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Comment by rdsnsca | Hacker News Reader

The iPad was, for sure, the iPhone is a spinoff from the iPad project.

There were rumors about “the true video iPod” by mid 2005 based on patent filings - a touch screen iPod that was 3.5 inches. People didn’t know back then that they were really getting leaks about the iPhone. The earliest mention I can find via a quick Google search is this.

https://www.theregister.com/2006/02/09/apple_readies_video_i...

"Virtual clickwheel"

Clearly wasn't a very accurate source. Unless apple did actually consider adding it at one point.

Doesn’t that sound like a way to replace the mechanical wheel with a touchscreen?

The UI was easy to change. But the form factor abd the size of the screen (3.5 inches), was pretty much spot on. What are the chances that the rumor mill would get the size just right two years before the iPhone was announced if it Apple hadn’t already basically decided on a form factor by then?

Even with the iPad, the first interface ideas were to just have a big iPhone interface with no accordances to the larger screen. (Source: various interviews of former employees on the Debug podcast).

Since the iPhone was released in 2007 and the iPad in 2010, I’m going to suggest your timeline is backwards.

The iPad development supposedly started before the iPhone even though it was released after.

"Jobs later said that Apple had begun developing the iPad before the iPhone.[27][28]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPad#History

Yeah, they'd messed with a clunky tablet for years. Then they finally developed a glass display that scrolled with touch and thought, "This would be better in a phone." I don't know if that really qualifies the iPhone as a "spinoff" of the Folio, or the Folio as even a predecessor to the iPad.

Folio was going to ship, but Jobs canceled it because it wasn’t good enough yet but let the team adapt it to a phone.

And I worked on the Pen Mac about fifteen years prior, so with that and Newton, Apple was working on the concept forever.

Upvoted you since you probably didn’t know and I didn’t want to see you buried for not knowing something, but Jobs did talk about how iPhones were a spin-off from an internal tablet project. At some point Apple realized that the tech they were developing for tablets would also work really well in a phone, and they shifted priorities to making a phone first.

As I understand it, a semi regular dinner guest that worked at Microsoft, the husband of his wife’s friend or something like that, came around with a Windows tablet PC after they hit the market and was talking about how great it was and Apple didn’t have anything like this. Jobs saw it for the crap it was (touchscreen Windows was pretty bad back then) and to shut this guy up, put together a team at Apple to work on developing tablets. This was the project that would eventually spawn iPhones and later, iPads.

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