
The History of the iPhone on its 10th Anniversary [audio] - lumisota
http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2017/01/the-history-of-the-iphone/
======
swampthinker
“Very rarely did I see him become completely unglued. It happened. But mostly
he just looked at you and very directly said in a very loud and stern voice,
‘You are fucking up my company,’ or, ‘If we fail, it will be because of you.'”

If I had read this quote 2-3 years ago, before trying to found a startup, I
would've thought that Jobs was a crazy asshole. While the latter point is
still up for debate, I can now completely sympathize with how he felt in this
moment.

~~~
overcast
Acting like that to your employees is a quick way to make them disappear.
Apple was Apple, nothing was going to make them leave, no matter how much of
an asshole Jobs was. I would listen to a CEO/Managers tirade once, before I
started looking elsewhere. It's only a job.

~~~
Cthulhu_
Good. If someone (like Jobs) want to create the best product(s) out there,
either you Be Better, or find somewhere where anything less than the best is
good enough. Shape up or ship out.

~~~
wyager
Anyone of particularly high quality is capable of finding work elsewhere
without much difficulty, so high-quality employees are actually _less_ likely
to put up with crazy tirades.

~~~
GuiA
Anyone of particularly high quality isn't going to be happy with 90% of the
work available elsewhere. When you're at the top, you don't want to be managed
by scrubs.

~~~
ryandrake
That's a bold claim. There are plenty of high performers who would rather be
managed with dignity by a "scrub" than be berated by an genius asshole.

------
Darthy
"And I gave it to one of our really brilliant UI guys. He then got inertial
scrolling working and some other things, and I thought, ‘my god, we can build
a phone with this’"

Does anybody know who this guy was?

~~~
lumisota
Bas Ording - [http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-
Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=H...](http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-
Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=7,469,381.PN.&OS=PN/7,469,381&RS=PN/7,469,381)

~~~
thefalcon
On page 363 of his Steve Jobs biography, Walter Isaacson tells the story of
Jobs meeting a graphical designer in the lobby at Apple after a particularly
poor interview:

"The process could be intimidating, but Jobs had an eye for talent. When they
were looking for people to design the graphical interface for Apple’s new
operating system, Jobs got an email from a young man and invited him in. The
applicant was nervous, and the meeting did not go well.

"Later that day Jobs bumped into him, dejected, sitting in the lobby. The guy
asked if he could just show him one of his ideas, so Jobs looked over his
shoulder and saw a little demo, using Adobe Director, of a way to fit more
icons in the dock at the bottom of a screen.

"When the guy moved the cursor over the icons crammed into the dock, the
cursor mimicked a magnifying glass and made each icon balloon bigger. “I said,
‘My God,’ and hired him on the spot,” Jobs recalled. The feature became a
lovable part of Mac OS X, and the designer went on to design such things as
inertial scrolling for multi-touch screens (the delightful feature that makes
the screen keep gliding for a moment after you’ve finished swiping)."

------
Darthy
"So they asked, ‘Why can’t we just make a little seam for the radio waves to
escape through?’ And you have to explain to them why you just can’t."

Well, the iPhone 6 and especially the iPhone 7 do exactly this, so apparently
you can indeed do exactly that. I wonder what has changed to make it possible.

~~~
rhino369
They use the aluminum housing as part of the antenna now.

------
Zanta
Cool read.

“We put a sign on over the front door of the iPhone building that said FIGHT
CLUB,” Forstall testified. “Because the first rule of fight club is that you
don’t talk about fight club.”

I found this bit wonderfully ironic given the anti-consumerist nature of the
movie. Shades of Reagan playing 'Born in the USA' on the campaign trail.

~~~
throwanem
On the other hand, the "Project Mayhem" members were shown to be consuming,
avidly, an ultimately pointless product which they mistook for having a
capability to fill the empty spaces in their lives where meaning could've
gone. That the product in question happened to be a somewhat unusually violent
repackaging of anti-consumerist ideology doesn't change the nature of its
relationship with "Tyler Durden"'s followers.

~~~
Zanta
That's an interesting argument!

What do you think Tyler's goal was in that movie? His fight club -> project
mayhem plan seemed to go off the way he wanted it to. If you think he wanted
to promote that free-your-mind, reset-the-score, you-are-not-your-possessions
ideology, that desire seems to fit with the fact that he's the alter-ego of
Norton's unfulfilled white collar weakling character. But you lay out pretty
convincingly that Project Mayhem is more of a trick, trading one kind of
prison for another. What would compel Norton's alter-ego to play such a trick?

~~~
throwanem
In a word: nihilism. In another: narcissism. Project Mayhem is indeed a trick,
but it's one "Jack" plays on himself.

Consider that blowing up the headquarters buildings of credit card companies
does not suffice to achieve, or even approach, the goal of wiping out debt.
Offsite backups are a thing. It doesn't even impair the operation of the
business all that much, because disaster-recovery plans and hot failover sites
are _also_ a thing. All told, Project Mayhem might have produced a period of
as long as a whole weekend during which bank cards wouldn't work, and maybe
not even that. But even if we're exceedingly charitable and assume they
brought all the settlement systems down for a whole week, that doesn't
materially affect debt held by credit customers, especially in light of the
brief spending boom that'd almost certainly occur once people's cards started
working again. So blowing up the HQ buildings is big, flashy, maybe a bit
expensive for a variety of real estate insurance companies, and ultimately
pointless.

And the way I read the character, Tyler Durden knows this is the case all
along. The only person he really cares about selling on his line of bullshit
is his own alter ego "Jack". Durden exists because "Jack" created him, and
"Jack" created him because "Jack" wants convincing that he's not as
meaningless, not as worthless, not as _pointless_ , as he feels himself to be.
Because he feels himself that way, he can't muster the emotional resources to
do this work for himself, so he creates Tyler Durden to do it for him, and
Durden does it very well. Creating a fringe political movement that blows
things up is incidental, and occurs not because Durden thinks that's a thing
worth doing in its own right - it's an open question whether Durden can even
be considered to have agency or consciousness independent of "Jack" \- but
because it serves the purpose of convincing "Jack" that he _has_ a purpose.

This is a problem someone else might solve by volunteering at a retirement
home or joining a church or starting a family - or all of the above, perhaps -
but "Jack"'s too much of a nihilist to really believe in anything outside
himself, and too much of a narcissist to really buy into anything that doesn't
center on himself. We see the former in his internal monologue, which the film
helpfully externalizes for us, and the latter in his behavior at the various
support groups he parasitizes in the first act. So "Jack" eventually invents
Tyler Durden, and Tyler Durden invents Project Mayhem, and this pays off for
"Jack" twice over: first when he finds himself to have become the barycenter
of a movement that has people ready to kill and die to advance its goals, and
then second when he decides it can't be borne and sets about to destroy it,
thus becoming able to conceive of himself as a virtuous man struggling against
all the odds - and, in "killing" Durden at the climax, eventually succeeding
in that struggle. The property damage, like the existence of Project Mayhem in
the first place, is incidental; the only meaning it has in the context of
"Jack"'s evolving self-experience, and thus in the context of the film, is an
indication of the extent to which it's necessary for "Jack" to go in order to
bridge the gap between how he perceives himself and how he needs to perceive
himself in order to tolerate his own existence.

Of course, one's experience of oneself is rarely static, and Palahniuk and
Fincher are too skilled in their respective crafts for it to be mere
coincidence that _Fight Club_ ends when it does. It would perhaps be
interesting to watch "Jack"'s tenuous grasp on life disintegrate completely,
along with his circumstances, over the next several days following the climax
of the film. But I doubt it would add all that much of appeal to the
experience, or have a fingernail's chance of getting past the first test
audience on which it was tried.

------
rcarmo
It should be noted that the transcript makes for _great_ reading on its own,
and seems to be word-for-word.

~~~
crispyambulance
Yes, good reading... but mind-numbingly horrible as a podcast. The guy is just
reading an essay out-loud!

Very few people can successfully podcast in a monologue format. The only
person that comes to mind is Malcom Gladwell.

~~~
ihuman
I agree. Monologue podcasts either work really well, or poorly. I'm a fan of
Dan Carlin's "Hardcore History" podcast.

------
jlundberg
A good hour of audio for my trainride back from Stockholm. It's amazing how
emotional the iPhone unveil feels even without the video.

Thanks for sharing.

