
An excerpt from “The One Device” – origin story of the iPhone - artsandsci
https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/13/15782200/one-device-secret-history-iphone-brian-merchant-book-excerpt
======
Joeri
_You’re going to have to give up nights and weekends probably for a couple
years as we make this product._

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?

~~~
t4h9drg
Apple needed to fulfill its deal with Cingular in a timely matter:

[http://archive.wired.com/gadgets/wireless/magazine/16-02/ff_...](http://archive.wired.com/gadgets/wireless/magazine/16-02/ff_iphone?currentPage=all)

"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."

~~~
LeifCarrotson
That, and the hardware relevancy, seem like plausible reasons: but why limit
yourself to only the rock-star engineers willing to work in secret and for
extreme hours? It doesn't seem like they had competency, competitive, or
budget constraints that would have prevented them from using more engineers,
more openness, or, again, more engineers on the project.

~~~
justinator
Great products are made by small teams. Adding a large amount of people to a
small team does not guarantee that the product will ship faster - many times,
the opposite is true.

------
janwillemb
"The iPhone ruined more than a few marriages". That would really never be
worth it to me. But maybe it depends on your marriage.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
More likely that quote is a Fallacy of Single Cause.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_the_single_cause](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_the_single_cause)

~~~
LeifCarrotson
No, "the iPhone" in this sentence is representing the iPhone development
program and its high-stress, night- and weekend-consuming, burnout-inducing,
multi-year schedule. That - and the resulting changes in behavior - can
absolutely be sufficient cause of a wrecked marriage.

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.

~~~
dguaraglia
I'm willing to be the iPhone (the actual device) might actually have had part
in many more broken marriages than the development process itself. Mind you,
not saying the iPhone caused the broken marriages, but it has become the
preferred medium of communication for a substantial part of the population.

I wonder how many of the unmasked Ashley Madison users were iPhone users :P

------
ghughes
On one hand, I don't like the glorification of overwork and burning people out
for the sake of maybe making a great product: "You're going to have to give up
nights and weekends probably for a couple years as we make this product."

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.

~~~
avasylev
In the end iPhone added billions to the company and shareholders, but
interesting if all these engineers who spent nights and weekends to make that
happen got an extra pay for that. Not much about that in the article, just the
praise for extra work. If I remember correctly from iCon book, the was period
when engineers on Steve's jobs team where paid less than in other teams in
Apple. This would really suck working weekend and creating multibillion dollar
product, but getting regular salary as the rest of the folks in the company.

~~~
rbritton
Any idea if this division of Apple employees are eligible for stock options?
If so, those may have ended up being one form of a payoff.

------
codeulike
It's strange to remember that no-one had ever seen 'swipe to scroll' before
the iPhone unveil in 2007. It's so fundamental to everything now. Before,
touchscreens had little scrollbars with up down arrows. Nuts.

~~~
MichaelGG
Pretty sure Windows had this in their tablet PC stuff, thought it was more
"flick" to scroll. I remember sitting around the house, browsing using the
touch system and thinking it was pretty nifty, and this was before the iPhone
was released.

~~~
hashhar
Apple made people oblivious to everything that came before the iPhone.

------
kjksf
It kind of dampens the image of Jobs as visionary leader.

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.

~~~
MBCook
> 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.

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.

------
mtdewcmu
Apple did a great job engineering the iPhone. They really killed it, no doubt.
That being said, I think that Apple was the only company that could have
invented the iPhone in the mid-2000s, because of their high degree of vertical
integration. They were the only company that had a completely proprietary
computer system for which they developed the hardware and software. Also, I
think that the basic interface for the iPhone was fairly inevitable. Cell
phones were becoming little computers and giving them little keyboards was a
problem, because there wasn't enough space. If you figure that little
keyboards were a dead end, then about the only remaining option was to use a
touch screen. Other companies could have started working on the touch screen,
but they didn't have an operating system. I believe Apple was in a unique
position to create the iPhone.

~~~
macintux
> I think that the basic interface for the iPhone was fairly inevitable

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.

~~~
Animats
_I think that the basic interface for the iPhone was fairly inevitable._

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.

~~~
mozumder
Just because the hardware would improve doesn't mean the UI would improve.

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.

~~~
Inconel
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but what in your opinion makes the
menu systems in digital cameras so crappy?

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.

~~~
dpark
Digital cameras already have a great interface for most users. It's single
button click.

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.

------
rospaya
Great excerpt. Except, it ignores the fact that there were smartphones,
touchscreens, app stores, MP3's on phones way before the iPhone.

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.

~~~
nailer
It's like full Pol Pot year zero:

> 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.

~~~
dpark
The percentage of the population with a PDA was effectively zero before the
iPhone created the market. People carrying Moto Qs were a geeky elite. Apple
made this mainstream.

RIM was closest but even they missed the real market with their focus on email
and physical keyboards.

------
theprop
So great to read personal stories about many of the insanely hard-working &
talented engineers who made the iphone and ipod. Their stories sadly are often
lost or left out.

~~~
ghaff
Have to plug Soul of a New Machine as well. It's more about hardware than
software--Data General's Eagle (MV/8000) minicomputer in the early 80s. I'm
somewhat biased as I was the product manager for many of DG's systems over a
fairly long period (starting about 5 years later) but it's still one of the
best books about product development ever written.

