That was great! I didn't realise that the iPhone had been around for such a,
relatively, short
time!
Jewel
--------------------------------------------------
From: "Simon" <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, June 27, 2017 5:40 PM
To: <[email protected]>
Subject: The iPhone's secret history: How Steve Jobs went from rejecting to
embracing the future
The iPhone's secret history: How Steve Jobs went from rejecting to embracing
> the future
>
> Home | Day 6 | CBC Radio
>
> Former Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs shows off the first generation iPhone on
> January 9, 2007. (Kimberly White/Reuters)
>
> The iPhone's secret history: How Steve Jobs went from rejecting to embracing
> the future
>
> Riffed from the Headlines, June 24, 2017.
> by Brent Bambury
>
> In the hours before Apple released its first iteration of the iPhone on June
> 29, 2007, fans were already lining up to buy one.
>
> They'd not yet held an iPhone, but they'd seen the commercials. They loved
> the blank slate of the touch screen and the uncluttered interface.
>
> Many of them already owned an iPod and that had changed the way they
> consumed music.
>
> They sensed the iPhone was transformative.
>
> They liked the style and ergonomics of Apple's stuff, and they'd listened to
> Steve Jobs who, six months earlier, boasted to the world, "we're going to
> reinvent the phone."
>
> Apple employees greet the first customers in line at the Apple Store for the
> launch and sale of the new iPhone 6 on Friday, Sept 19, 2014, in Palo Alto,
> Calif. (Tony Avelar/The Associated Press)
>
> Today, a billion iPhones have made their way into the world and those
> devices transformed people's relationship with data, communications, music
> and navigation.
>
> The iPhone changed Apple too.
>
> In 2007, the company was sitting on $6.39 billion in cash. By 2016, that
> number
> was $237.59 billion.
>
> The iPhone is arguably the most popular product of all time, and one of the
> most successful. But Apple engineers had to work hard to make it successful,
> and they had to convince a lot of sceptics that it was a good move.
>
> One of the most sceptical was Steve Jobs.
>
> Steve Jobs didn't want to make a phone
>
> "The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone" by Brian Merchant was
> released June 2017. (Hachette Book Group)
>
> Jobs never wanted his company to be a phone maker. "Jobs was really, really
> against the idea of trying to bring Apple into this market," Brian Merchant
> told me on Day 6.
>
> Merchant is an editor at Motherboard and the author of the new book The One
> Device: The Secret History of the iPhone. He says Jobs was scornful of the
> regulatory obligations attached to making mobile phones.
>
> "It's notoriously difficult to work with companies like Verizon," Merchant
> says. "At the time, they had an immense amount of control over the handsets
> that manufacturers could make. They would deliver these giant manuals that
> said, 'you
> have to have this, you have to have that.'"
>
> "And it was totally anathema to the style that Jobs had adopted designing
> products at Apple, where every single thing had to fit his window and cater
> to his ideas."
>
> "Jobs said 'Meh!" And just kind of, you know, wrote it off."
> - Brian Merchant
>
> Courting Steve Jobs
>
> Introducing Steve Jobs to new ideas, and getting him to buy into initiatives
> that weren't his own, required careful management and timing.
>
> He was exacting and mercurial and prone to being dismissive.
>
> But a group of Apple engineers working independently were prototyping a
> technology they thought may be useful enough to eventually present to Jobs.
>
> It was a form of direct manipulation: touchscreens.
>
> "They had hacked together this rig to make this sort of prototype of
> touchscreen technology work," Merchant says. "It was really the size of a
> table. They were just really kind of trying to experiment with this whole
> brand new paradigm."
>
> "And the fear was that if Jobs stumbled into it too early before it looked
> like something Apple could physically do, he would say, 'What the heck are
> you guys doing?' and shut the whole thing down."
>
> "They knew there was a right way to approach Jobs with this stuff and there
> was a wrong way, and you had to, sort of very strategically roll it out and
> give it to the right person to give it to him on the right day when he was
> in the right
> mood."
>
> An Apple iPhone 7 and the company logo are seen in this illustration
> picture. (Regis Duvignau/Reuters)
>
> They found their intermediary in Apple's design chief, Jonathan Ive.
>
> Ive loved the touchscreen technology.
>
> "He thought it was the future," says Merchant.
>
> "And he said, 'Let me bring it to Jobs when he is in a good mood, when, you
> know, the time is right.'"
>
> Ive was one of Jobs' closest collaborators and the two were intimate
> friends.
> But when he unveiled the project, Jobs wasn't impressed.
>
> "Jobs said 'Meh!" And just kind of, you know, wrote it off," Merchant says.
>
> Ive was surprised and disappointed. But Jobs kept thinking about what he'd
> seen until he wheeled back, embraced the technology and put his mark on the
> project.
>
> "Sure enough, Jobs came around," says Merchant "He thought about it some
> more. He asked to see the demo again and he said, 'OK, this is pretty cool.'
> And then fast forward a couple weeks, couple months and he loves it. And now
> he is like,
> 'Oh, you know what? Multi-touch? Yeah, I invented that.'"
>
> The touch screen team didn't know it yet, but they'd begun the work that
> would be a key component to the device that changed the course of
> smartphones.
>
> Protecting the iPod
>
> By 2004, some of the regulatory issues around mobile phones that had earlier
> vexed Jobs were easing. The other huge incentive for Apple to produce a
> phone was the threat that other companies might offer a mobile phone that
> played
> music, cutting into the sales of the iPod.
>
> "Once you could put music on a cell phone, even if the cell phone was lame,
> consumers would start thinking, 'Well do I really want to have two things in
> my pocket?'"
>
> "The iPod was, at the time, Apple's biggest marquee product. It was their
> cash cow," says Merchant.
>
> That brought urgency to the project.
>
> An Apple employee grabs an iPhone 6 for a customer at the Apple Store during
> the launch and sale of the new iPhone 6 and 6 Plus smartphones, in Palo
> Alto, Calif. (Tony Avelar/The Associated Press)
>
> Engineers were recruited from other parts of the company to find ways to
> shrink and fine-tune the touchscreen technology, meld it with an operating
> system and gild it onto a sleek device.
>
> It was an expensive, paranoid and secretive project, and no one who was
> approached to work on it was completely sure what they were being asked to
> do.
>
> "They knew almost nothing," says Merchant. "Their boss was knocking on
> their door and saying, 'Excuse me, do you have a second? I have an exciting
> opportunity for you.'"
>
> "'This project is going to demand all of your time. You're going to have to
> work around the clock, you're going to work harder than you've ever worked
> before.
> And I cannot tell you what it is and you have to tell me whether or not
> you're on board today.'"
>
> A brilliant, anonymous team
>
> It took two-and-a-half years and an enormous toll on the team.
>
> "[Those years] were brutal," says Merchant.
>
> "They were really stressful times and people were working around the clock,
> sometimes sleeping in this so-called purple dorm. Dirty laundry was piling
> up, trash was piling up. It stunk."
>
> "Tensions were running high. People were missing holidays, missing their
> children's birthdays. And it got so intense that I've had some of these
> engineers tell me that the iPhone is the reason that I'm divorced."
>
> "So it really created this sort of vortex; 'a soup of misery' is how one of
> the engineers described it, just non-stop craziness."
>
> Jobs was the face of Apple Inc. especially during product launches. In this
> 2008 photo, he's unveiling the iPhone 3G. (Kimberly White/Reuters)
>
> In the end, hundreds of designers and engineers navigated the emotional
> stress and corporate pressure to help produce the device that revolutionized
> the
> smartphone.
>
> Fans loved it. Not all the reviews were raves, and the full potential of the
>
> iPhone, the billions of possibilities unleashed when Apple launched the App
> Store, was yet to be seen. But the iPhone was an instant success.
>
> When Apple was awarded a patent for the original device, there were only 14
> people listed as designers. How did the others feel about their anonymity
> given
> the demands of the project?
>
> "I think they were OK with it at the time," says Merchant.
>
> "Now, 10 years later, I think a lot of people are coming around to the idea
> that
> maybe it would be nice if this achievement could be recognized as sort of
> the
> fuller, more complex undertaking that it was, if only because that's just
> the
> truth about how innovation and invention happens. It takes teams, it takes
> cooperation, it takes a lot of people, more people than we can even perhaps
> comprehend."
>
> But Merchant says most were aware of what they were getting into. They
> understood Steve Jobs.
>
> "You knew, by signing on to work there, that that was a possibility, that
> you would just, sort of, be working under Jobs' shadow, and [that] he wasn't
> going
> to divulge any of the details or the names or the teams that really made
> this
> possible."
>
> "It was just his nature."
>
>
> end of informative article.
>
>
>
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