An excerpt from “The One Device” – origin story of the iPhone
theverge.com
theverge.com
The excerpt doesn't give a strong rationale for why people had to give up nights and weekends.
It wasn't to protect apple from bankrupcy, because thanks to the ipod and imac apple was already a profitable business.
It wasn't because phones were a threat to the ipod, because carriers had the phone market locked up so tight that you couldn't do a decent mp3 player on a phone. The ROKR was ample evidence for that.
It wasn't because competitors were on the horizon, because all phones at the time were terrible, and would have remained so without the iphone.
As far as I can tell from the article, the pressure cooker was created deliberately, by having competing teams and top-down imposed deadlines, but it still doesn't explain why it was necessary to do things like that. Was it all due to Steve's personality? If that's the case, how is modern-day apple? Is the autonomous car project still this crazy pressure cooker, or can people go home over the weekend to spend time with their families?
http://archive.wired.com/gadgets/wireless/magazine/16-02/ff_...
"And what would AT&T think? After a year and a half of secret meetings, Jobs had finally negotiated terms with the wireless division of the telecom giant (Cingular at the time) to be the iPhone's carrier. In return for five years of exclusivity, roughly 10 percent of iPhone sales in AT&T stores, and a thin slice of Apple's iTunes revenue, AT&T had granted Jobs unprecedented power. He had cajoled AT&T into spending millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours to create a new feature, so-called visual voicemail, and to reinvent the time-consuming in-store sign-up process. He'd also wrangled a unique revenue-sharing arrangement, garnering roughly $10 a month from every iPhone customer's AT&T bill. On top of all that, Apple retained complete control over the design, manufacturing, and marketing of the iPhone. Jobs had done the unthinkable: squeezed a good deal out of one of the largest players in the entrenched wireless industry. Now, the least he could do was meet his deadlines."
It's also worth being ... cautious about this account. Many of the competing / complementary perspectives aren't represented, often because they are still working there.
First, it wasn't about the hardware. Other companies (Nokia, HTC, Samsung, Motorola) were doing competitive hardware.
It was all about the software and Apple was so far ahead of everyone else, that if they took 1 year more to ship, they would still be far ahead of everyone else.
As history shows, the only credible competition was from Microsoft and Android. RIM/Nokia/Samsung/HTC/Motorola (all significant players) couldn't replicate iOS no matter how much time they would take.
First iPhone was released on June 2007 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone)
Windows Phone was released on Nov 2010, 3 years later (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Phone).
First Android was released on September 2008 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_version_history) and took a long time to achieve design quality parity with iOS.
Apple had plenty lead time.
How did they know that for certain?
If you can afford to sleep in that late most likely you don't mind covering that time at night instead.
A good strategy would be to be an Apple employee working on a project that receives less scrutiny and pressure and stay for a few years after iPhone launch, to get most of the benefit of the rising stock price without the crappy work environment.
And even at the time, many people ridiculed the iphone.
The right response is always "Ok boss, but you're gonna have to give up 30% more money to my salary".
Some fallacies are universal: "If A then B, therefore because not A, not B" is an example. But that one seems extremely contextual. It denies that "If A then B" is possible.
I wonder how many of the unmasked Ashley Madison users were iPhone users :P
On the other hand, they did make the iPhone, so I guess this is a lesson to project managers and executives that death marches do occasionally pay off.
However, I believe most death march projects don't end as something influential.
Obviously it's hard to know the answer to that, but I suspect it's yes.
I often thumb typed on a Nokia N800 for example.
Thing about resistive screens though is that it has much better precision. Thus one could operate checkboxes and scrollbars that were downright tiny.
And speaking of scrollbars, i kinda miss them. I wonder how many times i have tried to scroll or pan and something makes the capacitive sensor think i instead pressed some element. Having distinct scrollbars avoid the ambiguity of input.
And anyway, to whatever extent you can type on a tiny keyboard or select a tiny checkbox with your finger, it comes down to software, because your fingertip isn't precise even if the screen is.
Scroll bars also suck for touch devices because they have to be so absurdly wide to be usable.
This is from 1995.
For a long time he was against making a phone, other executives had to convince him that Apple should make the phone, even doing risky things like running "secret" projects exploring possible technologies for the phone.
Job's talent seems to be more of a taskmaster: once he decided that phone needs to be done, he was able to organize people to do it, even if it meant great personal sacrifices.
But the whole "our CEO is a genius, the gift of the gods", is a standard trick in branding luxury products. Actually, one of the more interesting stories behind the iPhone would be of the marketing behind it. But i'll guess we'll never hear it, because there's always new stuff to sell.
He was also a fantastic editor. He was very good at saying "no" to things whether it was because they were just bad ideas, weren't fully done yet, were missing something important, where especially when some stuff that other people thought was important wasn't and needed to be removed.
Now we know he didn't always get it right, he could be swayed by personal emotions such as when he wanted to keep the iPod off Windows.
But clearly he got it right a number of times where it really mattered.
He was against a phone for good reasons, then when his employees solved those problems he became its greatest advocate, to the point of threatening to fire Schiller if he didn't get on the iPhone train.
I remember using a Sony Ericsson Symbian UIQ phone in 2006 (the M600i IIRC, Jobs was rumored use an earlier phone in the same OS series, the P800), where they had put the action buttons at the bottom of the screen at a finger-friendly size. I remember often quickly using my fingers to do common tasks, but it was a resistive screen and they still used scroll bars and tiny checkboxes. In hindsight it shouldn't have been that difficult to make the leap to finger-first, but it was Apple who did it.
I think you mean LG: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada
Apple made the first successful one. Which seems to be their knack, after all.
Multitouch was being developed by a startup that Apple gobbled up.
I hear that a lot, and I'm not convinced.
I think people needed to have a strong motivation to get used to software keyboards. I think most companies implementing one would have screwed it up (see: RIM).
So you'd need a compelling use case and compelling software to force that sea change. I find it plausible that, absent Apple's existence, we'd be using clunky GUIs on desktop computers and even clunkier GUIs with physical keyboards on smartphones.
Much like laptops still being shipped with floppy drives and VGA ports years after those technologies were effectively dead.
Android was still getting built with a Blackberry-style physical keyboard at that point.
It feels like if it wasn't for a few researchers in the interaction lab we wouldn't have gotten software keyboards for a while.
We could have had a long detour through Blackberry-like devices with keyboards. But comprehensive smartphones in some form were to be expected as the electronics got cheap enough.
I find it plausible that, absent Apple's existence, we'd be using clunky GUIs on desktop computers
Without Apple, we probably would have had something like lower-priced Sun or Apollo workstations on the desktop. For most of the 1980s and 1990s, people at well-funded companies did have Sun workstations on the desktop. With, though, crappy GUIs. XWindows is from that era. It would never have occurred to Sun to hire Susan Kare.
Sun didn't have the volume to support software companies. Interleaf had something better than Microsoft Word by 1983, before the Mac had even shipped. But their business model was to bundle a few Sun workstations and a laser printer with the software, for about $60K. Software for Sun machines tended to cost a few thousand dollars per seat.
Digital cameras have killer hardware, but they still have the same crappy menu systems they had when they were first introduced in the 90's.
You absolutely need extremely rare talent to produce original & creative ideas like what was used in the iPhone, and the digital camera makers have absolutely none of that talent.
Yes, the world would continue to use clunky desktop-oriented WindowsCE/Blackberry/Treo phones today without Apple. They really were original and unique to the industry in how they completely changed its course.
Also, never take advice from Phil Schiller.
I have an older Canon digital SLR, and while the rear LCD isn't as big, bright, or high res as newer cameras, and it lacks touch support, I generally find the menu system pretty nice. It's fairly information dense and has dedicated buttons for a whole host of features so that you don't have to go digging through a bunch of hamburger menus.
The menus and dials are for expert users who don't want a more simplified interface because it's more efficient for them to learn the dense interface that novices find confusing.
>>I think most companies implementing one would have screwed it up (see: RIM).
Little keyboards were a dead end (I think I remember reading contemporaneous articles noting the fundamental problem of "little keyboard -> little screen" and the little screen being just too small. The real issue wasn't the little keyboard per se, it was the little screen). I think Apple had the advantage in creating software keyboards, because they had the ability to tightly coordinate the hardware and software development. They also the capital to take the risk.
I suppose RIM also did hardware and software, but their software was less sophisticated than Apple's.
>>I find it plausible that, absent Apple's existence, we'd be using clunky GUIs on desktop computers and even clunkier GUIs with physical keyboards on smartphones.
Wasn't that sort of my point? My point was that only Apple was positioned to do the iPhone in the mid-2000s.
I think the player who might have made the leap was Google, who was experimenting with touchscreen devices, but they aren't the boldest company when it comes to hardware.
I think we might agree on that?
I guess my main thesis rests on the idea that an iPhone is more like a tiny computer than it's like a circa-2007 cell phone. It was easier for Apple to make a tiny Mac with phone capabilities than it would have been for a handset manufacturer to retrofit PC-like functionality onto their handsets. Apple was already the master of the Mac ecosystem, which they could leverage however they wanted. Handset manufacturers would have had to acquire a computer platform or partner with a computer company (which, I guess, is the story of Android).
the "keyboard" were simply a bunch of pins that prodded the screen in the appropriate places. If you wanted to you could simply remove the cover and just poke the screen directly.
This applied to dropping the hardware keyboard on the iPhone.
It also applied to something like the lack of printing on the original iPad. This was a big critique that a lot of people had when the iPad first came out. Now, even though there are printing options, most people don't really care any longer.
Actually, the Palm Pilot from the 2000's was an alternative to both - sort of a touch screen, but used a stylus and its own script for writing characters.
All the cell phone companies had their own proprietary OS.
Android was getting built at literally the same time.
Symbian was used by dozens of manufacturers and came in different flavors. S60 for standard smartphones, S80/90 for communicators, UIQ for touchscreens.
Windows Mobile was also widely used and had an edition for phones using a touchscreen and one without them.
Hundreds of millions were sold before the iPhone even came out.
And i swear i could finger type on the 770 before iPhone showed up, even though it was a resistive screen.
https://www.technobuffalo.com/2011/10/27/android-before-and-...
Yeah, in 2000 I assumed that phones would end up like that, because keys took too much space for something that fits in your pocket. I was an enthusiastic fan of Windows Mobile when it came out, and I've been on iOS since the first iPod Touch.
It's a very American point of view, since Nokia never made a lot of progress with their smartphones in the US, like Blackberry did, and their phones were strickly email and business.
I had a touchscreen phone that could hold hours of video or hundreds of songs, send instant messages, browse the web, get apps, use WiFi... In 2004. In 2005 you could alreday get GPS, more versatile hardware and better accessories.
The iPhone did a huge cultural change, and pushed UI and apps into the future. But pretending that it was the first one to make icons like phones today use or that it created the first computer-phone like the excerpt says - is nonsense.
The iPhone with such a large shift from the things that existed before that even though they had many of the features in different forms, it's a bit hard to look at them and say "that's the same thing as a smartphone" instead of "that's a really fancy feature phone" or "that's a PDA with a radio stuck on it".
> The software engineers saw P2 not as a chance to build a phone, but as an opportunity to use a phone-shaped device as a Trojan horse for a much more complex kind of mobile computer.
Do they mean... a PDA? Apple's execution and OS is amazing but the idea they invented mobile computing is insane. Palm created that market, then Windows Mobile did, then Apple did, then Android did.
RIM was closest but even they missed the real market with their focus on email and physical keyboards.