Speaker 1: Text with Technology with tech Stuff from dot com. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I am your host, Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I am a podcaster with the halstaff Works podcasting company.
Speaker 1: Thank you for joining tech Stuff, the show where we
Speaker 1: look at all things tech. This is technically a part
Speaker 1: two episode. Part one was the episode immediately before this,
Speaker 1: unless something has gone horribly wrong with the publishing schedule,
Speaker 1: and we're looking at the origin of the iPhone. As
Speaker 1: it turns out, it is a complicated story, and it
Speaker 1: was so complicated that it warranted two episodes rather than
Speaker 1: one super long episode. And in the last one, I
Speaker 1: talked about the earliest stages of the iPhone project at Apple,
Speaker 1: and as I pointed out, it's surprisingly long. I left
Speaker 1: off with the earliest phases of the two groups that
Speaker 1: were competing against one another internally to develop the Apple phone,
Speaker 1: and those two groups were known as P one and
Speaker 1: P two among a very few select Apple employees. Most
Speaker 1: people didn't even know what was going on. But those
Speaker 1: two groups were each trying to create a phone Apple
Speaker 1: can market as a consumer product, and they took very
Speaker 1: different approaches. The P one group, which was led by
Speaker 1: Tony Fidel, was looking to make a souped up iPod
Speaker 1: with phone capabilities. The other group, P two, that had
Speaker 1: Scott Forestall and the next Mafia, was trying to create
Speaker 1: a pocket sized Mac computer that could also act as
Speaker 1: a phone. In both cases, you could argue that the
Speaker 1: phone thing was an add on and iPod and I'll
Speaker 1: add on and P one and a Mac add on
Speaker 1: with P two. Now, most of the engineers and these
Speaker 1: two groups were really really too busy with work to
Speaker 1: worry about the other group. But when you get to
Speaker 1: the executive level, there were some pretty notable clashes between them,
Speaker 1: and it got really ugly at some points, and and
Speaker 1: kind of petty and brutal. Some executives ended up quitting,
Speaker 1: some got fired, and they were often sniping at one another,
Speaker 1: and it was kind of like again, a kind of
Speaker 1: like a soap opera. Meanwhile, the work had to carry on.
Speaker 1: The project had developed a code name at that point.
Speaker 1: It was called purple. No one's really sure why. There
Speaker 1: was some debate that it perhaps was referring to the
Speaker 1: color of a particular toy one of the developers had,
Speaker 1: because it represented an internal process at Apple, but no
Speaker 1: one's really sure. It's kind of grasping at straws, but
Speaker 1: the name was Purple. Now keep in mind, at this stage,
Speaker 1: which is around two thousand five or so, the project
Speaker 1: was so secret that only a few people in Apple
Speaker 1: were even aware of it, and other employees at Apple
Speaker 1: were left to wonder what the heck happened to their coworkers.
Speaker 1: So it's seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth. Now,
Speaker 1: those co workers were still at Apple, those most of
Speaker 1: them were still at Apple anyway, but they were sequestered
Speaker 1: in other parts of the office complex behind heavy security,
Speaker 1: working slavishly long hours. And those hours were so long,
Speaker 1: and the work was so hard that team leaders had
Speaker 1: taken to renting hotel rooms to allow employees to have
Speaker 1: a place to crash, because they were worried that otherwise
Speaker 1: people might fall asleep behind the wheel of a car
Speaker 1: due to exhaustion. And honestly, the deadlines that Steve Jobs
Speaker 1: was setting were so aggressive that there was really no
Speaker 1: time to actually, you know, go home and stuff. Now,
Speaker 1: that obviously put a big strain on employees. There was
Speaker 1: one employee who described it as a soup of misery
Speaker 1: at times. This was an employee who talked to Brian Merchant,
Speaker 1: the author of the One Device, which, as I mentioned
Speaker 1: in Part one of the series, served as my primary
Speaker 1: source for much of this information. You should really check
Speaker 1: out that book if want to dive super super deep
Speaker 1: on the iPhone. I mean, it goes into way more
Speaker 1: detail than what I am talking about here, and I'm
Speaker 1: being pretty thorough. Now, not only was this whole situation
Speaker 1: really stressful, there was also this general feeling that the
Speaker 1: iPhone was a make or break situation for Apple the company,
Speaker 1: that the future of the company itself rested on the
Speaker 1: outcome of this project. Now, at least one Apple employees
Speaker 1: cited the development process as the reason for his divorce.
Speaker 1: The phone was really taking its toll even though long
Speaker 1: distance calls at that point, we're toll free. It's a
Speaker 1: terrible joke, but I had to make it. Not jump
Speaker 1: back to the design of the phone itself. Now, not
Speaker 1: only were teams looking at physical formats, they also had
Speaker 1: to define the look of everything on the phone, and
Speaker 1: part of that was this concept of widgets. Uh Imron
Speaker 1: Schaudry was working on that team. He had helped develop
Speaker 1: widgets for the mac Os dashboard feature, and he was
Speaker 1: invited to join the iPhone project. He began to design
Speaker 1: widgets for the iPhone user interface, and Chaudry and fellow
Speaker 1: designer Freddie and Zeroes were responsible for widget design, and
Speaker 1: the story goes that they developed almost all of them
Speaker 1: over the course of a single night. This was because
Speaker 1: Steve Jobs wanted to see designs right away and gave
Speaker 1: them a super tight deadline. He essentially said, have something
Speaker 1: on my desk tomorrow. So they stayed up and they
Speaker 1: worked all night long trying to design these things. Typically,
Speaker 1: you would spend weeks designing something like a widget appearance,
Speaker 1: and you would do lots of testing of different options
Speaker 1: to find out which was the most appealing and user friendly.
Speaker 1: But that just wasn't an option. So the two of
Speaker 1: them worked throughout the night, and the following day they
Speaker 1: showed their widget designs to Jobs, and Jobs loved them,
Speaker 1: and so those initial designs essentially became the icons that
Speaker 1: you would find on the iPhone at its launch. So
Speaker 1: just think those icons at launch. Those were designed by
Speaker 1: two guys frantically putting them together there over the course
Speaker 1: of a few hours before they had to show it
Speaker 1: off to Steve Jobs. It's pretty remarkable. Again, nothing was
Speaker 1: set in Stone at this time, and one of the
Speaker 1: decisions the team had to make was how the icons
Speaker 1: would appear on the screen when you booted up the phone.
Speaker 1: So they considered several different options, such as having all
Speaker 1: the icons appear alphabetically in a list format, which then
Speaker 1: you would be able to scroll through and choose, but
Speaker 1: they thought it made more sense to create a grid
Speaker 1: based system on the phone, and then you would just
Speaker 1: lock icons to that grid so that they would be
Speaker 1: evenly spaced from each other and look very neat and organized.
Speaker 1: Now it's funny to think that this was just one
Speaker 1: of several options, because now practically all smartphones follow that
Speaker 1: same feature, But at the time that was just a
Speaker 1: design decision that they had to make. It could have
Speaker 1: gone a different way, and it's possible that if they
Speaker 1: had gone a different way, maybe other companies would have
Speaker 1: followed suit and we wouldn't have had this grid approach
Speaker 1: to most smartphone u i's. Now. At this stage, the
Speaker 1: ZIGN team did not have any prototype hardware. They were
Speaker 1: still designing stuff on Mac computers. They would confine their
Speaker 1: designs to match dimensions that would fit what they thought
Speaker 1: the iPhones dimensions would be, so they were working from
Speaker 1: general rules of the iPhone size was going to be
Speaker 1: like a three and a half inch screen, for example,
Speaker 1: So they would create a border on max to say,
Speaker 1: all right, everything has to fit within this border, and
Speaker 1: they would design their user interface on a computer to
Speaker 1: be within that border. While they were waiting on testing
Speaker 1: out all this stuff, they even went so far as
Speaker 1: to fabricate wooden iPhone frames. They hadn't even settled on
Speaker 1: what the physical design of the phone was at this point,
Speaker 1: but they created wooden frames to hold up to their
Speaker 1: computer screens so that they could look at the size
Speaker 1: of the various icons and determine if they needed to
Speaker 1: be larger or smaller, which is pretty wild, I think so.
Speaker 1: By February two tho five, if Steve Jobs was starting
Speaker 1: to get really antsy. He wanted to see some results
Speaker 1: from this project he had given the go ahead for.
Speaker 1: And now remember he had only said okay to this
Speaker 1: back in November two thousand four. February two thousand five
Speaker 1: is not that long from November two thousand four. But
Speaker 1: he was starting to say, I'm not seeing anything coherent here.
Speaker 1: I'm seeing a lot of individual ideas and concepts, but
Speaker 1: nothing that connects all these different things together as a
Speaker 1: cohesive experience. I I need to have more than that.
Speaker 1: I can't just see like a rubber banding effect or
Speaker 1: a momentum effect in scrolling or widget design. I need
Speaker 1: to see how they all fit together as an experience. Now,
Speaker 1: this was specifically toward the Human Interface team, not everybody.
Speaker 1: So the Human Interface team got an ultimatum which was
Speaker 1: produced a coherent demonstration of the interface within two weeks,
Speaker 1: and that began what Greg Christie, who was leading the
Speaker 1: Human Interface team, called the two week death March. Engineers
Speaker 1: were working long hours, most of them were not getting
Speaker 1: any sleep. They were trying to put together this demonstration
Speaker 1: that would incorporate numerous concepts and features into a single experience.
Speaker 1: And keep in mind that this was again just the interface.
Speaker 1: This didn't include the operating system or the hardware. This
Speaker 1: was just supposed to be the user experience. Other teams
Speaker 1: were working on and competing with each other for those
Speaker 1: other pieces of the iPhone story. So this was just
Speaker 1: the way you would interact with the phone if you
Speaker 1: were using it, and it put an enormous stress on
Speaker 1: the team, and several people were totally sidelined with exhaustion
Speaker 1: and stress, but they got the demo together and in
Speaker 1: two weeks they showed it off to Steve Jobs, and
Speaker 1: Steve Jobs was happy. He liked it. He liked it
Speaker 1: so much he actually asked them to run through the
Speaker 1: whole demo a second time, which they did, and this
Speaker 1: was exactly what Steve Jobs needed to see in order
Speaker 1: to really throw his full support behind the phone project.
Speaker 1: And he also increased security on the project again, so
Speaker 1: at every stage he demanded even more secrecy, and he
Speaker 1: really wanted to surprise people, and he wanted to do
Speaker 1: it in two waves. He first wanted to surprise people
Speaker 1: within Apple and show them this amazing project, but no
Speaker 1: one really knew was happening outside of the project itself.
Speaker 1: And then when the time was right, he wanted to
Speaker 1: surprise the world with this new idea. But until that
Speaker 1: time he didn't want anyone to know anything about it.
Speaker 1: Over on the operating side of things, there was a
Speaker 1: guy named Richard Williamson who was really hard at work
Speaker 1: on the iPhone side, the software operating system side, and
Speaker 1: he had been on the verge of actually leaving Apple entirely,
Speaker 1: and that ticked off Steve Jobs quite a bit because
Speaker 1: Williamson was a very valuable asset for Apple, but he
Speaker 1: was getting restless. See, Williamson had worked for Next way
Speaker 1: back in the day. He came over to Apple when
Speaker 1: Apple acquired Next. He and he had developed the WebKit framework.
Speaker 1: Now that's the framework that power is the Safari web browser.
Speaker 1: And this was an open source tool, which for Apple
Speaker 1: was totally unusual. If you're familiar with Apple products, you know,
Speaker 1: the phrase open source doesn't come up that often. They
Speaker 1: like to lock things down and be very proprietary with
Speaker 1: their approaches, so much so that when the iPhone launched,
Speaker 1: it had proprietary types of screws that you needed a
Speaker 1: special tool called a pinto labe to open. So having
Speaker 1: an open source kit, the web kit, the thing that
Speaker 1: fueled Safari, was really out of the norm and it
Speaker 1: was a powerful tool. It was so powerful that Google
Speaker 1: actually used it to power Google Chrome until about two thout. Well,
Speaker 1: Williamson wanted to kind of get away from WebKit. He
Speaker 1: wanted to work on something new. He did not want
Speaker 1: his career to involve perpetually updating and maintaining the same
Speaker 1: software that he had invented years earlier. The iPhone ended
Speaker 1: up being the project that convinced him to stay on
Speaker 1: with Apple, and he lent his consider herble talents to
Speaker 1: the software and OS side of that project. Now, Jobs
Speaker 1: decided that the next step was to clue in some
Speaker 1: of the executives at Apple at one of their Top
Speaker 1: one events. Now these are internal meetings at Apple. They
Speaker 1: were similar in structure and tone to the big public
Speaker 1: marketing events that Apple holds throughout the year. So if
Speaker 1: you've ever watched one of those, any sort of Apple
Speaker 1: presentation where there's an executive up there talking about their products,
Speaker 1: it's that same sort of thing, only this was for
Speaker 1: executives inside the company, not anyone outside of it. And
Speaker 1: even this presentation was just for executives. The rank and
Speaker 1: file Apple employees were to remain unaware of the phone
Speaker 1: project on an official capacity. Jobs gave the HI department
Speaker 1: until May two thousand five to work up a full
Speaker 1: demo of the interface for these executives. So remember February
Speaker 1: two thousand five was when they were put through those
Speaker 1: two weeks of torture. They they show the demo to
Speaker 1: Steve Jobs. He loves and he's like, all right, now
Speaker 1: make an even bigger one for May, and you didn't
Speaker 1: even get a chance to relish in the victory of
Speaker 1: creating a demo that made Steve Jobs happy, you had
Speaker 1: to go back and make an even bigger demo for
Speaker 1: this top one event, which they did, and while it
Speaker 1: was hard to do, they made the demo. It went
Speaker 1: over like Gangbusters, and it was clear that Apple was
Speaker 1: onto something, but they still had a long way to
Speaker 1: go before they had an actual product, because this was
Speaker 1: still conceptual stuff at this stage. It was talking about
Speaker 1: the way it would interface, but they didn't have an
Speaker 1: actual physical device yet, and the battles between P one
Speaker 1: and P two were still raging, with Fidel and Forestall
Speaker 1: growing increasingly irritated at each other. Some folks over on
Speaker 1: Forestall's team would even start to refer to Tony Fidel
Speaker 1: not as the pod father, the guy who oversaw the
Speaker 1: development and launch of the iPod. They started calling him
Speaker 1: Tony Malogney, the cut deep at Apple folks. So the
Speaker 1: employees were calling him Tony Malogney because they said that
Speaker 1: Fidel had this habit of overstating his role in developing
Speaker 1: products like the iPod and the iPhone, and they said
Speaker 1: he was a really strong manager and he definitely had
Speaker 1: a reputation for going toe to toe with Steve Jobs.
Speaker 1: He was one of the few people who would stand
Speaker 1: up to Steve Jobs and yell right back at him
Speaker 1: and keep his job in the process. But a lot
Speaker 1: of employees were asserting that Fidel was just he wasn't
Speaker 1: in the trenches the way a lot of the engineers were.
Speaker 1: Whether that's true or not is not for me to say.
Speaker 1: I don't know, But there were definitely employees who resented
Speaker 1: the credit that Fidel seemed to take for his role
Speaker 1: in these operations, and they seemed to feel that it
Speaker 1: wasn't entirely deserved. Now, Fidel's team did end up making
Speaker 1: some working prototypes of their iPod based phone. They relied
Speaker 1: on those click wheels I was talking about the click
Speaker 1: wheels of the original iPod design, and the interface was
Speaker 1: more than a little clunky, but they actually worked as phones.
Speaker 1: They were able to make calls with each other. So
Speaker 1: the very first phone calls made on an official but
Speaker 1: unreleased piece of Apple hardware happened to be on those prototypes. Now,
Speaker 1: those would never see the light of day as consumer products,
Speaker 1: but they did actually work. But everyone, particularly Steve Jobs,
Speaker 1: felt that they weren't the right product for the consumer market.
Speaker 1: Some of that hardware would find its way onto the iPhone, though,
Speaker 1: while the official iPhone would end up following the P
Speaker 1: two design philosophy of adopting that Mac os into a
Speaker 1: phone form factor, and and the actual use of it
Speaker 1: would be more on the P two side, the hardware
Speaker 1: that the phone was using to make calls came from
Speaker 1: that P one group. The actual uh you know, radio
Speaker 1: frequency chips that all came from P one. And so
Speaker 1: while there were two competing teams with an Apple to
Speaker 1: build a phone, ultimately both of them contributed to the
Speaker 1: actual finished product. I've got a lot more to say
Speaker 1: about this, but before I make another deep breath and
Speaker 1: launch it to yet another tirade, let's take a quick
Speaker 1: break to thank our sponsor. Meanwhile, you had the P
Speaker 1: two team who were still struggling to create a scaled
Speaker 1: down version of their approach. You know, they were running
Speaker 1: everything off of Mac os is, and they needed our
Speaker 1: actual Mac computers. They needed to create something that could
Speaker 1: work in a phone size. They showed off their ideas
Speaker 1: on the computers and then they had to figure out
Speaker 1: how are they going to port that experience into a
Speaker 1: handheld device, and this was a huge challenge. Now they
Speaker 1: mostly focused on that and not the phone elements of
Speaker 1: the device. Many on the P two side felt the
Speaker 1: phone feature was more of an add on really, and
Speaker 1: the interesting part of the challenge was creating a pocket
Speaker 1: sized computer with a touch interface. The Fidel team was
Speaker 1: using Lennox as its operating system, and this had limitations,
Speaker 1: but it was really really fast to boot up. So
Speaker 1: four stalls team was trying to adapt Mac os and
Speaker 1: put it on a handheld device, and they found that
Speaker 1: boot times were way longer, and that became a problem
Speaker 1: because you want something that's gonna pop on pretty quickly,
Speaker 1: and it became another area of focus. If the team
Speaker 1: couldn't solve that problem, their project would be just as
Speaker 1: doomed as those iPod phones were. Meanwhile, the hardware team
Speaker 1: began looking at other elements to add into the phone
Speaker 1: to give it more functionality, and that included things like
Speaker 1: an accelerometer so it could detect changes in orientation, which
Speaker 1: would allow the phone to switch between portrait and landscape modes.
Speaker 1: Also included an infrared light sensor, which the phone would
Speaker 1: use to detect when someone was lifting the phone to
Speaker 1: their face. The goal here was to both conserve battery
Speaker 1: life by dimming the screen whenever the phone came up
Speaker 1: to your ear, and also cut down on the possibility
Speaker 1: of an erroneous touch command. It would turn off the
Speaker 1: touch screen because otherwise, if you put the phone up
Speaker 1: to your face, you know your skin is gonna activate
Speaker 1: that capacity of touch screen and you're gonna start putting
Speaker 1: in weird commands left and right, and that's no good
Speaker 1: if you want to have a working phone. Remember, a
Speaker 1: capacity of touch screens rely upon changes in capacitance on
Speaker 1: along that really changes in uh electric potential when you
Speaker 1: get down to it across the screen and your points
Speaker 1: of contact or what allow that to happen. So by
Speaker 1: turning that off, you could actually put this up against
Speaker 1: your face and not have it activate that early inference
Speaker 1: sensor also had a problem detecting dark hair and skin,
Speaker 1: which was a bit of a pr nightmare for Apple
Speaker 1: back in the day. There's also an ambient light sensor
Speaker 1: designed to guide the iPhone into dynamically changing screen brightness,
Speaker 1: primarily again as a strategy to conserve battery life, will
Speaker 1: also improving the user experience. Now, all of this work
Speaker 1: continued for more than two years. The full development time
Speaker 1: of the iPhone, generally speaking, was two and a half years.
Speaker 1: It's two and a half years of people working practically
Speaker 1: around the clock in full secrecy, not able to tell
Speaker 1: anybody what they were working on. You know, they had
Speaker 1: to agree to work on it without even knowing what
Speaker 1: they were agreeing to, and then coming up with these
Speaker 1: solutions to very tough challenges. Shrinking down the technology to
Speaker 1: allow for multi touch touch screen ability, Creating the framework
Speaker 1: to allow an operating system like mac os to work
Speaker 1: on a handheld device, making sure that you design widgets
Speaker 1: that are operable on that operating system. Creating the user
Speaker 1: interface that is compelling and intuitive. All of these were
Speaker 1: monumental challenges, and most of them, again from the software side,
Speaker 1: came out of that P two group, with the P
Speaker 1: one group providing very valuable hardware support. It was an
Speaker 1: incredible time at Apple, and it's remarkable that the phone
Speaker 1: was even able to emerge out of this. You think
Speaker 1: about all of those challenges. If any of them had
Speaker 1: been too difficult for the team, there's no iPhone. If
Speaker 1: any group had dissolved because of these sorts of clashes
Speaker 1: that were going with an Apple, there's no iPhone. If
Speaker 1: Steve Jobs had lost confidence in this project, and there
Speaker 1: were plenty of opportunities for that to happen, there's no iPhone.
Speaker 1: So the fact that all of those pieces fell into place,
Speaker 1: it's incredibly remarkable to me. So designs continued to be proposed, tested, tweaked,
Speaker 1: or discarded, and the process was repeated over and over.
Speaker 1: Secrecy remained over the entire team over time for stalls,
Speaker 1: team was able to show that the Mac os pro
Speaker 1: approach was viable, but it took a huge amount of
Speaker 1: hard work to pull it all off, and eventually they
Speaker 1: had it. They shrunk it down, they had a touchscreen interface,
Speaker 1: they had the scale down but functional computer OS on
Speaker 1: a handheld device, and they had cellular connectivity, all fitting
Speaker 1: within the frame of an iPhone designed by Johnny I've
Speaker 1: the actual appearance of the device itself, and as two
Speaker 1: thousand seven approached, Apple prepared to unveil their super secret
Speaker 1: project to the rest of the world. Now that unveiling
Speaker 1: date when they announced the iPhone to the world was
Speaker 1: January nine, two thousand seven, and it took place during
Speaker 1: the now defunct Macworld event in San Francisco. Steve Jobs
Speaker 1: took the stage with the goal of shocking the audience,
Speaker 1: and you can watch this performance. There are plenty of
Speaker 1: videos on YouTube that capture either part of or the
Speaker 1: entirety of Steve Jobs presentation, and he was really coy
Speaker 1: at first. He said that Apple had in the past
Speaker 1: revolutionized technology a couple of different times. In he says,
Speaker 1: they launched the Macintosh computer and that changed home computing
Speaker 1: with the introduction developments like the graphic user interface and
Speaker 1: the mouse, which I point out Apple did not invent.
Speaker 1: The graphic user interface and the mouse were both in
Speaker 1: use at the Xerox Park Research and Development Center years
Speaker 1: before the Macintosh became a thing. But Apple was the
Speaker 1: company that was able to introduce them successfully into the
Speaker 1: consumer market. And really that's what matters is that they
Speaker 1: were able to make it work as a consumer product.
Speaker 1: Other people made it work first, like as an actually
Speaker 1: technologically it could work, but Apple was the one that
Speaker 1: could turn it into something you could sell to people.
Speaker 1: Then Jobs went on to point out that in two
Speaker 1: thousand one they launched the iPod and that marked another
Speaker 1: technological revolution. And again Apple did not invent the MP
Speaker 1: three player. They didn't even invent the portable MP three player,
Speaker 1: but honestly, before the iPod came out, very few people
Speaker 1: were using portable MP three players. In fact, more people
Speaker 1: were burning MP three's two C D and then using
Speaker 1: a portable CD player to listen to MP three's, which
Speaker 1: was not the most efficient way of doing things. It
Speaker 1: was iPod and the iTunes software suite that took the
Speaker 1: world by storm, particularly once iTunes was Windows compatible, and
Speaker 1: it ultimately caused the music industry to change. As a result,
Speaker 1: Apple had become a global player in the music industry,
Speaker 1: acting as the storefront for all the major record labels
Speaker 1: and attracting a new user base and a new form
Speaker 1: of revenue. Job said that he was ready to unveil
Speaker 1: three products at that Macworld that would also revolutionized technology.
Speaker 1: The first was a wide screen iPod with touch interface,
Speaker 1: which the crowd said yea. The second was a phone,
Speaker 1: and the crowd went bananas. And the third was an
Speaker 1: Internet communications device, and the crowd went mild. But then
Speaker 1: he repeated those three things a few times, you know,
Speaker 1: wide screen iPod, a phone, and the Internet communications device.
Speaker 1: He does this two or three times, scrolling through those
Speaker 1: icons very quickly, and he was teasing the audience, and
Speaker 1: they started to pick up on it, and then they
Speaker 1: started applauding, and Job says, get it. And of course
Speaker 1: he was talking about one single device that was all
Speaker 1: three of those things at the same time. It was
Speaker 1: an Apple phone that incorporated iPod capabilities and Internet capabilities
Speaker 1: all in one, and that really got the crowd going.
Speaker 1: Then Jobs poked the audience again and he said, here's
Speaker 1: what it looks like, and he showed an image that
Speaker 1: he claimed was the iPhone, but it was a joke.
Speaker 1: There was a photoshopped iPod with a rotary dial instead
Speaker 1: of the click wheel, and it had a monochromatic screen
Speaker 1: with the iPod classic style of it, and contacts were
Speaker 1: listed on it the way you would have song titles
Speaker 1: listed on a classic iPod. And this got a big laugh.
Speaker 1: But perhaps the really funny thing is that that could
Speaker 1: have been the iPhone. Tony Fadell's team was essentially working
Speaker 1: on that exact same idea. I mean, it wasn't gonna
Speaker 1: look precisely like that, but that was the basis for
Speaker 1: the iPod version of the iPhone, and here it was
Speaker 1: being used in a keynote presentation as a joke. So
Speaker 1: I think that was a bit of a disk to
Speaker 1: Fidel and a little bit of a nod to Forestall
Speaker 1: on his team as far as the strategies go, kind
Speaker 1: of saying to P two, like you guys had it right.
Speaker 1: P one was that was whackadoodle crazy, just wasn't gonna work.
Speaker 1: That's how I interpret it. I have no idea how
Speaker 1: anyone connected to the projects interpreted it at the time,
Speaker 1: but Steve Jobs spent more than an hour going through
Speaker 1: the phone's features in front of an appreciative audience, and
Speaker 1: as soon as he had said the word phone, he
Speaker 1: had them eating out of his hand. I encourage you
Speaker 1: to watch that presentation. Like I said, it's available on
Speaker 1: YouTube and you can listen to the crowd's response. Once
Speaker 1: Jobs says the word phone, they really do go completely bonkers. Now,
Speaker 1: before showing off what the iPhone really looked like, Jobs
Speaker 1: spent some time talking about the state of the art
Speaker 1: and smartphones as it stood in two thousand seven. Now,
Speaker 1: keep in mind, smartphones in two thousand seven, we're not
Speaker 1: really a consumer device. They were mostly reserved for again executives.
Speaker 1: So like the Blackberries, anyone who was a CEO had
Speaker 1: a BlackBerry because it was a convenient device where you
Speaker 1: could get email, communication and other types of communication that
Speaker 1: used secure servers, so you were pretty sure that your
Speaker 1: communications would remain private. They weren't going to get hacked
Speaker 1: out there. So it was a popular device. And then
Speaker 1: you had some bleeding edge technology folks, people who had
Speaker 1: a lot of disposable income, who would buy anything that
Speaker 1: was really cool and technological in their eyes. But for
Speaker 1: your average person, smartphones just weren't a thing. And Jobs
Speaker 1: was taking them to task and explaining why they were
Speaker 1: not really good consumer devices. He criticized the fact that
Speaker 1: they had physical keyboards. He said that that was a
Speaker 1: big thing. He took up of the landscape on the
Speaker 1: front of the phone. That was just a number. He
Speaker 1: threw out in some cases, maybe more than some cases,
Speaker 1: maybe a little less, but it did take up landscape
Speaker 1: on the front of the phones. And he said, the
Speaker 1: problem is the buttons are there whether you need them
Speaker 1: or not. Sometimes you don't need the buttons, but they're
Speaker 1: still there because it's part of the physical format of
Speaker 1: the phone. You can't get rid of them. He also
Speaker 1: pointed out that the physical keyboard represents a fixed interface
Speaker 1: you couldn't tweak it or add to that interface. Once
Speaker 1: you manufactured the phones, they were set. You couldn't add
Speaker 1: a button or change a button the tracking device, whether
Speaker 1: it was a rollerball or buttons or whatever it might be,
Speaker 1: it can't morph into anything else. And so you're forcing
Speaker 1: app developers and software developers to create stuff that works
Speaker 1: to the physical format of the device, not something that's adaptable.
Speaker 1: And that's how he justified and sold the audience on
Speaker 1: a touch screen only interface, because now you would have
Speaker 1: all the buttons displayed on a screen. The iPhone would
Speaker 1: only have virtual buttons. They can change into whatever you
Speaker 1: need based upon whatever function you're trying to execute, which
Speaker 1: it means it has an instant and in finite customization
Speaker 1: in a non fixed format. The only static button on
Speaker 1: the face of that original iPhone was the home button,
Speaker 1: at least on the face of it. There were other
Speaker 1: physical buttons, including the volume up and down and the
Speaker 1: power buttons, but those were on the side of the device,
Speaker 1: not on the face of the device. And Jobs also
Speaker 1: dismissed the concept of using a stylus as an interface device,
Speaker 1: which would kind of come back and haunt the company
Speaker 1: when the a later version of the iPad would come
Speaker 1: out with the stylist device for it, but Job said that,
Speaker 1: you know, the stylist is irritating. He teased the audience
Speaker 1: into thinking that perhaps the iPhone would launch with the stylist,
Speaker 1: but then he said, now you don't really want that
Speaker 1: because you have to take it out, you have to
Speaker 1: put it back. It's really easy to lose it. And
Speaker 1: so he decided that they would just go with a
Speaker 1: touchscreen interface that would just use your fingers. Now. He
Speaker 1: also went on to say that smartphones, the ones that
Speaker 1: preceded the iPhone, were not that great at what they
Speaker 1: were supposed to do. He said, you know, you get
Speaker 1: a smartphone not just to make calls, but to browse
Speaker 1: the web, to respond to emails, maybe look at photos,
Speaker 1: that kind of thing. And he said that smartphones just
Speaker 1: weren't very good at that, not the ones before the iPhone.
Speaker 1: He said, you could view phones along two axes. Along
Speaker 1: one axis is or access, I should say, is how
Speaker 1: smart the phone is. Along the other axis is how
Speaker 1: easy is it to use? And he argued, you know,
Speaker 1: cellphones are dumb, so they they're on the bottom of
Speaker 1: that axis, they're they're dumb. They're not smart, but they're
Speaker 1: about the middle of the road as far as ease
Speaker 1: of use goes. He doesn't provide any arguments to really
Speaker 1: support this and say why the cell phone is perhaps
Speaker 1: harder to use than say an iPhone, but you know,
Speaker 1: he he establishes, or at least he asserts that cell
Speaker 1: phones are kind of right in the medium of ease
Speaker 1: of use. And then he said, smartphones are kind of smart,
Speaker 1: but they are limited in that smartness. They aren't a
Speaker 1: will to do everything that you would want them to
Speaker 1: be able to do, and they are also really difficult
Speaker 1: to use. They're not intuitive, they're not easy for people
Speaker 1: to just pick up and understand. But the iPhone, he says,
Speaker 1: it's very smart and very easy to use, and then
Speaker 1: he would go on to explain why. But before I
Speaker 1: talk about that, let's take another quick break to thank
Speaker 1: our sponsor. So one of the features Jobs talked about
Speaker 1: in that presentation was one that I think a lot
Speaker 1: of people forget about these days because it's no longer
Speaker 1: a necessary step. But in that original iPhone, you had
Speaker 1: to do something that you used to do with iPods
Speaker 1: as well, which is that you had to sink them
Speaker 1: with a computer that was running iTunes. There was no
Speaker 1: sinking over the air. You had to actually connect it
Speaker 1: to a computer. So you would use iTunes to load
Speaker 1: in things like your contacts and your photos and then
Speaker 1: you could in them over to your phone. But you
Speaker 1: couldn't just do that over the air, so you had
Speaker 1: to actually put it in a docking station connected to
Speaker 1: your computer and then you could have the connection between
Speaker 1: the two. Uh, this would allow you to also sink
Speaker 1: things like emails and your calendar and that sort of stuff. Now,
Speaker 1: Steve Jobs went through and started showing off lots of
Speaker 1: features on the phone, mostly to the delight of the crowd.
Speaker 1: There are a few that kind of nothing, nothing fell
Speaker 1: completely flat. But there were a few that only had,
Speaker 1: like you know, a small amount of appreciation shown by
Speaker 1: the crowd, But a lot of them got some pretty
Speaker 1: sizable response. For example, one of the ones that got
Speaker 1: a big response was the resize feature of images that
Speaker 1: whole pinch and to zoom, although you're not really pinching
Speaker 1: to zoom, you're pinching to shrink. But the pinch to
Speaker 1: re size photos that gesture got a big reaction. Because
Speaker 1: multi touch was not really something that had found its
Speaker 1: way into a lot of consumer technology at this point.
Speaker 1: So to see a phone where you could use two
Speaker 1: fingers on the phone simultaneously and use a gesture to
Speaker 1: make a meaningful command happen, it was a big deal.
Speaker 1: And so seeing this simple gesture of resizing an image
Speaker 1: by moving your fingers apart or bringing them together got
Speaker 1: a big reaction from the crowd. He also showed off
Speaker 1: the fact that you could turn the phone ninety degrees
Speaker 1: and change it from portrait to landscape, and that the
Speaker 1: phone would detect that and make that change automatically. He
Speaker 1: showed off the iPod features because again this was a
Speaker 1: big thing when the iPhone first launched. The iPod was
Speaker 1: one of those really important cornerstones of the iPhones abilities.
Speaker 1: Now today we think of all the different apps that
Speaker 1: you can get on the iPhone, but this is before
Speaker 1: the app store had been created. The app store would
Speaker 1: not be a thing for another year. So the iPod
Speaker 1: was one of the really big features that Steve Jobs
Speaker 1: had to push when the iPhone first launched. So he
Speaker 1: showed off things like cover flow, the fact that your
Speaker 1: phone could actually show all those cover albums. You could
Speaker 1: zoom through it just like you could on the iTunes
Speaker 1: application on your Mac, but now it was on your phone.
Speaker 1: This is before it was available on things like the
Speaker 1: iPod line. And he even played some music during that presentation,
Speaker 1: including some songs by the Beatles, by Green Day, by
Speaker 1: Bob Dylan, and by my favorite of all the ones
Speaker 1: he chose, the Talking Heads. Good choice, Deep Jobs. I
Speaker 1: also really like the talking Heads now. He also showed
Speaker 1: how you can make calls with the iPhone, arguably a
Speaker 1: very important feature in something called a phone, but he
Speaker 1: showed that the the the contact list was easy to navigate,
Speaker 1: easy for you to activate a phone call. It also
Speaker 1: showed off that the iPhone had contextual recognition of phone numbers.
Speaker 1: He had been they would show off at Google Maps,
Speaker 1: which was one of the more important launch partners with
Speaker 1: the iPhone. He even had Eric Schmidt of Google at
Speaker 1: the time come out and talk about Google's involvement with
Speaker 1: partnering with Apple on this. He also had Yahoo come
Speaker 1: out because Yahoo was doing a really important push notification
Speaker 1: initiative with Apple when the iPhone launched, and in Google Maps,
Speaker 1: Steve Jobs showed off a function where he pulled up
Speaker 1: the Moscony Center, which is where the event was taking
Speaker 1: place and did a search for Starbucks, and it populated
Speaker 1: the map with Starbucks that were in the area, and
Speaker 1: he clicked on one and the phone number was included
Speaker 1: and he was able to make a call to that
Speaker 1: Starbucks right away, where then he asked for three thousand
Speaker 1: lattes and then said sorry, wrong number and hung up
Speaker 1: on them. And it was an actual Starbucks employee, and
Speaker 1: it was both hilarious and I kind of wonder what
Speaker 1: that employe's day was like, Like, did they eventually find
Speaker 1: out that you were the one who talked to Steve
Speaker 1: Jobs who was demonstrating the iPhones calling ability publicly for
Speaker 1: the first time ever? That person is now a part
Speaker 1: of history and we don't even know their name, or
Speaker 1: at least I don't. I'm sure someone does. I actually
Speaker 1: didn't think to research that when I was looking this up,
Speaker 1: so I say it very cavalier like when I say,
Speaker 1: and we don't even know her name. Uh. But that's
Speaker 1: partly because I didn't look it up. That's my bad, guys,
Speaker 1: that's on me. Let's tell you on me. But he
Speaker 1: also showed other integrations of widgets, including like the weather widget,
Speaker 1: a stocks in it uh widget, and when he pulled
Speaker 1: out the stocks. Apple stock happened to be up while
Speaker 1: other tech stocks were down, so that led to some
Speaker 1: witty banter with the audience. And again this was all
Speaker 1: before the App Store, so there were only a few
Speaker 1: apps that were actually packaged with the iPhone or widgets
Speaker 1: as they were calling them. Meanwhile, backstage, while Steve Jobs
Speaker 1: is up on stage presenting to the crowd, backstage you
Speaker 1: had the various departments and teams who were responsible for
Speaker 1: all of these different features, from the interface to the
Speaker 1: widget implementation to phone calls. Every single team had representatives backstage,
Speaker 1: and they were all flipping out. They were all so
Speaker 1: on edge, so stressed out because they were all nervous
Speaker 1: about any sort of glitches or crashes that could happen,
Speaker 1: and partly because during the development process they kept running
Speaker 1: into stability issues. I mean, they were all working on
Speaker 1: individual elements, and then when you bring all those elements together,
Speaker 1: then often that creates stability problems because as one group
Speaker 1: is really focused on their part of the overall picture,
Speaker 1: they don't necessarily know how their features are going to
Speaker 1: impact other really important elements of that same product. So
Speaker 1: if you've got different divisions working on very important features
Speaker 1: within the same product, and then you put them all together,
Speaker 1: you're gonna find some stuff that doesn't work together so well.
Speaker 1: And it meant that there was a lot of q
Speaker 1: A work to correct that. And actually on stage it
Speaker 1: turned out Steve Jobs was using lots of different phones.
Speaker 1: He wasn't using just one phone to show all this off.
Speaker 1: It looked like he was, but the phone the phones
Speaker 1: were sitting on a lectern at one end of the
Speaker 1: stage and the electron was turned at an angle so
Speaker 1: that you could not see that there were multiple phones
Speaker 1: on the lectern. And Steve Jobs was following a very
Speaker 1: specific script and it meant picking up particular phones to
Speaker 1: show off particular features. And after he was done showing
Speaker 1: off the feature, he would set the phone down. He
Speaker 1: would go back out to center stage, show a couple
Speaker 1: of slides, talk a little bit more before going on
Speaker 1: to the next feature to show another demo where he
Speaker 1: would pick up the next phone. And each phone had
Speaker 1: been queued up for its specific feature so that it
Speaker 1: would minimize the possibility of the phone crashing because of
Speaker 1: some had ability issue between these various features. So it's
Speaker 1: a little sneaky. There's a little shell game going on
Speaker 1: with him showing off different phones, but they wanted to
Speaker 1: guarantee as best they could an excellent demonstration. They were
Speaker 1: so concerned with the perception of this brand new device,
Speaker 1: and they were positioning themselves as a Maverick company redefining
Speaker 1: the phone space, so they couldn't really afford to have
Speaker 1: a disaster happen on stage. And trust me, those kind
Speaker 1: of disasters happen all the time in these product demonstrations.
Speaker 1: So backstage you have these teams. They're all flipping out.
Speaker 1: They're watching very carefully. They're all hoping that Steve remembers
Speaker 1: to pick up the correct phone to show off each
Speaker 1: individual demo. They really hope he doesn't put the phones
Speaker 1: down in the wrong order so that he doesn't know
Speaker 1: which one to pick up for the next bit. They're
Speaker 1: all concerned about this, and so to to let off
Speaker 1: some steam, the team leaders decide it upon a drinking game,
Speaker 1: and the rules of the drinking game were this, whenever
Speaker 1: Steve Jobs would talk about a piece of the iPhone
Speaker 1: that your team was in charge of, you took a shot.
Speaker 1: Some of those team leaders oversaw multiple departments and they
Speaker 1: got what I like to call totes tore up y'all.
Speaker 1: They were seeing little iPhones dancing around their heads by
Speaker 1: the end of that presentation. Some of them were pretty
Speaker 1: deep in their cups by the end. Now, the demo
Speaker 1: actually ended with Jobs showing off multiple functions in one demonstration,
Speaker 1: so this was really the moment where it all could
Speaker 1: have fallen apart. He was using the music app to
Speaker 1: play music and then he makes a phone call and
Speaker 1: it pauses the music, and he just wanted to make
Speaker 1: sure that all of these different features were going to
Speaker 1: be demonstrated as seamless, and everyone backstage was just holding
Speaker 1: their breath the whole time. But it worked and the
Speaker 1: crowd loved it. According to the t SAM, this was
Speaker 1: the first time they ever saw all those features working
Speaker 1: together without the system crashing, which is crazy to see
Speaker 1: the first success in a public demonstration. That is beyond insane.
Speaker 1: You don't do that typically. You make absolutely certain that
Speaker 1: you give every chance of success before you go out
Speaker 1: there and show it off in public. But it worked,
Speaker 1: so it paid off. In one demo, Jobs showed off
Speaker 1: the delete function and contacts and he swiped on the
Speaker 1: contact to knock it away. And this was an interesting
Speaker 1: moment because the contact he swiped to delete was Tony
Speaker 1: Baloney Fidel, which might have been foreshadowing, as Fidel was
Speaker 1: kind of on his way out of the company. Now,
Speaker 1: don't go crying for a good old Tony. He did
Speaker 1: just fine. Tony Fidel would go on to found another
Speaker 1: little company called Nest, the smart thermostatic company, which Google
Speaker 1: eventually acquired. Oh and Google, by the way, only had
Speaker 1: a role to play in the iPhone launch. Not only
Speaker 1: the Google end up acquiring Tony Fidel's company, Nest, Google
Speaker 1: also would eventually acquire Motorola. Remember that was the company
Speaker 1: that Apple had thought about acquiring back in two thousand
Speaker 1: three and then decided against it. Google actually did buy them,
Speaker 1: or at least part of the Motorola company, not that
Speaker 1: it went very far. Google will eventually acquire everything, it seems,
Speaker 1: particularly now that it's alphabet now. The iPhone would not
Speaker 1: go on sale until June twenty nine, six months later,
Speaker 1: with a T and T as the partnered carrier in
Speaker 1: the United States. By November two thousand seven, just a
Speaker 1: couple of months after it started going on sale, Apple
Speaker 1: had sold one point four million iPhones. It was a
Speaker 1: legitimate success. The original two models of the iPhone were
Speaker 1: a four gigabyte and an eight gigabyte model, and they
Speaker 1: were priced at four hundred dollars and five hundred, respectively.
Speaker 1: The App Store would not launch until July two thousand eight,
Speaker 1: and it launched along with the iPhone three G, which
Speaker 1: was not the third generation iPhone despite its name. It
Speaker 1: was the second generation iPhone, but it was compatible with
Speaker 1: the three G cellular networks, so three G was available
Speaker 1: back in two thousand seven, but Steve Jobs's team had
Speaker 1: decided that they were going to stick with the Edge
Speaker 1: network service, which was slower data not less data throughput,
Speaker 1: I should say, so you would take would take longer
Speaker 1: to load up web pages under the Edge network than
Speaker 1: the three gene network, but that became typical for Apple.
Speaker 1: They were always slow to jump on new technologies. They
Speaker 1: wanted to make sure that things were in good condition
Speaker 1: before they also joined suit, and they wanted to make
Speaker 1: sure that the user experience remained top notch. They had
Speaker 1: very high standards for what the user experience should be.
Speaker 1: They also held off on some other important features that
Speaker 1: you could find in other phones around that time, things
Speaker 1: like GPS sensors. There was no GPS sensor in the
Speaker 1: original iPhone, and that frustrated some people, but most people
Speaker 1: were just blown away by how innovative the iPhone was
Speaker 1: compared to all the smartphones that came before it, and
Speaker 1: Apple really wanted to make sure that whatever experience they
Speaker 1: provided was good and that it wasn't going to kill
Speaker 1: the battery, because the more stuff you add, the more
Speaker 1: demand on the battery there is, and if the battery
Speaker 1: drains in three hours, that's not a good experience. Now,
Speaker 1: that doesn't really touch on the fact that the A,
Speaker 1: T and T experience in those early iPhone days it
Speaker 1: was not fantastic, particularly in markets like San Francisco, where
Speaker 1: it became difficult to even complete a phone call. That
Speaker 1: would plague the iPhone early on in its days. But
Speaker 1: that's a story for a different time. Like I said,
Speaker 1: we'll eventually have to dive into that Apple A T
Speaker 1: and T relationship, but now is not the time to
Speaker 1: do it. One thing I want to touch on before
Speaker 1: I go is that the iPhone has had a remarkable
Speaker 1: impact on the way we navigate the web and the
Speaker 1: way we consume content on the web, whether it's video,
Speaker 1: which also the first iPhone couldn't capture video That would
Speaker 1: come later, whether it's video or audio or web pages,
Speaker 1: whatever it may be. The iPhone had an immeasurable impact
Speaker 1: on the way we consume information on the web. And
Speaker 1: I can say that as someone who has worked in
Speaker 1: web content since the days of the iPhone launch. I mean,
Speaker 1: I worked at How Stuff Works in February two thousand seven,
Speaker 1: so I've seen how this has changed over the years.
Speaker 1: We have seen transformations in the web space based upon
Speaker 1: mobile browsing. Before the iPhone, you didn't have to worry
Speaker 1: mobile browsing because it was a terrible experience, so no
Speaker 1: one was doing it. Everyone was using their laptops or
Speaker 1: desktops to navigate the web. No one was whipping out
Speaker 1: their phone and doing it at least not more than
Speaker 1: a little, you know, distraction. And so your web design
Speaker 1: was all based on the laptop experience or the desktop experience.
Speaker 1: It wasn't based on mobile. That meant that things like
Speaker 1: advertising was based more on the laptop or desktop experience.
Speaker 1: But then mobile comes along and it's a completely different
Speaker 1: way of uh engaging with web content. People began to
Speaker 1: optimize their experiences for phone delivery because while you could
Speaker 1: use something like an iPhone or later an Android phone
Speaker 1: to look at web pages in the desktop formats, and
Speaker 1: in some cases that's the preferable way of doing it
Speaker 1: because you get more features that way. It wasn't the
Speaker 1: easiest to navigate, so a lot of people began to
Speaker 1: make optimized mobile device versions of their website. That changed
Speaker 1: the way that advertising is displayed, which in turn changes
Speaker 1: the way you monetize your web content. So just as
Speaker 1: Apple had really affected the music industry with a launch
Speaker 1: of the iPod, and it was incredibly disruptive, so too
Speaker 1: were they disruptive with the way the web delivers content
Speaker 1: and the way the web generates revenue. And suddenly you
Speaker 1: had all these companies that had a pretty good handle
Speaker 1: on how web content and revenue would work thrown into
Speaker 1: the deep end. Everything the rules were changing overnight, and
Speaker 1: it meant that you had to come up with new strategies,
Speaker 1: which sometimes lead to terrible decisions, because when you're thrown
Speaker 1: into the deep end, you're you're grasping at anything, and
Speaker 1: sometimes the thing you grasp ends up not being a
Speaker 1: great solution. It might be an anchor the striking you
Speaker 1: under the water instead of a life vest that will
Speaker 1: keep you afloat so the impact on the web in general,
Speaker 1: it is really hard to put into words because it
Speaker 1: was fundamentally an enormous transformation. And I can say that
Speaker 1: personally because I've seen it in my career, and so
Speaker 1: you might not really think of it as a user necessarily,
Speaker 1: or maybe you do, but many people don't really think
Speaker 1: of it from a user perspective. You know, you're just
Speaker 1: you're just navigating to whatever website or web app or
Speaker 1: whatever it may be, on whatever device happens to be
Speaker 1: in your hands at the moment, whether it's a tablet computer,
Speaker 1: which Apple also was able to make a viable consumer product.
Speaker 1: Before the iPad, very few people owned a tablet computer
Speaker 1: as a consumer product. There were a few industries that
Speaker 1: depended upon it, but very few consumers. Or if it's
Speaker 1: a smart device like a tell, a smartphone, or or
Speaker 1: some other like maybe a smart watch, whatever it may be,
Speaker 1: it really changed things in a big, big way. And
Speaker 1: we're still seeing that play out. We still see companies
Speaker 1: struggling with ways to deal with that so that they're
Speaker 1: providing a good user experience but also able to monetize content,
Speaker 1: because once you get to a point where you can
Speaker 1: no longer do either of those things together, the web
Speaker 1: dies if people don't like the experience, they stopped using it,
Speaker 1: and you don't make any money. If you can't figure
Speaker 1: out a good way to monetize it, you're not making
Speaker 1: any money, and you can't continue to create content because
Speaker 1: that costs money. So it's interesting because it's both a boon.
Speaker 1: It meant that you saw traffic numbers increase substantially across
Speaker 1: lots of different websites, but it's also a bit of
Speaker 1: a curse because you can't necessarily count on those numbers
Speaker 1: to translate into something you can monetize easily. And it's
Speaker 1: been a really interesting experience to watch how that has
Speaker 1: played out over the last several years now. The iPhone itself, obviously,
Speaker 1: has continued to evolve and flourish after the debut of
Speaker 1: the iPhone, each success of iPhone adding more features and
Speaker 1: some of them getting much more advanced, some of them
Speaker 1: changing dramatically in the form factor, not so much that
Speaker 1: it's unrecognizable as an iPhone, but certainly changing quite a
Speaker 1: bit from that original design. And I am very eager
Speaker 1: to see where it goes next. Even though I don't
Speaker 1: use an iPhone, I am not an iPhone user. I'm
Speaker 1: an Android, meaning I use Android. I am not a replicant.
Speaker 1: And if the tortoise were turned on its back, I
Speaker 1: would turn it over. I wouldn't just stand there and
Speaker 1: not turn it over. I don't care what the void
Speaker 1: comp says. Now. In the future, I'll probably do an
Speaker 1: episode where I go into more detail about the evolution
Speaker 1: of the iPhone. We've talked about the origin, but what
Speaker 1: how did it change? What were the decisions, what were
Speaker 1: the battles that were fought within Apple as the iPhone
Speaker 1: developed into what it is today? How did it change?
Speaker 1: What Steve Jobs passed away? How much influence did Jobs
Speaker 1: have on the iPhone models that came out after his death?
Speaker 1: And at what point would you say this is the
Speaker 1: first iPhone that was not influenced by Steve Jobs. Those
Speaker 1: are great questions, and I'm sure I'll answer them in
Speaker 1: a future episode, but for now, it's time to sign off.
Speaker 1: If you guys have any suggestions for topics I should
Speaker 1: cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, whether it's a
Speaker 1: specific technology or a very specific product, or a person
Speaker 1: in tech, or just a concept in technology in general,
Speaker 1: let me know what you want to hear. You can
Speaker 1: do that by sending me an email. Unlike getting email,
Speaker 1: it makes me feel important. The address is tech Stuff
Speaker 1: at how stuff ors dot com, or you can drop
Speaker 1: me a line on your favorite social media platform as
Speaker 1: long as that's either Facebook or Twitter, because that's where
Speaker 1: I'm at, and the handle you should use for both
Speaker 1: of those places is tech stuff H s W. And finally,
Speaker 1: you can watch me record this kind of stuff live
Speaker 1: at twitch dot tv slash tech Stuff. I record every
Speaker 1: Wednesday and Friday, or most every Wednesday and Friday, and
Speaker 1: you can go to twitch dot tv slash text stuff
Speaker 1: to see the schedule there. And I'll talk to you
Speaker 1: again really soon