe it’s in the public interest to better understand how the world’s most ubiquitous gadget is made.

  The Apple chapters are a different story. As mentioned, Apple is notoriously secretive—its strict nondisclosure policies mean that an employee who leaks can be fired on the spot. I’m told that former employees who speak to the press even after they leave stand to lose benefits (and of course, stature). So this section had to be conducted with care—I spent what felt like days on LinkedIn and writing emails, reaching out to every iPhone member I could find whose names were either listed on its primary patents or linked to the story in interviews, testimonials, and media coverage. Those still at Apple had to speak anonymously, or risk losing their jobs. Others declined to talk altogether. I thought it worth including anonymous sources here—all of whom I believe gave trustworthy testimony—given Apple’s intensely secret nature. I also pored over court filings, depositions, and public testimony given especially during the Samsung copyright trials. Many, even most, of the key members of the team involved in creating the software and hardware for the iPhone have since left Apple, and I was able to interview them on the record—which is what you see here.

  Teardown

  To get a handle on how ubiquitous smartphones have become, I turned to research organizations and market data. Pew started tracking smartphone ownership and usage in 2011, when it estimated 35 percent of Americans owned smartphones. That number doubled in just five years. In 2007, according to ComScore figures, 9 million Americans owned smartphones. Given that there were 301 million U.S. residents then, that means smartphone ownership was just shy of 3 percent. Since then, the matter’s been polled more thoroughly, of course, and Pew’s 2017 report concludes that 77 percent of Americans own smartphones.

  Today, Nielsen and an array of marketing firms chart smartphone screen-time habits. The 85 percent usage figure comes from the Marketing Cloud 2014 Mobile Behavior Report. The study about our perceptions of usage was led by Sally Andrews, a psychologist at Nottingham Trent University. The market-research group Informate arrived at the 4.7 hours screen-time figure. Dediu’s argument that the iPhone is “the most popular product of all time” can be found at the post of the same name at Asymco’s website. The 70 percent profitability figure comes from a report run in Recode, based on raw-cost findings of IHS, a UK-based market-research firm; the research was also covered in the Independent in “Apple’s iPhone: The Most Profitable Product in History.” The 41 percent figure comes from a 2014 Credit Suisse analysis. The analysis concluding that the iPhone is more profitable than cigarettes was conducted by 247 Wall Street, based on data from S&P Capital IQ, and published on Time magazine’s website.

  For historical context here and in future chapters, I interviewed Jon Agar, a historian of mobile technology, who wrote Constant Touch, one of the few historical surveys of the segment. I corresponded via email with David Edgerton, a historian of technology and author of Shock of the Old, for further context. Mariana Mazzucato’s book The Entrepreneurial State contains an entire chapter about the iPhone and how government-backed agencies and initiatives contributed to each of its key technologies. It’s a controversial book in some circles; critics argue it gives too much credit to governments and not enough to entrepreneurs. But its t
hesis is indisputable—the foundation for the most prominent technological products are often laid by the state as they require immense funding that only such large institutions are capable of. You’ll find many examples of this throughout the book, whether it’s the British navy ponying up for wireless comms systems for their fleet; CERN fostering innovations, from the web to touchscreens; or DARPA investing in artificially intelligent assistants.

  Equally indispensable was Mark E. Lemley’s “The Myth of the Sole Inventor,” a paper published in the Michigan Law Review in 2012. Lemley is an esteemed patent lawyer, and the case he makes—that inventions occur both collaboratively and simultaneously, that ideas are “in the air”—is a central concept of this book. No one inventor should be credited with, nor is a single inventor capable of, crafting such an influential device. For the teardown section, I traveled to San Luis Obispo, California, where iFixit’s headquarters have been refashioned from an old car dealership. In addition to my guided teardown with Andrew Goldberg, I interviewed iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens and a couple of other members of the team.

  1. A Smarter Phone

  To explore the roots of the smartphone, both as a concept and as a piece of convergence technology, I spoke to a number of technology historians, industry vets, and science-fiction experts. These include Chris Garcia, curator of the Computer History Museum in Palo Alto; Matt Novak of Paleofuture; and Gerry Canavan, a professor of literature who specializes in science fiction at the University of Marquette. Kristina Woolsey, the onetime director of Apple’s Multimedia Lab, and Fabrice Florin, a former executive producer at Apple, provided context.

  Herbert Casson’s The History of the Telephone—published in 1910 and available to read for free on iBooks—was a fascinating look at telephony from the same perspective we have of the iPhone today, a decade or so after its popularization. Carolyn Marvin’s When Old Technologies Were New provided context about the dawn of the electric age. Agar’s Constant Touch was a reference on the evolution of mobile technologies. Albert Robida’s The Twentieth Century is a portentous look at how audiovisual technologies might evolve. Other sources include “As We May Think” by Vannevar Bush, which imagines the future of human knowledge augmentation and the memex; J.C.R. Licklider’s Man-Computer Symbiosis, which half predicted the iPhone through a skewed lens; Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics, which outlines the ways that a computer control system can influence lives; and Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg’s Personal Dynamic Media, which outlined a vision for personal computing that would set the enduring standard.

  The core of the chapter is Frank Canova, who was kind enough to demo the original Simon for me and whom I interviewed at his office in Santa Clara.

  2. Minephones

  My visit to Cerro Rico was conducted through a local mine-tour company, which hosted my fixer and me on a personal expedition. We spoke to the miners we encountered on the site and a local colectivo boss who arranges distribution to smelters, and I interviewed former miners like Ifran Manene. He, among others, confirmed that ore from Cerro Rico was sent to the smelters listed by Apple. The top industry trade group, ITRI, confirmed the flow of tin from Potosí to Apple smelters.

  Investigations into the mining practices fueling the tech trade have been carried out by the Washington Post, the Guardian, the BBC, and many other organizations, and their invaluable work informed this chapter. BBC Future reporter Tim Maughan provided crucial insight about the rare earth extraction site in Baotou. My former colleague Wes Enzinna’s “Unaccompanied Miners” piece for Vice magazine, about the child-mining epidemic in Bolivia, was a valuable source of reportage as well. NPR’s segment “Thousands of Children as Young as 6 Work in Bolivia’s Mines” confirms the age statistic.

  David Michaud, the metallurgist who runs 911 Metallurgist, a mining consultancy, arranged to have my iPhone 6 pulverized and analyzed by chemical scientists and prepared a report about the results. We will publish those results concurrently with the book. Michaud was also interviewed about the results. The calculations are his, and drawn from available data about mining operations that can be considered industry standard—not the mines Apple gets its minerals from in particular, most of which are undisclosed. He also notes that the “20.5 grams of cyanide” figure “depends on the source of gold. This is an average number. It may vary from 5 to 60 grams.”

  Figures and information about mining and pollution were drawn from the EPA, the World Bank, and UNICEF. The journalist Elizabeth Woyke’s The Smartphone: An Anatomy of an Industry provided a good overview of the raw materials that make the technology possible. Jack Weatherford’s book Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World, provided context about the history of Potosí and its indigenous population.

  3. Scratchproof

  The story of how Corning came to make the iPhone’s glass was mentioned in Isaacson’s Steve Jobs, detailed in Fred Vogelstein’s Dogfight, and further fleshed out in Bryan Gardiner’s excellent Wired cover story “Glass Works.” Gardiner was kind enough to sit for a phone interview and supply further details. The quotes from Corning’s Kentucky plant workers come from a 2012 NPR story called “Small Kentucky Town Makes High-Tech Glass Amid Bucolic Farmland.” Further information came from Daniel Gross and Davis Dyer’s The Generations of Corning, a history of the company that includes details about the Project Muscle and Pyroceram programs. Finally, Corning’s vision for a world filled with glass products was detailed in its bit of design fiction, A Day Made of Glass, a video released in 2012.

  4. Multitouched

  An entire book could and should be written about the history of touch technology. I interviewed Bill Buxton, the pioneer who used the term in a paper he published at the University of Toronto in 1984. His compendium of touch technologies, “Multi-Touch Systems I Have Known and Loved,” is one of the best resources on the topic anywhere. I also reviewed the patents for E. A. Johnson’s first touchscreen, the early CERN yellow papers, as well as Apple and FingerWorks’ patents. I traveled to CERN and interviewed Bent Stumpe and David Mazur, and a number of other current employees of the consortium. Stumpe gave me one of the earliest touch screens he prototyped—capable, he says, of multitouch.

  I explored the work of the early synthesizer pioneers and listened to a lot of theremin and piano duets performed by Clara Rockmore and Sergey Rachmaninoff. James C. Worthy’s biography of William Norris, Portrait of a Maverick, provided details about CDC and Norris’s decades-long advocacy of touch technologies.

  To get to the heart of Wayne Westerman’s story—Apple wouldn’t make him available for an interview—I interviewed Ellen Hoerle, his older sister and only living nuclear-family member. Wayne’s vividly written 1999 dissertation on multi-finger gestures was essential to this chapter, and surprisingly fun to read. I plumbed early interviews with his alma mater’s newspaper, the New York Times, and the News Journal, which are where any quotes attributed to him originate. Jeff White, the erstwhile FingerWorks CEO, gave an interview to Technical.ly/Philly, which quotes are drawn from.

  As a nontouch aside, it’s also worth noting that Tim Berners-Lee built the World Wide Web using a NeXT Cube—the computer made by the company Steve Jobs founded after getting fired from Apple.

  5. Lion Batteries

  SQM organized the tour of their facility in Atacama and allowed us to stay on-site so that we could visit both Salar de Atacama, where the lithium is harvested, and Salar de Carmen, where it is refined and prepared for distribution (I paid for the travel and the rest of the lodgings). Enrique Pena, the evaporation ponds superintendent, was interviewed about the process, and additional details came from Claudio Uribe. David Michaud provided context. Data about the amount of lithium sold was supplied by SQM. I also traveled to Salar de Uyuni, the largest lithium deposit in the world, in nearby Bolivia, but development has not yet begun seriously there and those adventures will have to wait for another story.

  For historical context about the history of the lithium-ion battery, I interviewed Stan Wh
ittingham and John Goodenough, the two godfathers of lithium-ion-battery technology. Steve LeVine’s The Powerhouse provides a nice history of the modern battery, and information drawn from the earlier chapters especially informs my own on the topic. New Scientist’s story about the Unknown Fields expedition to Bolivia, “Lithium Dreams,” was another valuable resource.

  6. Image Stabilization

  When I was looking for an iPhone photographer to follow, I hoped to find someone who’d gotten an early jolt in his or her career thanks to opportunities provided by the device and whose photos uniquely reflected the new style of shooting. David Luraschi was perfect. Interviews with Brett Bilbrey (over phone and email) and Dr. Oshima (via email) helped me understand the advances in camera technology that led to the modern smartphone camera. Some additional quotes are drawn from a previous interview with Oshima archived at the Japan Patent Office. A 60 Minutes story about Apple’s camera factory provided the figures and data about the company’s current camera operations.