Speaker 1: Technology with tech Stuff from work dot com. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I am your host, Jonathan Strickland,
Speaker 1: senior writer for how stuff works dot com, the podcasting
Speaker 1: company extraordinaire. We're all grown up, y'all. I don't know
Speaker 1: if you saw the news, but yeah, how stuff Works
Speaker 1: has spun off. It is a podcasting company, and of
Speaker 1: course tech Stuff being one of the first of the
Speaker 1: podcasts to UH to launch way back in the day,
Speaker 1: one of the first three major podcasts out of How
Speaker 1: stuff Works. I thought today we could talk about something
Speaker 1: that's iconic in today's technology, the iPhone, And it's really
Speaker 1: a matter of timing. It's important to talk about the
Speaker 1: iPhone came out ten years ago as of the recording
Speaker 1: of this podcast. Anyway, if you're listening in the future,
Speaker 1: it was more than that. But at the time of
Speaker 1: the recording, we're talking about ten years since the iPhone
Speaker 1: came out, and we have the tenth anniversary iPhone coming
Speaker 1: out right around the corner. In fact, on September twelve, seventeen,
Speaker 1: Apple is going to unveil the tenth anniversary version of
Speaker 1: the iPhone, and by the time you listen to this,
Speaker 1: maybe that's already happened. I don't know when you've when
Speaker 1: you've subscribed, but this episode should publish before September, and
Speaker 1: I thought it would be a good idea to trace
Speaker 1: the history of the iPhone and talk about impact on
Speaker 1: technology and culture. So I was gonna do an episode
Speaker 1: that just kind of went through the evolution of the iPhone. However,
Speaker 1: something happened. I started researching, and when I really got
Speaker 1: into the origins of the iPhone, I realized that, holy cow,
Speaker 1: just that story, just the story of how the first
Speaker 1: iPhone came to be, is so incredible and so complicated
Speaker 1: it justified an entire episode. So I concentrated on that,
Speaker 1: and then I found out that, surprise, surprise, it was
Speaker 1: such a huge story that it's more than one episode.
Speaker 1: This is actually part one of a two part episode
Speaker 1: about the origins of the iPhone. So this story will continue.
Speaker 1: In the next episode of tech Stuff. We will conclude
Speaker 1: the story of the origin of the iPhone. I have
Speaker 1: a little bit to say about how the iPhone evolved
Speaker 1: in its impact on technology in general at the end
Speaker 1: of the next episode. But this story is bonkers, y'all. Now,
Speaker 1: before I get into it, I've got to give some
Speaker 1: credit out there, actually a lot of credit to a
Speaker 1: particular writer, Brian Merchant. Mr. Merchant is an editor over
Speaker 1: at Motherboard. That's one of the sites I love to visit.
Speaker 1: Motherboards a great site. And he's been published by gosh,
Speaker 1: just about everyone everywhere, and he has a book out
Speaker 1: now titled The One Device, The Secret History of the iPhone.
Speaker 1: And I used a lot of different sources when I
Speaker 1: was researching this episode, but I would say that that
Speaker 1: book was my primary source. It's incredible. It's got an
Speaker 1: enormous amount, an exhaustive amount, you might say, of information
Speaker 1: about the iPhone and its development, including things like details
Speaker 1: about the manufacturing process and the materials that go into
Speaker 1: the iPhone, so not just the story of how it
Speaker 1: was created, but the actual story of the stuff used
Speaker 1: to create it, the physical materials. I'm not going to
Speaker 1: dive into that part because it's outside the scope of
Speaker 1: what I wanted to talk about, But if you find
Speaker 1: this discussion at all interesting, I recommend you hunt down
Speaker 1: a copy of Brian Merchant's book again, that's uh, The
Speaker 1: One Device. Check that out because he goes into way
Speaker 1: more detail than I am going to go into. And
Speaker 1: I've got two episodes to talk about here. Now, the
Speaker 1: iPhone origin story is incredibly complex and there are a
Speaker 1: lot of different layers involved in it. It's a story
Speaker 1: of innovation, it's a story about advances in technology, but
Speaker 1: it's also a story about corporate politics and personality clashes
Speaker 1: and personal tragedy as it turns out. So this isn't
Speaker 1: a story about how some guy at Apple cobbled a
Speaker 1: phone together out of I don't know, shoe polish and dreams.
Speaker 1: The iPhone project involved dozens of people, sometimes working at
Speaker 1: cross purposes toward one another, So you had groups that
Speaker 1: were trying to compete with each other within Apple in
Speaker 1: order to produce this iPhone. And really it's it's very
Speaker 1: challenging to find a spot to begin, I mean, and
Speaker 1: that's because real history rarely has a clearly cut beginning
Speaker 1: or a middle. Really, the only thing that history has
Speaker 1: a clear cut defining feature is an end, because one
Speaker 1: day there will be an end to at least human history,
Speaker 1: I mean, the heat death of the universe pretty spells
Speaker 1: it out for us. But until that day, whenever it
Speaker 1: may be, it is hard to find a point where
Speaker 1: you can have a clear cut beginning it's we like
Speaker 1: our stories to have nice beginnings. That's just not the
Speaker 1: way real history works. So I thought it might be
Speaker 1: fun to go back and talk about an earlier mobile
Speaker 1: device Apple tried to launch in an effort to define
Speaker 1: a new era in computing, because I think it's a
Speaker 1: great way to compare and contrast the iPhone and I'm
Speaker 1: talking about the unfortunate Apple Newton. Now, the Apple Newton
Speaker 1: story is valuable because it illustrates how the iPhone project
Speaker 1: could have gone really wrong, and the story begins more
Speaker 1: than a decade before the iPhone project got the official
Speaker 1: nod from Steve Jobs. In fact, this story begins back
Speaker 1: when Steve Jobs wasn't even part of Apple. So if
Speaker 1: you've listened to my podcasts about Apple, you know that
Speaker 1: this is part of their story. A right that John Scully,
Speaker 1: who was brought into Apple to be their CEO, had
Speaker 1: progressively pushed Steve Jobs towards the outskirts of the company,
Speaker 1: both figuratively and literally, putting him in a remote part
Speaker 1: of the Apple campus and giving him fewer and fewer responsibilities.
Speaker 1: Jobs had alienated Scully, and he was notorious for his
Speaker 1: managerial style, which I think we could generously describe as difficult.
Speaker 1: So Jobs left Apple in nineteen five. Effectively he was
Speaker 1: forced out, and Scully turned his sites to finding a
Speaker 1: new product to transform the computing space. Now. Scully became
Speaker 1: enamored with this idea of a tablet like computing device
Speaker 1: that would rely upon artificial intelligence to help users navigate
Speaker 1: and complete tasks. And it was a really far out
Speaker 1: futuristic idea that would turn out to be a bit
Speaker 1: beyond the technological grasp of Apple or anyone else for
Speaker 1: that matter at that time, and it just couldn't take
Speaker 1: on a format that would be consumer ready, but it
Speaker 1: did set in motion the events that would lead to
Speaker 1: the Apple Newton. Scully's version of this device was called
Speaker 1: the Knowledge Navigator. Apple even created a concept video to
Speaker 1: show off what the Knowledge Navigator would one day be
Speaker 1: able to do, and you can find this on YouTube,
Speaker 1: and it's fascinating if you watch this. It is an
Speaker 1: amazing piece of of a video because it has a
Speaker 1: lot of prescience about where technology was going to be
Speaker 1: headed over the next couple of decades. It took a
Speaker 1: couple of decades to get there, but you can see
Speaker 1: ideas that are now becoming commonplace. In that concept video.
Speaker 1: The actual knowledge navigator in that video was like a magazine.
Speaker 1: It was actually a folded over computer. You could unfold
Speaker 1: it like you would a magazine as if you were
Speaker 1: opening it, and it had screens on both sides where
Speaker 1: images and show up. It could talk to you, so
Speaker 1: it had a voice capability, and it it had a
Speaker 1: touch screen and voice activation system, so you could either
Speaker 1: use touch commands or talk to it and make it
Speaker 1: do things like add in scheduling, UH conflicts or anything
Speaker 1: like that, or just schedule events on your calendar. You
Speaker 1: might hear a message and say, hey, put a note
Speaker 1: in my calendar surprise birthday party tomorrow. So it was
Speaker 1: really incredible because it incorporated features that later on we
Speaker 1: would see in actual real world devices like the iPad
Speaker 1: or things like Amazon's Echo or Google Home. But it
Speaker 1: was very much in that concept phase back in the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties. There was no way to really make this
Speaker 1: at that point. It was just sort of a dream
Speaker 1: that Scully had. He just wanted to see something akin
Speaker 1: to that. And one person who was brought over to
Speaker 1: Apple around this time who saw the potential in creating
Speaker 1: a handheld computing device was Jean Luis Gassy and I
Speaker 1: also talked about Jean Luis guess Ay in those Apple
Speaker 1: episodes I referred to earlier. Guess A worked with a
Speaker 1: guy named Steve Sikaman who used to work for HP,
Speaker 1: and he really wanted to create special new technology, but
Speaker 1: no one over at HP was interested. So then he
Speaker 1: came over to Apple and for a while he was
Speaker 1: trying to work that over at Apple. Didn't get a
Speaker 1: lot of headway there either, and was about to leave
Speaker 1: the company when he and guess A got an amazing opportunity.
Speaker 1: Guess A got permission from Scully to work on a
Speaker 1: project without actually telling him what that project was. He
Speaker 1: essentially said, I have this idea. I think it could
Speaker 1: be incredible. I need your go ahead for me to
Speaker 1: to bring some people over into this project and work
Speaker 1: on it, and then I'll have something to show you
Speaker 1: in the future and maybe it's something we can move
Speaker 1: on as a product. And Scully said, all right, I
Speaker 1: trust you, go ahead. So guess And and Segament began
Speaker 1: to work on a project check that would eventually become
Speaker 1: the Apple Newton. The idea was that segment. He had
Speaker 1: a real interest in handwriting recognition technology, and so they
Speaker 1: were talking about making a handheld device that would have
Speaker 1: a stylists and a writing surface, and you could write
Speaker 1: on the device and it would translate it into digital text,
Speaker 1: among other things. And so they started work on this
Speaker 1: and it would evolve into the Apple Newton. And even
Speaker 1: back then, Segment said there were very early problems right
Speaker 1: out of the gate with the Apple Newton. Big one
Speaker 1: of those problems was that Guess didn't really set any
Speaker 1: restrictions on what should go into the device. He didn't
Speaker 1: have any hard and fast rules about that. So you
Speaker 1: get a bunch of engineers together and you tell them
Speaker 1: your general idea, you don't set restrictions on it. Everyone
Speaker 1: immediately starts to brainstorm different features and functions that quote
Speaker 1: unquote should go into that device. And then it just
Speaker 1: becomes a Morga's board of people adding in functionality, making
Speaker 1: the device more and more complex over time, and it
Speaker 1: became bloated with features as engineers kept thinking of other
Speaker 1: stuff the device should be able to do. The more
Speaker 1: features they gave the Newton, the more power it was
Speaker 1: going to require, and the more expensive components it would
Speaker 1: require in order to do this sort of processing, and
Speaker 1: the more strain on its battery it would create because
Speaker 1: you're requiring more power. So, in other words, it was
Speaker 1: just making the whole thing more complicated and more expensive,
Speaker 1: and it was strangling the development of the project. So
Speaker 1: in those early designs, before they had anything really to
Speaker 1: show for it, the team determined that the size of
Speaker 1: the Newton would be about the same as a four
Speaker 1: standard paper size. At Secondment felt it was already getting
Speaker 1: bigger than it was supposed to be. He wanted a
Speaker 1: smaller form factor, and the projected price for the gadget,
Speaker 1: based upon the elements that they were brainstorming at that time,
Speaker 1: was looked at it about six thousand dollars six thousand
Speaker 1: dollars for a handheld device, essentially a personal digital assistant
Speaker 1: or p d A that could read your handwriting. Six
Speaker 1: grand and we're talking nineteen eighties money here, so if
Speaker 1: you adjusted for inflation, you're talking about ten thousand dollars
Speaker 1: in today's cash for this device. Ten grand. I mean,
Speaker 1: Apple was known for selling premium products at a high price.
Speaker 1: But come on, well, Guessa and Sigaman would both end
Speaker 1: up leaving Apple before the Newton was finished. They would
Speaker 1: go on to found a new company called be Incorporated.
Speaker 1: That's b E. They created the b box platform. But
Speaker 1: a side note here segment would eventually rejoin our story
Speaker 1: because he would come back to Apple in two thousand
Speaker 1: three as vice president of Software Technology, so he would
Speaker 1: actually play an important role in the development of the
Speaker 1: iPhone later on, but his role in the Newton had
Speaker 1: come to an end. He and guess A left, So
Speaker 1: even though they got the project started, they left before
Speaker 1: it was finished. But by then Scully was completely behind
Speaker 1: it and the ball was rolling and there were there
Speaker 1: was a team hard at work trying to make this
Speaker 1: become a reality. Now on the software side of things,
Speaker 1: the Apple Newton pioneered some really cool technology, including elements
Speaker 1: of that assist of AI that Scully had been dreaming about.
Speaker 1: The software could search through text, and it could identify
Speaker 1: names and cross reference that with a context list. It
Speaker 1: could identify phone numbers, It could send hyperlinks for email
Speaker 1: addresses and more and make it more useful by recognizing
Speaker 1: these elements within text. And it could also pull up
Speaker 1: scheduling information based upon text within messages about meeting times.
Speaker 1: So short it had early versions of the features you
Speaker 1: find in a lot of email apps and smart devices
Speaker 1: out there. So, for example, if I get an email
Speaker 1: that uh confer arms that I've purchased tickets for something
Speaker 1: and it's going to my Gmail account, that will put
Speaker 1: in a Gmail entry in my out or my my
Speaker 1: Google calendar and say, all right, well, because I've got
Speaker 1: this message and because it had this time and this time,
Speaker 1: this date on it, I can put in an entry
Speaker 1: in that calendar. Well, the Apple Newton had a rudimentary
Speaker 1: form of that technology in it, which was years ahead
Speaker 1: of anyone else at that point. It also had the
Speaker 1: infamous handwriting recognition algorithm. Now, the algorithm was designed to
Speaker 1: learn over time how to recognize specific characters written onto
Speaker 1: the message pad, but it wasn't terribly accurate right out
Speaker 1: of the gate, and that would end up causing some
Speaker 1: major major problems for Apple. The development process was stretching
Speaker 1: on for years, and Scully eventually put his foot down
Speaker 1: and demanded that the team produced a Newton device that
Speaker 1: would be ready for consumers by April second, and he
Speaker 1: wanted it to cost less than of teen hundred dollars. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: within the teams that were about three different models that
Speaker 1: were being proposed for the Apple Newton and They ranged
Speaker 1: from the bare bones version that would be the cheapest
Speaker 1: to a full featured version that would be more than
Speaker 1: seven thousand dollars. Teams broke out in support of those
Speaker 1: different models, and the two teams that had the most
Speaker 1: support were the extreme ends. You had the junior end
Speaker 1: on one side and the senior end on the other side. Uh,
Speaker 1: and it became a battle of wills, and apparently it
Speaker 1: got a bit heated. The senior version of the Newton
Speaker 1: was way more feature heavy and included some stuff like
Speaker 1: the ability to network with other Newton's. The problem was
Speaker 1: the way it networked was through infrared communication, and the
Speaker 1: infrared sensors did not work well under fluorescent lights, which
Speaker 1: led the junior team to jokingly state that the only
Speaker 1: way you could use the Newton networking function in the
Speaker 1: senior model would be if you turned all the lights
Speaker 1: off inside your office, which seems a bit counterproductive. So
Speaker 1: is this kind of sniping that was going on back
Speaker 1: and forth. The junior version, like I said, was not
Speaker 1: quite so latent with features and would cost less than
Speaker 1: a thousand dollars, and eventually it became the front runner
Speaker 1: among all the models, but it didn't get there without
Speaker 1: a lot of arguments on all sides. April came and
Speaker 1: went and the team still didn't have a Shippa Bowl
Speaker 1: product yet, though they had performed a few successful demos,
Speaker 1: so Scully was assuaged a little bit, although he kept
Speaker 1: on setting new deadlines so that the team would have
Speaker 1: something to work toward. He laid down the law again
Speaker 1: and kept creating these deadlines, saying pressure the team, he said,
Speaker 1: produced some results for me, and it caused a great
Speaker 1: deal of problems among the team and likely contributed to
Speaker 1: one absolute tragedy. One of the programmers on the project
Speaker 1: was a guy named Ko who moved from Japan with
Speaker 1: his wife to be part of the programming community in
Speaker 1: Silicon Valley and joined Apple. On December twelfth, Iszono went
Speaker 1: home after work and he committed suicide. The assumption is
Speaker 1: that the intense pressure at work to create the Apple
Speaker 1: Newton led to this breakdown. Now, that was the absolute
Speaker 1: worst of the tragedies associated with Newton's development, but it
Speaker 1: was not the only one. There was another event that
Speaker 1: happened where one of the developers had some sort of
Speaker 1: mental breakdown and assaulted his roommate and was charged with
Speaker 1: assault and sent to jail as a result, so John
Speaker 1: Scully would not be in charge by the time the
Speaker 1: Newton was finally ready to debut. He stepped down as
Speaker 1: CEO of Apple on June seven. That was two months
Speaker 1: before the Newton went gold, so it's just too much
Speaker 1: shy of the Newton actually launching. He was effectively forced
Speaker 1: to resign by the board of directors, and he became
Speaker 1: the chairman of Apple, but his position was reduced to
Speaker 1: being largely ceremonial, which was an that was somewhat ironic
Speaker 1: because Scully had effectively done the same thing to Steve
Speaker 1: Jobs a decade earlier when he was forced out of
Speaker 1: the company. Michael Spindler would step in as the new
Speaker 1: CEO of Apple and he would oversee the launch of
Speaker 1: the Newton. The team did finish the Newton, and it
Speaker 1: shipped in August, I should say, but the handwriting recognition
Speaker 1: was faulty, as you probably know if you've ever heard
Speaker 1: anything about the Newton, and since the handwriting feature was
Speaker 1: supposed to be the core feature of the Newton, it
Speaker 1: led to massive criticism and ridicule. Steve Jobs was fuming
Speaker 1: over it. He was not part of Apple, but he
Speaker 1: was furious to see a product make Apple the laughing
Speaker 1: stock of the tech community. He hated seeing this company
Speaker 1: that he had co found and held up to ridicule,
Speaker 1: and he had made no secret of his disdain towards
Speaker 1: Scully throughout Scully's tenure as CEO. Of course, a couple
Speaker 1: of years later, Steve Jobs would rejoin Apple, and what
Speaker 1: happened was that Apple acquired Jobs as company Next. So
Speaker 1: Jobs that created a company called Next Computers, and Jobs
Speaker 1: had failed to produce a commercially successful computer with his
Speaker 1: next company, but uh, and it was because that computer
Speaker 1: was incredibly expensive and a lot of people thought it
Speaker 1: was limited in what it could do. But mostly it
Speaker 1: was the cost of the computer that made people bulk.
Speaker 1: But the operating system innovations that his company had created
Speaker 1: were undeniable, and Apple was really in need of that innovation.
Speaker 1: So Apple acquired Next, and Jobs came along with the company,
Speaker 1: and before long he was able to maneuver the board
Speaker 1: into making him the interim CEO, and eventually he became
Speaker 1: the permanent CEO of Apple. So that's the Newton's story,
Speaker 1: and I'll talk more about how that impacts the iPhone
Speaker 1: story in just a moment. But first let's take a
Speaker 1: quick break to thank our sponsor. You know, the reason
Speaker 1: I spent so much time on that story of the
Speaker 1: Newton in a podcast about the iPhone is to set
Speaker 1: that stage and explain why the iPhone was such a
Speaker 1: big risk for Apple. The company's reputation had already been damaged.
Speaker 1: The Newton was literally a punchline. I distinctly remember a
Speaker 1: Simpsons episode that used it as a throwaway joke. And
Speaker 1: again I mean that literally, as Nelson throws a Newton
Speaker 1: away after it misinterprets handwriting. So trying to get a
Speaker 1: new type of computing device out the door was going
Speaker 1: to have big obstacles, not just from technology but also
Speaker 1: from a corporate culture standpoint. And Steve Jobs was, as
Speaker 1: I'm sure many of you are aware, a notoriously difficult
Speaker 1: person to work for. He had very strong convictions, very
Speaker 1: strong opinions, and he was not terribly concerned with how
Speaker 1: they came across in his interactions with other people. Uh
Speaker 1: he would he could be incredibly blunt and sometimes extremely critical,
Speaker 1: and it was a tough environment. Now, in the early
Speaker 1: two thousand's, before anyone had even proposed a formal phone project,
Speaker 1: at Apple, employees were talking about how cell phones were
Speaker 1: a potential opportunity for the company because there was a
Speaker 1: general consensus that cell phones kind of stunk at the time.
Speaker 1: They had really bad call quality, many of the handsets
Speaker 1: were not good at holding onto a signal, you would
Speaker 1: have calls dropping left and right, and the internet features
Speaker 1: were anemic. But while there was a general desire to
Speaker 1: look into developing a cell phone under Apple's brand, it
Speaker 1: remained mostly wishful thinking, including among people who had worked
Speaker 1: on the Newton project and who were still at Apple. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: Apple was launching a device that would revolutionize electronics as
Speaker 1: well as an entirely different industry, namely the music industry.
Speaker 1: I am talking, of course, about the iPod, and I've
Speaker 1: done a full episode about that device, so I'm not
Speaker 1: going to retread it here, But the iPod it wasn't
Speaker 1: a home run right away. The two thousand one iPod
Speaker 1: had some hefty limitations. Now. The biggest limitation was that
Speaker 1: it was only compatible with Mac computers, and that was
Speaker 1: a problem because at the time, Max represented a very
Speaker 1: small percentage of the overall computer market. The overwhelming majority
Speaker 1: of computer owners were using Windows based devices, and so
Speaker 1: the iPods customer base was limited by that compatibility issue.
Speaker 1: Now Tony Fidell, who sometimes is referred to as the
Speaker 1: pod Father, oversaw the development and launch of the iPod,
Speaker 1: and he thought that Apple should make the iPod work
Speaker 1: with PCs, which would mean developing iTunes software that could
Speaker 1: run on Windows based machines. Steve Jobs was really reluctant. Actually,
Speaker 1: that's too gentle word to use. Steve Jobs refused to
Speaker 1: do this for a long time, but after a couple
Speaker 1: of years of lackluster iPod sales, Jobs had to admit
Speaker 1: that they needed to explore other options if the iPod
Speaker 1: were to be a real success. Now, Luckily, in this case,
Speaker 1: Fidel had kind of gone behind Steve Jobs back and
Speaker 1: he had been working with a group of people to
Speaker 1: develop iTunes for Windows machines without Jobs being aware of it.
Speaker 1: So once Steve Jobs actually came around to this idea
Speaker 1: of a Windows compatible iPod, Fidel already had the iTunes
Speaker 1: build ready to go essentially, and once Apple allowed for
Speaker 1: this connectivity, iPod sales exploded. It suddenly became extremely popular
Speaker 1: because now it was compatible with the overwhelming majority of
Speaker 1: computers out there, and by two thousand four, the iPod
Speaker 1: sales accounted for fifty percent of all revenue for Apple.
Speaker 1: So Apple was no longer just a computer company. Had
Speaker 1: a new mobile product that was in just as much
Speaker 1: money as their computer sales were bringing in. So this
Speaker 1: was revolutionary, and that revolution would of course ripple out
Speaker 1: to affect the entire music industry as well. It really
Speaker 1: changed the way the music industry works. So you have
Speaker 1: Fidel and he starts thinking about this possibility of making
Speaker 1: a phone similar to the iPod, so would essentially be
Speaker 1: an iPod with a phone kind of glommed onto it.
Speaker 1: And I've got a lot more to say about that
Speaker 1: in this episode. But as I mentioned earlier, there had
Speaker 1: been talks at Apple about phones and phone like devices,
Speaker 1: but no definitive move to develop one. No one had
Speaker 1: actually launched a project in Apple to do this, though.
Speaker 1: There were a lot of different proposals out there, and
Speaker 1: some of those talks involved not building a phone, but
Speaker 1: rather acquiring a handset manufacturing company, one that was already
Speaker 1: in the business of building phones. So in two thousand three,
Speaker 1: Apple executives were seriously considering the possibility of making a
Speaker 1: move on Motorola, but ultimately they decided that the cost
Speaker 1: of the acquisition would be too high, the payoff was
Speaker 1: too uncertain, and so they decided they couldn't go forward.
Speaker 1: They abandoned the idea to purchase Motorola, but they did
Speaker 1: see another way that they could partner with Motorola. So
Speaker 1: Steve Jobs really like the design of a Motorola phone
Speaker 1: called the Razor are A z R. This is a
Speaker 1: feature phone and it was pretty popular back when it
Speaker 1: was released. I know a lot of people who held
Speaker 1: onto their Razors well into the smartphone era, even though
Speaker 1: the Razors really more of a feature phone than a smartphone.
Speaker 1: And so Apple and Motorola had some discussions and decided
Speaker 1: to partner to develop a new phone. Motorola would build
Speaker 1: the device and Apple would incorporate some iTunes functionality on
Speaker 1: the phone, and this would become the Motorola Rocker R
Speaker 1: O c k R I guess we really hate final
Speaker 1: vowels in Motorola products. Singular would become the partnered carrier
Speaker 1: for this phone. So you really have three big companies
Speaker 1: all working together to create something new. You had the
Speaker 1: hardware and the operating system coming from Motorola. You had
Speaker 1: the iTunes functionality coming from Apple and the service coming
Speaker 1: from Singular. Now. The Rocker was meant to be a
Speaker 1: bridge between phones and m P three players, but Apple
Speaker 1: developers didn't really want to give Motorola too much, so
Speaker 1: they purposefully designed the iTunes functionality with limitations so that
Speaker 1: Apple wouldn't go and create its own product rival. It
Speaker 1: wouldn't make sense for Apple to help Motorola create a
Speaker 1: product that would complete compete directly with the iPod, and
Speaker 1: so the iTunes functionality was severely limited as a result.
Speaker 1: Fidella essentially confirmed this when he talked with Merchant during
Speaker 1: interviews for that book. I was mentioning earlier in the
Speaker 1: episode that this was pretty much the planet Apple all along,
Speaker 1: that they had purposefully nerfed the iTunes functionality so that
Speaker 1: they could avoid cannibalizing their own sales and also possibly
Speaker 1: set up a phone project at Apple later on. And
Speaker 1: when Steve Jobs finally debuted the Motorola Rocker, which some
Speaker 1: were calling the iTunes Phone, and this happened in two
Speaker 1: thousand five, he was visibly not into it and there
Speaker 1: were some glitches during his presentation that did not help,
Speaker 1: and so Jobs did kind of a pivot during the event.
Speaker 1: He was also there to talk about the iPod Nano,
Speaker 1: that particularly small version of the iPod with some limited
Speaker 1: functionality that at a lower price point than the other
Speaker 1: iPod lines, and he kind of buried the Rocker, and
Speaker 1: he kind of talked about how the Nano could hold
Speaker 1: just as many songs as the Rocker could, and Motorola
Speaker 1: executives were not thrilled by this, to be honest, they
Speaker 1: were a little steamed about it. Fidel, on the other hand,
Speaker 1: was pleased as punch because he figured he could get
Speaker 1: jobs to back phone projects at Apple so that the
Speaker 1: company could show how to do phones the right way
Speaker 1: and not depend upon a partner for the hardware. And
Speaker 1: for that was right about that. The Rocker turned into
Speaker 1: a flop, and at a return rate six times higher
Speaker 1: than other phones on the market, which means people were
Speaker 1: six times more likely to return their Motorola Rocker in
Speaker 1: exchange for something else than they would any other phone,
Speaker 1: which is not great. But now I got a backtrack
Speaker 1: just a bit, because I was just talking about two
Speaker 1: thousand five. But again, this is a complicated story, and
Speaker 1: a lot of stuff is happening at around the same
Speaker 1: time or a little bit earlier, So while the Motorola
Speaker 1: deal was kind of forming within Apple before it was
Speaker 1: actually created. Around two thousand four or so, you had
Speaker 1: different groups with an Apple all getting more serious about
Speaker 1: actually developing a phone for Apple itself, and they were
Speaker 1: taking very different philosophical pathways towards this goal. Meanwhile, Steve
Speaker 1: Jobs was showing reluctance to get into that industry. He
Speaker 1: had publicly said that smartphones were problematic because carriers tend
Speaker 1: to get really intrusive, the carriers being the companies that
Speaker 1: provide the cell service to phones, and as such, they
Speaker 1: have high demands regarding the capabilities of handsets that run
Speaker 1: on their respective networks, and Steve Jobs bristled at the
Speaker 1: thought of some other company coming in and dictating which
Speaker 1: features he could and couldn't include in his phone, and
Speaker 1: he didn't really want to deal with that mess. He
Speaker 1: preferred to be the master of Apple and not have
Speaker 1: other people tell him what he could and couldn't do.
Speaker 1: And on top of that, within Apple, not publicly, but
Speaker 1: within the company, Jobs said he wasn't really keen on
Speaker 1: smartphones because he thought they only would appeal to quote
Speaker 1: the pocket protector crowd end quote. So essentially he was
Speaker 1: saying only nerds are gonna want smartphones, it's not really
Speaker 1: a viable industry, And honestly, at the time he was
Speaker 1: saying this, he was mostly right, because smartphone of that
Speaker 1: era were clunky. They were chunky, they were burdened by
Speaker 1: physical keyboards and controls, They weren't easy or intuitive to use,
Speaker 1: They had limited functionality, and even with features like email
Speaker 1: and web access, they were limited in what they could
Speaker 1: actually display or how you could interact with those Internet features.
Speaker 1: And the only people who are really willing to put
Speaker 1: up with all of that nonsense in return for a
Speaker 1: smartphone that was typically incredibly expensive were either executives or
Speaker 1: bleeding edge techno buffs. Jobs felt the market just wouldn't
Speaker 1: support a smartphone, at least not to the level where
Speaker 1: it would be profitable. Still, all that being said, Fidel
Speaker 1: wanted to give it a go, and other groups did too,
Speaker 1: and Jobs eventually gave his permission for preliminary development to
Speaker 1: begin at around two thousand four. This was around the
Speaker 1: same time Apple was working with Motorola. Now, these early
Speaker 1: days were blue sky, and by that I mean no
Speaker 1: one was really sure what form the phone would ultimately take,
Speaker 1: what the user interface was going to be like what
Speaker 1: sort of operating system it would have, what features it
Speaker 1: would support, or really anything about it. Now, Jobs was
Speaker 1: holding conversations with various carriers and exploring options at this time,
Speaker 1: and initial conversations with Verizon we're going nowhere. Jobs felt
Speaker 1: that Verizon just wanted too much input in the development
Speaker 1: of the phone. Project Singular seemed a little more favorable.
Speaker 1: The carrier said that in return for exclusivity, they would
Speaker 1: place no demands or restrictions on the phone. Now, eventually,
Speaker 1: Apple would end up partnering with a T and T
Speaker 1: and an exclusive deal that lasted a few years here
Speaker 1: in the United States. Now, the story behind that is
Speaker 1: so complicated that I might actually have to do another
Speaker 1: episode about that specifically in the future, But for now,
Speaker 1: let's just acknowledge that when the phone finally did debut,
Speaker 1: a T and T was the carrier partner in the
Speaker 1: United States. So Fidel and team began working on an
Speaker 1: idea that would eventually really turn into the iPod Touch
Speaker 1: as opposed to the iPhone, because he was thinking about
Speaker 1: adding radio frequency capability to an iPod, but in this
Speaker 1: case that our ff ability was WiFi, not cellular service. Uh,
Speaker 1: that's ultimately what would come out of Fidel's group. Fidel's
Speaker 1: team began to work on this and started with existing
Speaker 1: iPod design. So this is before the iPod touch. It
Speaker 1: was back in the old user interface of the iPod.
Speaker 1: I'm talking about that click wheel design of the old iPods.
Speaker 1: So yeah, the first iPhone sort of had a rotary
Speaker 1: dial on the front of them in a sense. Because
Speaker 1: it had that click wheel, you would navigate the phone's
Speaker 1: features using the clickwheel. Now, jobs ultimately would feel that
Speaker 1: this was not a particularly good user experience, but Fidel's
Speaker 1: team really went for it, building out the operating system
Speaker 1: and user interface to support the click wheel navigation system.
Speaker 1: Fidel's approach was much more conservative than what the iPhone
Speaker 1: would turn out to be, not just because of the
Speaker 1: user interface and navigation, but also in its features. The
Speaker 1: Fidel version was really an MP three player that was
Speaker 1: all so a phone, So it wasn't a pocket computer
Speaker 1: or an Internet connected device in the way the iPhone is.
Speaker 1: It really just had two modes of operation. It had
Speaker 1: iPod mode and in that mode. Eventually, once they settled
Speaker 1: on a particular user interface and an appearance, the screen
Speaker 1: would turn blue and you could listen to your music.
Speaker 1: If you switched it to phone mode, the screen would
Speaker 1: turn kind of an amber color, and then you can
Speaker 1: make calls. Meanwhile, there were other people like Michael Bell,
Speaker 1: who were arguing for an entirely different approach to phone design.
Speaker 1: Bell felt that the future was in convergence, with devices
Speaker 1: like the iPod, telephones, and computers all merging into a
Speaker 1: single form factor, and Bell and Jobs had numerous discussions
Speaker 1: some might call them arguments about this. Bell used some
Speaker 1: of Johnny i'ves designs for future iPod models as leverage.
Speaker 1: He said, don't think about the way mobile devices look
Speaker 1: right now. Take a look at some of these design
Speaker 1: for future iPods and imagine a Mac style device, something
Speaker 1: running a Mac operating system in this warm factor. It
Speaker 1: would be a surefire hit. And it's definitely where things
Speaker 1: are headed anyway. And if we jump on it, if
Speaker 1: Apple becomes the company to make this, we could be
Speaker 1: pioneers and lead the space. Steve Jobs was not immediately
Speaker 1: convinced of this. He actually held out for a while,
Speaker 1: but he did get broken down by Michael Bell's arguments,
Speaker 1: and Bell insisted that there was value in developing a
Speaker 1: product that could merge the qualities of a phone and
Speaker 1: NB three player and a network computer, and Jobs would
Speaker 1: allow Bell to work on this idea. He agreed to
Speaker 1: it on November seven, two thousand four. And thus you
Speaker 1: had two different groups trying to go in two different
Speaker 1: pathways to create the same in the goal a phone,
Speaker 1: but they were taking very different pathways to get there.
Speaker 1: And that began the rate mystery at Apple. You can
Speaker 1: kind of think of it as like a murder mystery
Speaker 1: in a way, because employees were disappearing left and right,
Speaker 1: only they weren't getting killed, they were getting cherry picked
Speaker 1: for one of these two different projects. Uh Fidel's team,
Speaker 1: which would become known as P one, started to try
Speaker 1: and create their iPod phone, and then the team that
Speaker 1: Bell argued for and Scott Forstaul would end up working with,
Speaker 1: was trying to create this new piece of merged technology.
Speaker 1: They became known as P two. So had P one
Speaker 1: and P two, and both teams began rating Apple talent. Now.
Speaker 1: Jobs was incredibly paranoid about this phone project. He insisted
Speaker 1: on the utmost secrecy, and he forbade anyone from recruiting
Speaker 1: from outside the company, so instead teams were free to
Speaker 1: pick and choose among existing Apple employees. But there was
Speaker 1: a big catch. Those employees could not be told they
Speaker 1: would be working on until after they had already agreed
Speaker 1: to do the work. I've got a lot more to
Speaker 1: say about that, but before I jump into it, let's
Speaker 1: take another quick break to thank our sponsor. So the
Speaker 1: secrecy did not end just in this whole process of
Speaker 1: picking members for your team. Bit by bit, sections of
Speaker 1: Cooper Tino's offices were being converted over to development rooms
Speaker 1: for the iPhone project. Now, a very early version of
Speaker 1: this was a room where the Human Interface team went,
Speaker 1: or the HI team as they were called. They were
Speaker 1: in a unique position and that they worked with both
Speaker 1: the P one and the P two teams. They helped
Speaker 1: both teams out. They were kind of in between these
Speaker 1: competing groups, and their office was a room that had
Speaker 1: no windows, and the only real thing it had inside
Speaker 1: of it was a white board and apparently, according to Merchant,
Speaker 1: a poster of a chicken for some reason. And they
Speaker 1: would put up their ideas on the whiteboard, and anything
Speaker 1: that was considered a really good, strong idea that was
Speaker 1: going to be the one of the central pillars of
Speaker 1: the Human Interface components of the phone project would stay
Speaker 1: up on the white board, and then other ideas they
Speaker 1: would erase if they figured that they weren't that important,
Speaker 1: pertinent or whatever, and they ended up seeing also increased
Speaker 1: security around the campus. An entire floor of one of
Speaker 1: Apple's buildings eventually became the home of the various teams,
Speaker 1: and to get there you had to have a badge.
Speaker 1: You had to have a specific security badge to be
Speaker 1: able to access that part of the office, and according
Speaker 1: to some people, you had to go through as many
Speaker 1: as four different secure doors before you could actually get
Speaker 1: to anything remotely related to the iPhone, and janitorial staff
Speaker 1: wasn't even allowed in the space. Job did not want
Speaker 1: any information about the phone leaking out, even to other
Speaker 1: Apple employees until he was ready to pull the trigger
Speaker 1: on it now. One of the people who worked on
Speaker 1: the human interface team was Greg Christie. He actually was
Speaker 1: one of the leads on this team, and he had
Speaker 1: also worked on the Newton back in the day. Steve
Speaker 1: Sackelman also got involved again. Sackeman he he was the
Speaker 1: guy who had worked on the Newton with Guessa back
Speaker 1: in the day and then left Apple before the Newton debuted. Well,
Speaker 1: he came back in two thousand three and he found
Speaker 1: it inspiring to work on the phone project. So the
Speaker 1: P two team, you know, the P one was trying
Speaker 1: to make the iPod phone. The P two team became
Speaker 1: known as the Next Mafia because it included a few
Speaker 1: of the engineers who had worked with Steve Jobs over
Speaker 1: at the Next Company, and they had come over to
Speaker 1: Apple along with the acquisition, and they were known for
Speaker 1: being really secretive and doing what they had to do
Speaker 1: in order to accomplish goals, so kind of like legendary
Speaker 1: mafioso types, the P two group had some enormous challenges.
Speaker 1: So unlike the iPod group, the P one group, they
Speaker 1: did not have a set method for navigation. Like the
Speaker 1: iPod group, they knew they were going to use the
Speaker 1: same functions of the iPod in order to move around
Speaker 1: on the phone features. But the P two group, it
Speaker 1: was more wide open. So they wanted to explore the
Speaker 1: possibility of using multi touch interfaces. And Apple likes to
Speaker 1: boast it invented multi touch. It's certainly patented approaches to
Speaker 1: multi touch, but it's not really true that the company
Speaker 1: invented it. There had been multi touch interfaces in various
Speaker 1: stages of development at different places, including Xerox Park for
Speaker 1: more than a decade, but no one had created a
Speaker 1: multi touch tool that could work in a small form
Speaker 1: factor in a commercial consumer product. Now, Apple had acquired
Speaker 1: a company called finger Works that was founded by a
Speaker 1: man named Wayne Westerman. Westerman wanted to create an alternative
Speaker 1: two keyboard interfaces because he had a repetitive strain injury
Speaker 1: and that made it really painful to use a keyboard
Speaker 1: for any kind of extended time. So he began to
Speaker 1: pioneer work in multi touch interfaces alternatives to keyboards, and
Speaker 1: he became an important key player in the technology that
Speaker 1: would allow for iPhones revolutionary interface. Another group that worked
Speaker 1: on this touch screen technology was the Q seventy nine group,
Speaker 1: and originally they were trying to build a multi touch tablet,
Speaker 1: although that ultimately didn't pan out, at least not in
Speaker 1: its initial form factor. They had been working on multi
Speaker 1: touch since two thousand three with an Apple and Bass
Speaker 1: Ordering was one of those engineers b A. S O R.
Speaker 1: D I N G. And he played an important role
Speaker 1: in developing the technology used in the iPhone. These engineers
Speaker 1: reached relished this challenge rather of scaling the technology down
Speaker 1: so they could fit inside the form factor of a
Speaker 1: mobile device, although most of their initial work was with
Speaker 1: full size computers, and then they were saying, well, worry,
Speaker 1: We'll worry about making it smaller later. Let's just worry
Speaker 1: about making it work right now. Ordering had been told
Speaker 1: by Jobs that the goal was to create a phone
Speaker 1: that would have no physical buttons and relied solely on
Speaker 1: touch screen gestures, and Ording was intrigued and at the
Speaker 1: time wasn't really sure if this was going to be possible,
Speaker 1: but he felt it was a worthy challenge, and so
Speaker 1: he joined the iPhone project, and it was Ordering who
Speaker 1: created a few of the features that became standard in
Speaker 1: touch screen navigation. So, for example, if you've ever used
Speaker 1: an app that had a bit of a rubber band
Speaker 1: effect whenever you got to the end of a page,
Speaker 1: whether it was the top or the bottom, that was
Speaker 1: Ording's idea. The Ording was using a touch interface with
Speaker 1: his Mac for testing purposes and found out that if
Speaker 1: he navigated a page, he would often find that once
Speaker 1: he reached the top or bottom of the page, he'd
Speaker 1: be misled for a few moments into thinking that his
Speaker 1: interface had broken because he'd get to the end and
Speaker 1: he'd be trying to scroll end up would happen, and
Speaker 1: you think, oh gosh, it's broken. And then he figured, oh, wait, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: I just got to the end of all the text
Speaker 1: or all the images or whatever it might have been,
Speaker 1: and he decided there needed to be some sort of
Speaker 1: visual representation that you had reached the end, and that
Speaker 1: way you wouldn't think that the scrolling was just broken.
Speaker 1: And so it had this rubber band effect where it
Speaker 1: would it would come down as if you were continuing
Speaker 1: to scroll, but as soon as you let go, it
Speaker 1: would snap back up. His team also created the momentum
Speaker 1: effect of scrolling on the iPhone, so that's when you
Speaker 1: flick your finger down or up the screen and the
Speaker 1: scrolling continues for a bit before it slows to a halt,
Speaker 1: which makes it feel like the virtual pages you're looking
Speaker 1: at are obeying the laws of physics, as if the
Speaker 1: stuff you're seeing is actually a physical object. And it
Speaker 1: seems totally obvious now, but someone actually had to come
Speaker 1: up with that, and then they had to build it,
Speaker 1: and that was Ardings Group. Now there's a ton I
Speaker 1: need to talk about with this iPhone. But I am
Speaker 1: running out of time for this episode. So what we're
Speaker 1: going to do is we're going to conclude this episode today.
Speaker 1: We will rejoin at this part in our next episode,
Speaker 1: and we're gonna have our part two of the Origin
Speaker 1: of the iPhone. If you guys have suggestions for topics
Speaker 1: you would like me to cover in future episodes. Maybe
Speaker 1: it's a specific technology, maybe it's a person in tech,
Speaker 1: maybe it's a company, let me know. Send me a message.
Speaker 1: The email address you should use is tech Stuff at
Speaker 1: how stuffworks dot com, or drop me a line on
Speaker 1: the facebooks or the twitters. I have the handled tech
Speaker 1: Stuff hsw for the show at both of those locations.
Speaker 1: And remember you can watch me stream live as I
Speaker 1: record these episodes and stumble all over myself and occasionally
Speaker 1: spill coffee on myself, entertaining things like that, but you
Speaker 1: can only see it if you go to twitch dot
Speaker 1: tv slash tech Stuff. I typically stream on Wednesdays and Fridays.
Speaker 1: You can go to twitch dot tv slash tech stuff
Speaker 1: and you'll see the schedule there and I'll talk to
Speaker 1: you again really soon for more on this and thousands
Speaker 1: of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com,