The Origin of the iPhone: Part Two

and we're looking at the origin of the iPhone. As it turns out, it is a complicated story, and it was so complicated that it warranted two episodes rather than one super long episode. And in the last one, I talked about the earliest stages of the iPhone project at Apple, and as I pointed out, it's surprisingly long. I left off with the earliest phases of the two groups that were competing against one another internally to develop the Apple phone, and those two groups were known as P one and

P two among a very few select Apple employees. Most people didn't even know what was going on. But those two groups were each trying to create a phone Apple can market as a consumer product, and they took very different approaches. The P one group, which was led by Tony Fidel, was looking to make a souped up iPod with phone capabilities. The other group, P two, that had Scott Forestall and the next Mafia, was trying to create a pocket sized Mac computer that could also act as

a phone. In both cases, you could argue that the phone thing was an add on and iPod and I'll add on and P one and a Mac add on with P two. Now, most of the engineers and these two groups were really really too busy with work to worry about the other group. But when you get to the executive level, there were some pretty notable clashes between them, and it got really ugly at some points, and and

kind of petty and brutal. Some executives ended up quitting, some got fired, and they were often sniping at one another, and it was kind of like again, a kind of like a soap opera. Meanwhile, the work had to carry on. The project had developed a code name at that point. It was called purple. No one's really sure why. There was some debate that it perhaps was referring to the color of a particular toy one of the developers had, because it represented an internal process at Apple, but no

one's really sure. It's kind of grasping at straws, but the name was Purple. Now keep in mind, at this stage, which is around two thousand five or so, the project was so secret that only a few people in Apple were even aware of it, and other employees at Apple were left to wonder what the heck happened to their coworkers.

So it's seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth. Now, those co workers were still at Apple, those most of them were still at Apple anyway, but they were sequestered in other parts of the office complex behind heavy security,

working slavishly long hours. And those hours were so long, and the work was so hard that team leaders had taken to renting hotel rooms to allow employees to have a place to crash, because they were worried that otherwise people might fall asleep behind the wheel of a car due to exhaustion. And honestly, the deadlines that Steve Jobs was setting were so aggressive that there was really no time to actually, you know, go home and stuff. Now,

that obviously put a big strain on employees. There was one employee who described it as a soup of misery at times. This was an employee who talked to Brian Merchant, the author of the One Device, which, as I mentioned in Part one of the series, served as my primary source for much of this information. You should really check out that book if want to dive super super deep on the iPhone. I mean, it goes into way more detail than what I am talking about here, and I'm

being pretty thorough. Now, not only was this whole situation really stressful, there was also this general feeling that the iPhone was a make or break situation for Apple the company, that the future of the company itself rested on the outcome of this project. Now, at least one Apple employees cited the development process as the reason for his divorce. The phone was really taking its toll even though long distance calls at that point, we're toll free. It's a

terrible joke, but I had to make it. Not jump back to the design of the phone itself. Now, not only were teams looking at physical formats, they also had to define the look of everything on the phone, and part of that was this concept of widgets. Uh Imron Schaudry was working on that team. He had helped develop widgets for the mac Os dashboard feature, and he was

invited to join the iPhone project. He began to design widgets for the iPhone user interface, and Chaudry and fellow designer Freddie and Zeroes were responsible for widget design, and the story goes that they developed almost all of them over the course of a single night. This was because Steve Jobs wanted to see designs right away and gave them a super tight deadline. He essentially said, have something on my desk tomorrow. So they stayed up and they

worked all night long trying to design these things. Typically, you would spend weeks designing something like a widget appearance, and you would do lots of testing of different options to find out which was the most appealing and user friendly. But that just wasn't an option. So the two of them worked throughout the night, and the following day they showed their widget designs to Jobs, and Jobs loved them, and so those initial designs essentially became the icons that

you would find on the iPhone at its launch. So just think those icons at launch. Those were designed by two guys frantically putting them together there over the course of a few hours before they had to show it off to Steve Jobs. It's pretty remarkable. Again, nothing was set in Stone at this time, and one of the decisions the team had to make was how the icons would appear on the screen when you booted up the phone.

So they considered several different options, such as having all the icons appear alphabetically in a list format, which then you would be able to scroll through and choose, but they thought it made more sense to create a grid based system on the phone, and then you would just lock icons to that grid so that they would be evenly spaced from each other and look very neat and organized.

Now it's funny to think that this was just one of several options, because now practically all smartphones follow that same feature, But at the time that was just a design decision that they had to make. It could have gone a different way, and it's possible that if they had gone a different way, maybe other companies would have followed suit and we wouldn't have had this grid approach to most smartphone u i's. Now. At this stage, the ZIGN team did not have any prototype hardware. They were

still designing stuff on Mac computers. They would confine their designs to match dimensions that would fit what they thought the iPhones dimensions would be, so they were working from general rules of the iPhone size was going to be like a three and a half inch screen, for example, So they would create a border on max to say, all right, everything has to fit within this border, and they would design their user interface on a computer to

be within that border. While they were waiting on testing out all this stuff, they even went so far as to fabricate wooden iPhone frames. They hadn't even settled on what the physical design of the phone was at this point, but they created wooden frames to hold up to their computer screens so that they could look at the size of the various icons and determine if they needed to be larger or smaller, which is pretty wild, I think so. By February two tho five, if Steve Jobs was starting

to get really antsy. He wanted to see some results from this project he had given the go ahead for. And now remember he had only said okay to this back in November two thousand four. February two thousand five is not that long from November two thousand four. But he was starting to say, I'm not seeing anything coherent here. I'm seeing a lot of individual ideas and concepts, but nothing that connects all these different things together as a cohesive experience. I I need to have more than that.

I can't just see like a rubber banding effect or a momentum effect in scrolling or widget design. I need to see how they all fit together as an experience. Now, this was specifically toward the Human Interface team, not everybody. So the Human Interface team got an ultimatum which was produced a coherent demonstration of the interface within two weeks, and that began what Greg Christie, who was leading the

Human Interface team, called the two week death March. Engineers were working long hours, most of them were not getting any sleep. They were trying to put together this demonstration that would incorporate numerous concepts and features into a single experience. And keep in mind that this was again just the interface. This didn't include the operating system or the hardware. This was just supposed to be the user experience. Other teams were working on and competing with each other for those

other pieces of the iPhone story. So this was just the way you would interact with the phone if you were using it, and it put an enormous stress on the team, and several people were totally sidelined with exhaustion and stress, but they got the demo together and in two weeks they showed it off to Steve Jobs, and

Steve Jobs was happy. He liked it. He liked it so much he actually asked them to run through the whole demo a second time, which they did, and this was exactly what Steve Jobs needed to see in order to really throw his full support behind the phone project. And he also increased security on the project again, so at every stage he demanded even more secrecy, and he really wanted to surprise people, and he wanted to do

it in two waves. He first wanted to surprise people within Apple and show them this amazing project, but no one really knew was happening outside of the project itself. And then when the time was right, he wanted to surprise the world with this new idea. But until that time he didn't want anyone to know anything about it.

Over on the operating side of things, there was a guy named Richard Williamson who was really hard at work on the iPhone side, the software operating system side, and he had been on the verge of actually leaving Apple entirely, and that ticked off Steve Jobs quite a bit because Williamson was a very valuable asset for Apple, but he was getting restless. See, Williamson had worked for Next way back in the day. He came over to Apple when

Apple acquired Next. He and he had developed the WebKit framework. Now that's the framework that power is the Safari web browser. And this was an open source tool, which for Apple was totally unusual. If you're familiar with Apple products, you know, the phrase open source doesn't come up that often. They like to lock things down and be very proprietary with their approaches, so much so that when the iPhone launched, it had proprietary types of screws that you needed a

special tool called a pinto labe to open. So having an open source kit, the web kit, the thing that fueled Safari, was really out of the norm and it was a powerful tool. It was so powerful that Google actually used it to power Google Chrome until about two thout. Well, Williamson wanted to kind of get away from WebKit. He wanted to work on something new. He did not want his career to involve perpetually updating and maintaining the same

software that he had invented years earlier. The iPhone ended up being the project that convinced him to stay on with Apple, and he lent his consider herble talents to the software and OS side of that project. Now, Jobs decided that the next step was to clue in some of the executives at Apple at one of their Top one events. Now these are internal meetings at Apple. They were similar in structure and tone to the big public

marketing events that Apple holds throughout the year. So if you've ever watched one of those, any sort of Apple presentation where there's an executive up there talking about their products, it's that same sort of thing, only this was for executives inside the company, not anyone outside of it. And even this presentation was just for executives. The rank and file Apple employees were to remain unaware of the phone

project on an official capacity. Jobs gave the HI department until May two thousand five to work up a full demo of the interface for these executives. So remember February two thousand five was when they were put through those two weeks of torture. They they show the demo to

Steve Jobs. He loves and he's like, all right, now make an even bigger one for May, and you didn't even get a chance to relish in the victory of creating a demo that made Steve Jobs happy, you had to go back and make an even bigger demo for this top one event, which they did, and while it was hard to do, they made the demo. It went over like Gangbusters, and it was clear that Apple was onto something, but they still had a long way to go before they had an actual product, because this was

still conceptual stuff at this stage. It was talking about the way it would interface, but they didn't have an actual physical device yet, and the battles between P one and P two were still raging, with Fidel and Forestall growing increasingly irritated at each other. Some folks over on Forestall's team would even start to refer to Tony Fidel not as the pod father, the guy who oversaw the development and launch of the iPod. They started calling him

Tony Malogney, the cut deep at Apple folks. So the employees were calling him Tony Malogney because they said that Fidel had this habit of overstating his role in developing products like the iPod and the iPhone, and they said he was a really strong manager and he definitely had a reputation for going toe to toe with Steve Jobs. He was one of the few people who would stand up to Steve Jobs and yell right back at him

and keep his job in the process. But a lot of employees were asserting that Fidel was just he wasn't in the trenches the way a lot of the engineers were. Whether that's true or not is not for me to say. I don't know, But there were definitely employees who resented the credit that Fidel seemed to take for his role in these operations, and they seemed to feel that it wasn't entirely deserved. Now, Fidel's team did end up making

some working prototypes of their iPod based phone. They relied on those click wheels I was talking about the click wheels of the original iPod design, and the interface was more than a little clunky, but they actually worked as phones. They were able to make calls with each other. So the very first phone calls made on an official but unreleased piece of Apple hardware happened to be on those prototypes. Now, those would never see the light of day as consumer products,

but they did actually work. But everyone, particularly Steve Jobs, felt that they weren't the right product for the consumer market. Some of that hardware would find its way onto the iPhone, though, while the official iPhone would end up following the P two design philosophy of adopting that Mac os into a phone form factor, and and the actual use of it would be more on the P two side, the hardware that the phone was using to make calls came from that P one group. The actual uh you know, radio

frequency chips that all came from P one. And so while there were two competing teams with an Apple to build a phone, ultimately both of them contributed to the actual finished product. I've got a lot more to say about this, but before I make another deep breath and launch it to yet another tirade, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Meanwhile, you had the P two team who were still struggling to create a scaled

down version of their approach. You know, they were running everything off of Mac os is, and they needed our actual Mac computers. They needed to create something that could work in a phone size. They showed off their ideas on the computers and then they had to figure out how are they going to port that experience into a handheld device, and this was a huge challenge. Now they mostly focused on that and not the phone elements of

the device. Many on the P two side felt the phone feature was more of an add on really, and the interesting part of the challenge was creating a pocket sized computer with a touch interface. The Fidel team was using Lennox as its operating system, and this had limitations,

but it was really really fast to boot up. So four stalls team was trying to adapt Mac os and put it on a handheld device, and they found that boot times were way longer, and that became a problem because you want something that's gonna pop on pretty quickly, and it became another area of focus. If the team couldn't solve that problem, their project would be just as

doomed as those iPod phones were. Meanwhile, the hardware team began looking at other elements to add into the phone to give it more functionality, and that included things like an accelerometer so it could detect changes in orientation, which would allow the phone to switch between portrait and landscape modes. Also included an infrared light sensor, which the phone would use to detect when someone was lifting the phone to

their face. The goal here was to both conserve battery life by dimming the screen whenever the phone came up to your ear, and also cut down on the possibility of an erroneous touch command. It would turn off the touch screen because otherwise, if you put the phone up to your face, you know your skin is gonna activate that capacity of touch screen and you're gonna start putting in weird commands left and right, and that's no good

if you want to have a working phone. Remember, a capacity of touch screens rely upon changes in capacitance on along that really changes in uh electric potential when you get down to it across the screen and your points of contact or what allow that to happen. So by turning that off, you could actually put this up against your face and not have it activate that early inference sensor also had a problem detecting dark hair and skin, which was a bit of a pr nightmare for Apple

back in the day. There's also an ambient light sensor designed to guide the iPhone into dynamically changing screen brightness, primarily again as a strategy to conserve battery life, will also improving the user experience. Now, all of this work continued for more than two years. The full development time of the iPhone, generally speaking, was two and a half years. It's two and a half years of people working practically around the clock in full secrecy, not able to tell

anybody what they were working on. You know, they had to agree to work on it without even knowing what they were agreeing to, and then coming up with these solutions to very tough challenges. Shrinking down the technology to allow for multi touch touch screen ability, Creating the framework to allow an operating system like mac os to work on a handheld device, making sure that you design widgets that are operable on that operating system. Creating the user

interface that is compelling and intuitive. All of these were monumental challenges, and most of them, again from the software side, came out of that P two group, with the P one group providing very valuable hardware support. It was an incredible time at Apple, and it's remarkable that the phone was even able to emerge out of this. You think about all of those challenges. If any of them had

been too difficult for the team, there's no iPhone. If any group had dissolved because of these sorts of clashes that were going with an Apple, there's no iPhone. If Steve Jobs had lost confidence in this project, and there were plenty of opportunities for that to happen, there's no iPhone. So the fact that all of those pieces fell into place, it's incredibly remarkable to me. So designs continued to be proposed, tested, tweaked, or discarded, and the process was repeated over and over.

Secrecy remained over the entire team over time for stalls, team was able to show that the Mac os pro approach was viable, but it took a huge amount of hard work to pull it all off, and eventually they

had it. They shrunk it down, they had a touchscreen interface, they had the scale down but functional computer OS on a handheld device, and they had cellular connectivity, all fitting within the frame of an iPhone designed by Johnny I've the actual appearance of the device itself, and as two thousand seven approached, Apple prepared to unveil their super secret

project to the rest of the world. Now that unveiling date when they announced the iPhone to the world was January nine, two thousand seven, and it took place during the now defunct Macworld event in San Francisco. Steve Jobs took the stage with the goal of shocking the audience, and you can watch this performance. There are plenty of videos on YouTube that capture either part of or the entirety of Steve Jobs presentation, and he was really coy at first. He said that Apple had in the past

revolutionized technology a couple of different times. In he says, they launched the Macintosh computer and that changed home computing with the introduction developments like the graphic user interface and the mouse, which I point out Apple did not invent. The graphic user interface and the mouse were both in use at the Xerox Park Research and Development Center years before the Macintosh became a thing. But Apple was the company that was able to introduce them successfully into the

consumer market. And really that's what matters is that they were able to make it work as a consumer product. Other people made it work first, like as an actually technologically it could work, but Apple was the one that could turn it into something you could sell to people. Then Jobs went on to point out that in two thousand one they launched the iPod and that marked another technological revolution. And again Apple did not invent the MP

three player. They didn't even invent the portable MP three player, but honestly, before the iPod came out, very few people were using portable MP three players. In fact, more people were burning MP three's two C D and then using a portable CD player to listen to MP three's, which was not the most efficient way of doing things. It was iPod and the iTunes software suite that took the world by storm, particularly once iTunes was Windows compatible, and

it ultimately caused the music industry to change. As a result, Apple had become a global player in the music industry, acting as the storefront for all the major record labels and attracting a new user base and a new form of revenue. Job said that he was ready to unveil three products at that Macworld that would also revolutionized technology. The first was a wide screen iPod with touch interface, which the crowd said yea. The second was a phone, and the crowd went bananas. And the third was an

Internet communications device, and the crowd went mild. But then he repeated those three things a few times, you know, wide screen iPod, a phone, and the Internet communications device. He does this two or three times, scrolling through those icons very quickly, and he was teasing the audience, and they started to pick up on it, and then they started applauding, and Job says, get it. And of course he was talking about one single device that was all

three of those things at the same time. It was an Apple phone that incorporated iPod capabilities and Internet capabilities all in one, and that really got the crowd going. Then Jobs poked the audience again and he said, here's what it looks like, and he showed an image that he claimed was the iPhone, but it was a joke.

There was a photoshopped iPod with a rotary dial instead of the click wheel, and it had a monochromatic screen with the iPod classic style of it, and contacts were listed on it the way you would have song titles listed on a classic iPod. And this got a big laugh. But perhaps the really funny thing is that that could have been the iPhone. Tony Fadell's team was essentially working

on that exact same idea. I mean, it wasn't gonna look precisely like that, but that was the basis for the iPod version of the iPhone, and here it was being used in a keynote presentation as a joke. So I think that was a bit of a disk to Fidel and a little bit of a nod to Forestall on his team as far as the strategies go, kind of saying to P two, like you guys had it right. P one was that was whackadoodle crazy, just wasn't gonna work.

That's how I interpret it. I have no idea how anyone connected to the projects interpreted it at the time, but Steve Jobs spent more than an hour going through the phone's features in front of an appreciative audience, and as soon as he had said the word phone, he had them eating out of his hand. I encourage you to watch that presentation. Like I said, it's available on YouTube and you can listen to the crowd's response. Once

Jobs says the word phone, they really do go completely bonkers. Now, before showing off what the iPhone really looked like, Jobs spent some time talking about the state of the art and smartphones as it stood in two thousand seven. Now, keep in mind, smartphones in two thousand seven, we're not really a consumer device. They were mostly reserved for again executives.

So like the Blackberries, anyone who was a CEO had a BlackBerry because it was a convenient device where you could get email, communication and other types of communication that used secure servers, so you were pretty sure that your communications would remain private. They weren't going to get hacked out there. So it was a popular device. And then you had some bleeding edge technology folks, people who had a lot of disposable income, who would buy anything that

was really cool and technological in their eyes. But for your average person, smartphones just weren't a thing. And Jobs was taking them to task and explaining why they were not really good consumer devices. He criticized the fact that they had physical keyboards. He said that that was a big thing. He took up of the landscape on the front of the phone. That was just a number. He threw out in some cases, maybe more than some cases, maybe a little less, but it did take up landscape

on the front of the phones. And he said, the problem is the buttons are there whether you need them or not. Sometimes you don't need the buttons, but they're still there because it's part of the physical format of the phone. You can't get rid of them. He also pointed out that the physical keyboard represents a fixed interface you couldn't tweak it or add to that interface. Once

you manufactured the phones, they were set. You couldn't add a button or change a button the tracking device, whether it was a rollerball or buttons or whatever it might be, it can't morph into anything else. And so you're forcing app developers and software developers to create stuff that works to the physical format of the device, not something that's adaptable. And that's how he justified and sold the audience on a touch screen only interface, because now you would have

all the buttons displayed on a screen. The iPhone would only have virtual buttons. They can change into whatever you need based upon whatever function you're trying to execute, which it means it has an instant and in finite customization in a non fixed format. The only static button on the face of that original iPhone was the home button,

at least on the face of it. There were other physical buttons, including the volume up and down and the power buttons, but those were on the side of the device, not on the face of the device. And Jobs also dismissed the concept of using a stylus as an interface device, which would kind of come back and haunt the company when the a later version of the iPad would come out with the stylist device for it, but Job said that,

you know, the stylist is irritating. He teased the audience into thinking that perhaps the iPhone would launch with the stylist, but then he said, now you don't really want that because you have to take it out, you have to put it back. It's really easy to lose it. And so he decided that they would just go with a touchscreen interface that would just use your fingers. Now. He also went on to say that smartphones, the ones that preceded the iPhone, were not that great at what they

were supposed to do. He said, you know, you get a smartphone not just to make calls, but to browse the web, to respond to emails, maybe look at photos, that kind of thing. And he said that smartphones just weren't very good at that, not the ones before the iPhone. He said, you could view phones along two axes. Along one axis is or access, I should say, is how smart the phone is. Along the other axis is how

easy is it to use? And he argued, you know, cellphones are dumb, so they they're on the bottom of that axis, they're they're dumb. They're not smart, but they're about the middle of the road as far as ease of use goes. He doesn't provide any arguments to really support this and say why the cell phone is perhaps harder to use than say an iPhone, but you know, he he establishes, or at least he asserts that cell phones are kind of right in the medium of ease

of use. And then he said, smartphones are kind of smart, but they are limited in that smartness. They aren't a will to do everything that you would want them to be able to do, and they are also really difficult to use. They're not intuitive, they're not easy for people to just pick up and understand. But the iPhone, he says, it's very smart and very easy to use, and then he would go on to explain why. But before I talk about that, let's take another quick break to thank

our sponsor. So one of the features Jobs talked about in that presentation was one that I think a lot of people forget about these days because it's no longer a necessary step. But in that original iPhone, you had to do something that you used to do with iPods as well, which is that you had to sink them with a computer that was running iTunes. There was no sinking over the air. You had to actually connect it

to a computer. So you would use iTunes to load in things like your contacts and your photos and then you could in them over to your phone. But you couldn't just do that over the air, so you had to actually put it in a docking station connected to your computer and then you could have the connection between the two. Uh, this would allow you to also sink

things like emails and your calendar and that sort of stuff. Now, Steve Jobs went through and started showing off lots of features on the phone, mostly to the delight of the crowd. There are a few that kind of nothing, nothing fell completely flat. But there were a few that only had, like you know, a small amount of appreciation shown by the crowd, But a lot of them got some pretty

sizable response. For example, one of the ones that got a big response was the resize feature of images that whole pinch and to zoom, although you're not really pinching to zoom, you're pinching to shrink. But the pinch to re size photos that gesture got a big reaction. Because multi touch was not really something that had found its way into a lot of consumer technology at this point.

So to see a phone where you could use two fingers on the phone simultaneously and use a gesture to make a meaningful command happen, it was a big deal. And so seeing this simple gesture of resizing an image by moving your fingers apart or bringing them together got a big reaction from the crowd. He also showed off the fact that you could turn the phone ninety degrees and change it from portrait to landscape, and that the

phone would detect that and make that change automatically. He showed off the iPod features because again this was a big thing when the iPhone first launched. The iPod was one of those really important cornerstones of the iPhones abilities. Now today we think of all the different apps that you can get on the iPhone, but this is before the app store had been created. The app store would not be a thing for another year. So the iPod was one of the really big features that Steve Jobs

had to push when the iPhone first launched. So he showed off things like cover flow, the fact that your phone could actually show all those cover albums. You could zoom through it just like you could on the iTunes application on your Mac, but now it was on your phone. This is before it was available on things like the iPod line. And he even played some music during that presentation, including some songs by the Beatles, by Green Day, by Bob Dylan, and by my favorite of all the ones

he chose, the Talking Heads. Good choice, Deep Jobs. I also really like the talking Heads now. He also showed how you can make calls with the iPhone, arguably a very important feature in something called a phone, but he showed that the the the contact list was easy to navigate, easy for you to activate a phone call. It also showed off that the iPhone had contextual recognition of phone numbers.

He had been they would show off at Google Maps, which was one of the more important launch partners with the iPhone. He even had Eric Schmidt of Google at the time come out and talk about Google's involvement with

partnering with Apple on this. He also had Yahoo come out because Yahoo was doing a really important push notification initiative with Apple when the iPhone launched, and in Google Maps, Steve Jobs showed off a function where he pulled up the Moscony Center, which is where the event was taking place and did a search for Starbucks, and it populated the map with Starbucks that were in the area, and he clicked on one and the phone number was included and he was able to make a call to that

Starbucks right away, where then he asked for three thousand lattes and then said sorry, wrong number and hung up on them. And it was an actual Starbucks employee, and it was both hilarious and I kind of wonder what that employe's day was like, Like, did they eventually find out that you were the one who talked to Steve Jobs who was demonstrating the iPhones calling ability publicly for the first time ever? That person is now a part of history and we don't even know their name, or

at least I don't. I'm sure someone does. I actually didn't think to research that when I was looking this up, so I say it very cavalier like when I say, and we don't even know her name. Uh. But that's partly because I didn't look it up. That's my bad, guys, that's on me. Let's tell you on me. But he also showed other integrations of widgets, including like the weather widget, a stocks in it uh widget, and when he pulled

out the stocks. Apple stock happened to be up while other tech stocks were down, so that led to some witty banter with the audience. And again this was all before the App Store, so there were only a few apps that were actually packaged with the iPhone or widgets

as they were calling them. Meanwhile, backstage, while Steve Jobs is up on stage presenting to the crowd, backstage you had the various departments and teams who were responsible for all of these different features, from the interface to the widget implementation to phone calls. Every single team had representatives backstage,

and they were all flipping out. They were all so on edge, so stressed out because they were all nervous about any sort of glitches or crashes that could happen, and partly because during the development process they kept running

into stability issues. I mean, they were all working on individual elements, and then when you bring all those elements together, then often that creates stability problems because as one group is really focused on their part of the overall picture, they don't necessarily know how their features are going to

impact other really important elements of that same product. So if you've got different divisions working on very important features within the same product, and then you put them all together, you're gonna find some stuff that doesn't work together so well. And it meant that there was a lot of q A work to correct that. And actually on stage it turned out Steve Jobs was using lots of different phones. He wasn't using just one phone to show all this off.

It looked like he was, but the phone the phones were sitting on a lectern at one end of the stage and the electron was turned at an angle so that you could not see that there were multiple phones on the lectern. And Steve Jobs was following a very specific script and it meant picking up particular phones to show off particular features. And after he was done showing

off the feature, he would set the phone down. He would go back out to center stage, show a couple of slides, talk a little bit more before going on to the next feature to show another demo where he would pick up the next phone. And each phone had been queued up for its specific feature so that it would minimize the possibility of the phone crashing because of some had ability issue between these various features. So it's

a little sneaky. There's a little shell game going on with him showing off different phones, but they wanted to guarantee as best they could an excellent demonstration. They were so concerned with the perception of this brand new device, and they were positioning themselves as a Maverick company redefining the phone space, so they couldn't really afford to have a disaster happen on stage. And trust me, those kind of disasters happen all the time in these product demonstrations.

So backstage you have these teams. They're all flipping out. They're watching very carefully. They're all hoping that Steve remembers to pick up the correct phone to show off each individual demo. They really hope he doesn't put the phones down in the wrong order so that he doesn't know

which one to pick up for the next bit. They're all concerned about this, and so to to let off some steam, the team leaders decide it upon a drinking game, and the rules of the drinking game were this, whenever Steve Jobs would talk about a piece of the iPhone that your team was in charge of, you took a shot. Some of those team leaders oversaw multiple departments and they got what I like to call totes tore up y'all. They were seeing little iPhones dancing around their heads by

the end of that presentation. Some of them were pretty deep in their cups by the end. Now, the demo actually ended with Jobs showing off multiple functions in one demonstration, so this was really the moment where it all could have fallen apart. He was using the music app to play music and then he makes a phone call and it pauses the music, and he just wanted to make sure that all of these different features were going to be demonstrated as seamless, and everyone backstage was just holding

their breath the whole time. But it worked and the crowd loved it. According to the t SAM, this was the first time they ever saw all those features working together without the system crashing, which is crazy to see the first success in a public demonstration. That is beyond insane. You don't do that typically. You make absolutely certain that you give every chance of success before you go out there and show it off in public. But it worked,

so it paid off. In one demo, Jobs showed off the delete function and contacts and he swiped on the contact to knock it away. And this was an interesting moment because the contact he swiped to delete was Tony Baloney Fidel, which might have been foreshadowing, as Fidel was kind of on his way out of the company. Now, don't go crying for a good old Tony. He did just fine. Tony Fidel would go on to found another little company called Nest, the smart thermostatic company, which Google

eventually acquired. Oh and Google, by the way, only had a role to play in the iPhone launch. Not only the Google end up acquiring Tony Fidel's company, Nest, Google also would eventually acquire Motorola. Remember that was the company that Apple had thought about acquiring back in two thousand three and then decided against it. Google actually did buy them, or at least part of the Motorola company, not that it went very far. Google will eventually acquire everything, it seems,

particularly now that it's alphabet now. The iPhone would not go on sale until June twenty nine, six months later, with a T and T as the partnered carrier in the United States. By November two thousand seven, just a couple of months after it started going on sale, Apple had sold one point four million iPhones. It was a

legitimate success. The original two models of the iPhone were a four gigabyte and an eight gigabyte model, and they were priced at four hundred dollars and five hundred, respectively. The App Store would not launch until July two thousand eight, and it launched along with the iPhone three G, which

was not the third generation iPhone despite its name. It was the second generation iPhone, but it was compatible with the three G cellular networks, so three G was available back in two thousand seven, but Steve Jobs's team had decided that they were going to stick with the Edge network service, which was slower data not less data throughput, I should say, so you would take would take longer to load up web pages under the Edge network than

the three gene network, but that became typical for Apple. They were always slow to jump on new technologies. They wanted to make sure that things were in good condition before they also joined suit, and they wanted to make sure that the user experience remained top notch. They had very high standards for what the user experience should be. They also held off on some other important features that you could find in other phones around that time, things

like GPS sensors. There was no GPS sensor in the original iPhone, and that frustrated some people, but most people were just blown away by how innovative the iPhone was compared to all the smartphones that came before it, and Apple really wanted to make sure that whatever experience they provided was good and that it wasn't going to kill the battery, because the more stuff you add, the more demand on the battery there is, and if the battery

drains in three hours, that's not a good experience. Now, that doesn't really touch on the fact that the A, T and T experience in those early iPhone days it was not fantastic, particularly in markets like San Francisco, where it became difficult to even complete a phone call. That would plague the iPhone early on in its days. But that's a story for a different time. Like I said, we'll eventually have to dive into that Apple A T and T relationship, but now is not the time to

do it. One thing I want to touch on before I go is that the iPhone has had a remarkable impact on the way we navigate the web and the way we consume content on the web, whether it's video, which also the first iPhone couldn't capture video That would come later, whether it's video or audio or web pages, whatever it may be. The iPhone had an immeasurable impact on the way we consume information on the web. And I can say that as someone who has worked in

web content since the days of the iPhone launch. I mean, I worked at How Stuff Works in February two thousand seven, so I've seen how this has changed over the years. We have seen transformations in the web space based upon mobile browsing. Before the iPhone, you didn't have to worry mobile browsing because it was a terrible experience, so no one was doing it. Everyone was using their laptops or desktops to navigate the web. No one was whipping out their phone and doing it at least not more than

a little, you know, distraction. And so your web design was all based on the laptop experience or the desktop experience. It wasn't based on mobile. That meant that things like advertising was based more on the laptop or desktop experience. But then mobile comes along and it's a completely different

way of uh engaging with web content. People began to optimize their experiences for phone delivery because while you could use something like an iPhone or later an Android phone to look at web pages in the desktop formats, and in some cases that's the preferable way of doing it because you get more features that way. It wasn't the easiest to navigate, so a lot of people began to

make optimized mobile device versions of their website. That changed the way that advertising is displayed, which in turn changes the way you monetize your web content. So just as Apple had really affected the music industry with a launch of the iPod, and it was incredibly disruptive, so too were they disruptive with the way the web delivers content

and the way the web generates revenue. And suddenly you had all these companies that had a pretty good handle on how web content and revenue would work thrown into the deep end. Everything the rules were changing overnight, and it meant that you had to come up with new strategies, which sometimes lead to terrible decisions, because when you're thrown into the deep end, you're you're grasping at anything, and sometimes the thing you grasp ends up not being a

great solution. It might be an anchor the striking you under the water instead of a life vest that will keep you afloat so the impact on the web in general, it is really hard to put into words because it was fundamentally an enormous transformation. And I can say that personally because I've seen it in my career, and so you might not really think of it as a user necessarily, or maybe you do, but many people don't really think

of it from a user perspective. You know, you're just you're just navigating to whatever website or web app or whatever it may be, on whatever device happens to be in your hands at the moment, whether it's a tablet computer, which Apple also was able to make a viable consumer product. Before the iPad, very few people owned a tablet computer as a consumer product. There were a few industries that

depended upon it, but very few consumers. Or if it's a smart device like a tell, a smartphone, or or some other like maybe a smart watch, whatever it may be, it really changed things in a big, big way. And

we're still seeing that play out. We still see companies struggling with ways to deal with that so that they're providing a good user experience but also able to monetize content, because once you get to a point where you can no longer do either of those things together, the web dies if people don't like the experience, they stopped using it,

and you don't make any money. If you can't figure out a good way to monetize it, you're not making any money, and you can't continue to create content because that costs money. So it's interesting because it's both a boon. It meant that you saw traffic numbers increase substantially across lots of different websites, but it's also a bit of a curse because you can't necessarily count on those numbers

to translate into something you can monetize easily. And it's been a really interesting experience to watch how that has played out over the last several years now. The iPhone itself, obviously, has continued to evolve and flourish after the debut of the iPhone, each success of iPhone adding more features and some of them getting much more advanced, some of them changing dramatically in the form factor, not so much that it's unrecognizable as an iPhone, but certainly changing quite a

bit from that original design. And I am very eager to see where it goes next. Even though I don't use an iPhone, I am not an iPhone user. I'm an Android, meaning I use Android. I am not a replicant. And if the tortoise were turned on its back, I would turn it over. I wouldn't just stand there and not turn it over. I don't care what the void comp says. Now. In the future, I'll probably do an episode where I go into more detail about the evolution

of the iPhone. We've talked about the origin, but what how did it change? What were the decisions, what were the battles that were fought within Apple as the iPhone developed into what it is today? How did it change? What Steve Jobs passed away? How much influence did Jobs have on the iPhone models that came out after his death? And at what point would you say this is the

first iPhone that was not influenced by Steve Jobs. Those are great questions, and I'm sure I'll answer them in a future episode, but for now, it's time to sign off. If you guys have any suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, whether it's a specific technology or a very specific product, or a person in tech, or just a concept in technology in general, let me know what you want to hear. You can do that by sending me an email. Unlike getting email,

it makes me feel important. The address is tech Stuff at how stuff ors dot com, or you can drop me a line on your favorite social media platform as long as that's either Facebook or Twitter, because that's where I'm at, and the handle you should use for both of those places is tech stuff H s W. And finally, you can watch me record this kind of stuff live

at twitch dot tv slash tech Stuff. I record every Wednesday and Friday, or most every Wednesday and Friday, and you can go to twitch dot tv slash text stuff to see the schedule there. And I'll talk to you again really soon