
Who Invented the iPhone? - extarial
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/who-invented-the-iphone/
======
ozten
I was hoping for some key engineers or product managers. I had a similar peak
into the iPod, a key stepping stone to the iPhone.

There was a time when digital music players like the Creative Nomad were
gaining adoption, but people were still absorbing the shift to digital music.

I worked at RealNetworks/Rhapsody music and there was a mysterious meeting
where a guy pitched what would eventually come to market as the iPod. The deal
didn't go through and he was latter employed by Apple.

I understand that sometimes inventions will be invented nearly simultaneously
by several distinct groups... and Apple may have already had a prototype
device for years in their labs waiting for the BOM to hit the right size,
price, and capabilities... But who were these visionaries that Apple
organized, packaged their visions, and helped delivered their wares?

Apple does an amazing job of marketing their myths and we've got the well
known brands of Woz, Jobs, Ive... It's hard to pierce that veil.

~~~
startupdiscuss
For the ipod, I don't consider the device to be the invention.

There were many music players around at the time.

The invention was itunes -- an easy way to buy music. And that invention
required cutting deals with all the music studios to put their catalog online.

That was new.

Of course it had to link up with a nice ecosystem, sound, software etc.

~~~
macintux
iTunes made the iPod huge, but the iPod itself was pretty remarkable. The UI
was entirely new and more intuitive than similar devices, and it was the
smallest large-capacity device thanks to Steve seizing on the idea of using
the new tiny hard drives Toshiba(?) had created.

Firewire also made it _much_ faster to upload music.

~~~
mc32
Rio had, PMPs, I think. They had flash storage. UI was okay but managing files
and transfers left a lot to be desired.

------
starky
I expect better from Scientific American, yes technology these days stands on
the shoulders of many smaller innovations, but it is the sum of all these
small components and the software that makes a tech product innovative.

Also, the article refers to lithium-ion/lithium polymer batteries as lithium
batteries. This is wrong, as lithium batteries are what you call primary cells
with lithium anodes (e.g. button cells), not secondary cells like are used in
a cellphone.

~~~
jgtrosh
Along the same lines, they're talking about the touch-screen as if that's what
they were credited for. There were lots of okay touch-screens widespread
before; the iPhone had afaik the first good quality widely available _multi_
-touch screen. There's a classic TED talk from 2004 where a guy introduces the
technology and it seemed so amazing, the iPhones made direct use of that.
(Albeit not being as amazing as the 2004 demo!)

~~~
panic
Jeff Han:
[https://mrl.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/](https://mrl.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/)

------
kerng
I don't own one, but Apple invented the iPhone.

Innovation happens in small steps, building on work of others and adding a few
new things and experiences. The iPhone is no different but this article is not
really worth the read.

------
Y_Y
I'm surprised that the premise that the iPhone is an "invention" is so quickly
accepted. It wasn't like nobody was making any similar devices, and then this
new idea came along. I know that invention can be as simple as gluing two
existing things together, but the meaningful aspect has to be that there is an
original idea there.

No doubt it popularised a lot of existing technology, and arguably combined
some of that technology in a way that hadn't been done before. All the same,
that reasoning could apply to the second version of the iPhone. Was that an
"invention" too?

~~~
rayiner
I followed PDAs pretty closely back then, and I'm unaware of any device where
the OS was built around multi-touch, like the iPhone.[1] The iPhone was one of
the few devices back then to render the "real web" and being able to swipe and
pinch to navigate pages was a game-changer on the order of the first mouse-
based UIs. It dramatically changes how much content you can easily access on a
small screen (which is why even devices with styluses today have multi-touch
screens to facilitate scroll/zoom). It also improves the quality of the on-
screen keyboard, enabling you to ditch the physical one (or reliance on
something like Graffiti).

[1] Apple didn't invent multi-touch:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t35HXAjNW6s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t35HXAjNW6s).
I believe it was the first to build a mobile UI entirely around it.

~~~
josh2600
It’s easy to forget how crazy the world was before the iPhone. Let me list the
ways in which Apple blew the doors off of the industry with the iPhone:

1) battery: the iPhone was basically a giant battery strapped to a logic
board. No one had designed a phone like this, ever.

2) capacitive multi-touch with inertia: capacitive touch screens existed, but
the software for using them was really bad (see windows mobile 5 as the
leading example).

3) non-WAP browser: all phones prior to the iPhone had a wap browser. The
consensus knowledge in the industry was that doing full web on mobile was
still years, maybe decades away. Apple came in and rendered the full New York
Times on mobile and it changed the world.

4) App Store: before Apple, carriers had an App Store that was garbage or you
sideloaded software. That was it. The App Store changed the world, not
technically but politically. Finally users could get good software from their
phones over the air.

I could go on for days. This doesn’t even touch carrier distribution, call
quality, or any part of the OS stack which was basically black magic at the
time. The iPhone really changed the world.

~~~
dingaling
> 3) non-WAP browser: all phones prior to the iPhone had a wap browser.

That's incorrect. Opera Mobile launched in 2000 and was a full HTML renderer.
I had it on a succession of Nokia E-series smartphones in that era. Yes, you
could run apps before appstores existed...

Then in 2005 Opera Mini was released which used server-side rendering for
feature-phones that couldn't run Mobile.

~~~
dfox
Integrated browser on probably every Nokia phone of 2000's (ie. "Services")
was perfectly capable of displaying HTML 4/XHTML, with one important caveat
that it really truly demanded valid markup on input.

------
mikestew
_" It all depends on what you mean by 'invented'"_

For practical application, the one that invented it is the one that first
offered it to me for sale. Kind of like battery technology, as the industry
iterates over various chemistries. Yeah, yeah, your new tech is going to blow
storage wide open...just like the last folks whose names I now forget. But
until I can buy one for my phone, my RV house battery, or a pack for my
electric car, you might as well have invented unicorns.

Who invented the car? We had engines, we had wheels, we had drive trains. But
Benz was the first to glue them all together into a mode of transportation.
But wait, Copeland put a steam engine on a bicycle two years before Benz got
his patent
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copeland_steam_bicycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copeland_steam_bicycle)).
And, frankly, all Benz did was glue an engine to an early tricycle design. So
"invented" sometimes strikes me as not the best word to describe "who
invented...?"

~~~
ponow
That definition of invention as marketed product is so demotivating to anyone
who would put in the decades of personal focus and study necessary to advance
a particular area of engineering or science.

~~~
mikestew
Didn't really read my last sentence, eh? Who invented the iPhone? Apple. No,
not even an individual (even if a name is on some patent), a corporation. Not
all of the ideas that make an iPhone an iPhone came from one individual. Who
invented the multitude of little parts that comprise an iPhone? People like
you.

------
CapitalistCartr
I had a Windows phone. The UI sucked, of course, but they all did because of
the tiny form factor. They had to, right? Then my buddy and I went to lunch
one day, and he showed me his new "I-phone".

The heavens opened up and the truth was shown to me. I immediately realized,
they _didn 't_ have to suck, after all. What a revelation.

~~~
usermac
I disagree. I super enjoyed the UI of Windows Phone and only gave it up
recently when MS formally dropped support.

~~~
mikestew
In the time period to which parent refers, the Windows Mobile UI was nothing
like what you're referring to:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Mobile_6.0](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Mobile_6.0)

~~~
usermac
You're right—my bad. Thank you.

------
mailslot
The real invention is taking technology and packaging it in a human way that
takes a baby seconds to learn. I didn’t have to teach my one year old how to
swipe photos.

Touch screens existed and confounded people for decades. Just watch the
average person use a touch screen ATM. Still not great.

It all seems so obvious in retrospect because iPhones have defined so much of
how everything works now.

The original iPhone was a product no one else had the vision or balls to
build.

~~~
macintux
I hear people argue that someone would have invented it without Apple, but my
counter-argument is that it would have still had a hardware keyboard tucked
away, whoever built it wouldn't know how to market it, it would have been just
one among dozens of devices at the carrier's stores, and it would have
vanished after a few months of languishing there.

Apple moved the world to make it succeed. No one else would have.

------
cheeko1234
No mention of Corning or gorilla glass:

[http://techland.time.com/2013/01/11/a-story-about-steve-
jobs...](http://techland.time.com/2013/01/11/a-story-about-steve-jobs-steel-
balls-and-gorilla-glass-you-with-the-cracked-phone-read-this/)

------
herodotus
This is a silly article. Most inventions come about when a person or group of
people recognize an opportunity based on many things that are already known,
or exist. The original iPhone of course relied on touch-screens, feasible
batteries, wifi chips and a many, many other existing technologies. But
remember that, at the time of its design, mobile phones all used keypads:
either the standard telephone type, or the full (but small) keyboard of the
Blackberry. Apple's big innovations (among many) were to eliminate the keypad,
and to embed a full-fledged OS on a small device. The lack of keyboard was a
huge risk, and it was mocked at the time. History proved Apple was right.
Steve Jobs (or at least his team, with his input) did indeed invent the
iPhone.

------
S_A_P
Maybe Im in the minority here, but I never attributed credit to Steve Jobs as
the "inventor" of any of apples products. I saw him akin to a music producer.
The team builds, and he guides their efforts according to his vision. This is
very different than sitting down and "inventing" anything.

------
gregw2
Lame analysis. The iPhone wasn't great because it had a good touchscreen,
battery and the web. I had "smart phones" before that with those. The real
innovation was the software UI, pinch zoom and wall of all icons with high
resolution pixels.

~~~
rando444
The article doesn't argue that the iphone was great because any of those
things.

The article is arguing that technology is iterative, and that great inventions
are often built on many other great inventions.

The article is focusing on the iphone as an example of breakthrough
technology.. but the question implied by the article is whether or not it's
great because of the inventors ability to build on a larger than average
amount of previous work.. and ends with the conclusion that greater freedom of
information allows for breakthroughs, not "genius" lone-wolf inventors.

~~~
Cobord
But the fact remains that the iPhone is used as the example, and so the myth
of Jobs as a lone-wolf who did it remains. Had to have that hook to focus the
article, but still feeds into that narrative for all the people who read the
title but not the article.

------
pmiri
This article ties well to the excellent book "The Entrepreneurial State" by
Mariana Mazzucato.

Apple did an excellent job of bringing together a lot of existing technology
into a viable consumer product, but it is still important to note that much of
that tech was powered by state-funded initiatives, instead of Silicon Valley,
VC-funded projects.

------
russellbeattie
I find it interesting that I know more about the team that developed the Mac
in the early 1980s than I know about the iPhone team.

The iPhone was a watershed moment in tech that propelled Apple to be a
trillion dollar company, yet the iPhone team is obscure to me. The Mac team
has had how many books and articles about them?

~~~
chaostheory
The One Device details the people and history well.

[https://www.amazon.com/One-Device-Secret-History-
iPhone/dp/0...](https://www.amazon.com/One-Device-Secret-History-
iPhone/dp/031654616X)

It just came out a year ago.

You can also try my user-editable site
([https://theymadethat.com/things/k4z/iphone](https://theymadethat.com/things/k4z/iphone))
where I aim for the same goal but with a different approach. The iPhone entry
still needs a lot of work.

------
CodeSheikh
Title should be "Who Innovated the iPhone?"

------
_Simon
What an utter waste of bits this article is?

------
mar77i
[https://www.xkcd.com/343/](https://www.xkcd.com/343/) RIOT PRRL

------
startupdiscuss
There were also many key business innovations with the iphone:

\- convincing mobile providers to provide data plans

\- Wrapping up the price of the phone in the data plan (i.e. providing
financing)

\- distribution with their own stores

\- eventually the app store

\- the itunes app also had to convince music studios to put their catalog
online and price them uniformly

~~~
trevyn
Um, almost all of these were done first by others.

~~~
startupdiscuss
In one sense, almost everything was done before.

But not in the reinforcing way. The cell plan lets you download songs over the
air. That lines up the two business deals you made.

[http://theconversation.com/understanding-the-real-
innovation...](http://theconversation.com/understanding-the-real-innovation-
behind-the-iphone-79556)

------
blhack
As a long time palm user, nothing about the iPhone seemed particularly new to
me. The interface was almost identical, the form factor was almost identical.

The only real upgrades were a cellular modem and a little bit prettier case.

Saying apple "invented" modern smartphones is a bit like saying Tesla invented
electric cars. No they didn't, they just made a really good one that is very
popular.

~~~
rerx
The capacitive multi-touch screen was definitely new.

~~~
joshlegs
honestly i think that was the biggest reason for its success. Blackberry was
already a thing, but that big honking, clunky keyboard was just silly on a
phone, and meant you had an exceptionally little amount of screen real estate.
The developments in capacitive touch made a lot of room for other improvements
to handheld devices.

~~~
rerx
I agree. I liked Palm OS back in the day and used to have two generations of
Sony Clié PDAs with resistive touchscreens. The first one (an SL10) had a
grayscale square touchscreen and a little "Graffiti" area below it where you
could jot down simplified characters and some gestures. The second one (TG50)
was really neat. It had a color screen (I remember watching videos and playing
ScummVM Lucas Arts adventures on this in 2003 or 2004!) and it replaced the
Graffiti area with an actual hardware keyboard. Text entry worked so much
better than it used to with that pseudo-handwriting recognition.

Much later, when I saw Apple and Android smartphones, I could not understand
how anybody could stand the onscreen keyboards. But the truth is that the
multitouch hardware allowed to progress these systems far enough that they
would surpass earlier tiny physical keyboards.

------
bjoli
I doubt the idea of such a phone was ever very unique. I got laughed at in
high school (2004) for saying something along the lines of "in 10 years all
our phones will be one big screen and they will be powerful enough to fulfil
most of our personal computing needs". I also believed they would be docked to
become full featured PCs, but I guess that niche has been filled for many with
the rise of tablets. (which I appalling, but I guess thats just because I
don't understand their appeal at all).

TFA article claims something similar: it was apple that took a bunch of ideas
and made it into something people wanted to actually use. I, and I doubt many
people here, would have a good enough vision and understanding of what people
actually wanted.

~~~
mbrumlow
Don't forget, the lot of ideas that Apple took to make the iPhone where mostly
built off a bunch of other ideas them self.

I find us in a strange new era of people using the past as a way to diminish
the now. I grow tired of people pushing the notion that we today must pay for
the sins and attribute success to past generations.

If we go far enough back I am sure if the wheel had never been invented we
would have none of what we have today and would still be smashing rocks around
in a cave.

