
And Then Steve Said, ‘Let There Be an iPhone’ - apress
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/magazine/and-then-steve-said-let-there-be-an-iphone.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all&
======
ianstallings
Reading this makes me think of Jobs as a Railroad baron of old. Kind of
heartless, gruff, and willing to crush anyone in his way, but a guy with a
vision so strong he will do anything. And it changed the world, it's hard to
overstate that.

I remember seeing the iPhone unveiled and thinking "It's cool, but will people
really buy such an expensive phone?". I think it was $600. That was pretty
expensive at the time. I also remember thinking about how they wanted all apps
to be web-based. A disaster for certain I thought. The phone market was all
over the place and brand loyalty was in short supply. I'd seen compaq go from
dominating PDAs and nosedive off the cliff. Motorola took their brand loyalty
(remember how many people had Razrs?) and went into hiding. Time and again I'd
seen phone platforms rise and fall. I was skeptical.

All I knew was one thing - _I_ certainly wasn't going to buy one.

Years later and I now program for iOS a lot. Everyday pretty much. I'm a full
blown Mac convert and I'll be honest, the iPhone was what caused it. I bought
my first iPhone at version 4. Then I _specifically_ bought my first Mac so I
could use the SDK for that phone. I fell in love with the platform, in all its
insane glory.

I might move to another platform one day, but I can honestly say I never
imagined this is what I would be working on.

~~~
at-fates-hands
>> I'm a full blown Mac convert and I'll be honest, the iPhone was what caused
it.

This will be Apple's saving grace. They're already entrenched several
generations deep. For every kid getting an i-pod touch or i-pod nano today, in
a few years, it's such a seamless jump to an iphone. Nothing to learn, no
additional software to learn, no new interfaces to spend time getting familiar
with. It's the same device, just with more functionality.

For me this is the most brilliant thing Apple has achieved. Being able to move
a consumer from platform to platform with ZERO new investment on the users
part? Genius.

~~~
rahoulb
That's exactly what Microsoft was counting on with their UI for Windows Mobile
(even down to a Start menu) and why they make such a big deal about Office
being available across all their platforms.

I'm sure that when the time comes, Apple will be prepared to throw away the UI
and start over with whatever suits the next form factor.

------
JunkDNA
I always like stuff like this because you see that these people who knock it
out of the park apparently effortlessly actually _struggle_ like all the rest
of us normal humans behind the scenes. They couldn't figure out how to make a
touch screen, the processor wasn't available, Sir Ive's case was impermeable
to RF, the LCD was causing interference on the multitouch display, etc... This
stuff is _hard_. Really, really hard. Any one technical obstacle could have
killed the whole thing.

~~~
tazjin
"But Apple just took existing parts and smashed them in a case!"

I love articles like this, even though the people who need to read them the
most don't have the attention span for them :-)

~~~
makomk
Reading the article, I think even Apple thought it was just a case of taking
existing parts and smashing them in a case - until they actually tried doing
it.

A lot of the stuff Apple had problems with is almost certainly routine for the
big existing phone players like HTC, Samsung, Nokia... I mean, Jobs and Ive
didn't even realise that metal cases block radio waves, which is basically
common knowledge. Many of their problems seem self-imposed in general - for
example:

"Even people within the project itself couldn’t talk to one another. Engineers
designing the electronics weren’t allowed to see the software. When they
needed software to test the electronics, they were given proxy code, not the
real thing. If you were working on the software, you used a simulator to test
hardware performance."

Apple could apparently get away with this, but I expect their development
techniques would have killed lesser companies. Maybe, in some alternative
universe where things worked out just a little differently, the iPhone killed
Apple too rather than being their biggest success.

~~~
gibwell
I'm sure this can't be what you intended, but it sounds as though you just
said that developing something like the iPhone is a matter of routine for
companies like HTC, Samsung and Nokia, and that Apple only found it hard
because of poor technique.

~~~
seiji
Some things are always hard, but doing them for the first time is harder.

Building buildings is always difficult, but if you've done it ten times
before, you know a lot of the caveats. If you're doing it for the first time,
you'll go slower due to more learning-by-doing.

Sometimes it takes an outsider to come in and build with no preexisting design
or engineering prejudices (or even overt knowledge) to change the world.

~~~
leoc
> Sometimes it takes an outsider to come in and build with no preexisting
> design or engineering prejudices (or even overt knowledge) to change the
> world.

Yes, this is probably the main reason why Apple was willing to spend extra
time and effort reinventing the wheel rather than hire some experienced
smartphone engineers. This decision may have been influenced by the experience
of the Lisa project, where the influence of engineers from HP has often been
blamed for some of the shortcomings. (Mind you, on the other side of the coin
the Macintosh barely survived the conviction that a hard disk or more than
128KiB of RAM were unnecessary, a mistake which seems to have been based in
the Apple II background of the Mac people.)

(It's not a uniqutely Apple practise either. In the heyday of Japanese
electronics companies, several times a firm made a successful leap into an
area which was completely new to them, often into a technology which was still
in a very early stage or already had strong players or both. See /We Were
Burning/ [http://www.amazon.com/We-Were-Burning-Entrepreneurs-
Electron...](http://www.amazon.com/We-Were-Burning-Entrepreneurs-
Electronic/dp/0465091180/) .)

------
hayksaakian
Talk about literally "fake it till you make it"

\----- (regarding the presentation)

They had AT&T, the iPhone’s wireless carrier, bring in a portable cell tower,
so they knew reception would be strong. Then, with Jobs’s approval, they
preprogrammed the phone’s display to always show five bars of signal strength
regardless of its true strength. The chances of the radio’s crashing during
the few minutes that Jobs would use it to make a call were small, but the
chances of its crashing at some point during the 90-minute presentation were
high.

~~~
Aloha
Bringing a COW (Cell on Wheels) in seems like a reasonable precaution - you
have a presentation with lots of people showing up, you want everything to
work correctly.

~~~
sliverstorm
Yeah, I don't really begrudge them there. As anyone who's ever had to do a
tech demo should know, tech demos are the living embodiment of Murphy's Law.

~~~
xerophtye
Happened to me at a Microsoft event. Me and my friend got up on stage to demo
our Software and BAM!! it crashed :P right in front of a hall full of big
shots!

------
pinaceae
i am glad to be old enough to remember the time before the iphone. seems like
a stupid thing to say, right? but go to any tech forum and it seems like all
of it is forgotten already, 2007 is kinda blurry and Apple producing
smartphones completely normal.

when the rumours started swirling about apple launching a phone people could
not believe it. like at all. apple, the ipod guys, building a phone?! no way,
what a joke. you had the photoshops of ipods with a dial, etc. analysts
explaining why this was completely wrong, impossible and apple was doomed.

same at the launch of the iPad. same at the launch of the iPod (less space
than a nomad, no wifi, lame). what the fuck is a nomad one might say today.

those great photoshops of steve holding a giant iphone to his ear, hilarious.
an iPad, buhaha, bunch of retards at apple. but now the galaxy note makes
perfect sense. to exactly the same neckbeards who laughed at apple's idiocy
before.

apple is indeed the most frustrating company. it somehow has defied gravity in
the second jobs era and proven that large swaths of the tech world couldn't
define taste and style if their life depended on it.

and perfection, like the iphone launch, is a matter of style and taste.

~~~
hayksaakian
Let's not get too patriotic there,

Apple introduced flops as well, see apple TV

~~~
shinratdr
I have, and do, all over the place.

I don't know how you can consider the Apple TV a flop. The first generation
one was built of OS X instead of iOS for reasons that this article makes very
obvious but it hammered out a clear path for the future Apple TV. Much like
the MacBook Air, it's really only a "flop" if you're talking about the first
generation product and not the establishing of a product line.

Neither took the world by storm, but they both launched a product category
that was ill-defined at the time and Apple sells millions of both. There were
internet connected set top boxes and ultraportables before the Apple TV and
the MacBook Air, but there were only Smart TVs, Rokus, Google TVs, and
Ultrabooks after.

Maybe it's just me but establishing a successful and profitable product line
that exists to this day hardly qualifies as a flop. Just a shaky first
generation. Which, keep in mind, also applies to the iPod.

IMO, the iPod can hardly be considered a flop. The iPod HiFi, THAT was a flop.

~~~
rictic
The iPod isn't a flop. People I know who got one (including the nontechnical)
used it a ton, and it was awesome.

The iPhone isn't a flop. Same story, everyone I know who got it loved it.

My parents got an Apple TV, after enjoying their iPods and iPhones. As far as
I know they haven't used it since the first week, and after seeing them try, I
don't blame them. The problems that the Apple TV is trying to address are
real, but IME it's not there yet.

~~~
ebrenes
On the other hand my father has been consistently using his Apple TV non-stop
since last christmas. I didn't even have to instruct him on how to use it
aside from a 5 minute intro course.

I've heard similar rave reviews from 3 people over 60 about how great the
Apple TV is. None of which I would position as tech-savvy.

------
PhasmaFelis
_" 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 [expletive] up my company,’ or, ‘If we fail, it will be
because of you.’ He was just very intense. And you would always feel an inch
tall."

"Compounding all the technical challenges, Jobs’s obsession with secrecy meant
that even as they were exhausted by 80-hour workweeks, the few hundred
engineers and designers working on the iPhone couldn’t talk about it to anyone
else. If Apple found out you’d told a friend in a bar, or even your spouse,
you could be fired."_

Christ, what an asshole.

~~~
sneak
But holy fuck, what a phone.

"You had me at scrolling."

------
mcenedella
It's easy to forget how far Apple had already come by this point. I re-
discovered this super-insulting dude asking an obnoxious question to Steve at
WWDC 1997:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6497475](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6497475)

~~~
eropple
As `teovall noted, any particular reason you linked a version covered with SEO
keywords with only a few views of the video instead of the one with 2.5
million (which has the exact same title but is remarkably lacking in SEO
spam)?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF-
tKLISfPE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF-tKLISfPE) is the original, for
anyone who's curious.

------
padmanabhan01
Articles like this help to show all the work involved in the path from a vague
idea to a finished product. That's the hard part. Guess that's why they get
upset when some other company just sees the end product and just makes a clone
of it, without having to face all the hurdles to arrive there from the initial
idea..

~~~
makomk
Except that the other companies have done essentially all of the hard work
this article talks about themselves, and more, and have been doing it for
years before Apple entered the smartphone market. I mean, many of Apple's
problems were with stuff like baseband development and antenna placement which
their competitors have been dealing with successfully since before the iPhone
even entered development.

If anything Apple were the ones that came along after other companies had done
all the hard work and piggy-backed on their work whilst claiming the credit.
Companies like Nokia and Motorola literally developed the technology that made
mobile phones possible, and had to build stuff like phone radios in an era
where no-one had ever done it before, whereas Apple could rely on pre-existing
chips, software and design experience. Then Apple sued Motorola to stop them
selling phones whilst insisting they didn't have to pay Motorola for the
patents they'd obtained through doing all that pioneering work.

------
ultimoo
>> The 55 miles from Campbell to San Francisco make for one of the nicest
commutes anywhere. The journey mostly zips along the Junipero Serra Freeway, a
grand and remarkably empty highway that abuts the east side of the Santa Cruz
Mountains.

While scenic, the 280 is certainly not 'remarkably empty'. I make the commute
from San Jose to SF everyday and wish I shared the enthusiasm of the author.
Apologies for commenting on something completely orthogonal to the point of
the OP.

~~~
jfb
Traffic on 280 (and to a lesser degree 880) seems to track pretty closely how
inflated the current SV bubble is.

------
forgottenpaswrd
"The thinking goes, why let bad Internet or cellphone connections ruin an
otherwise good presentation? But Jobs insisted on live presentations. It was
one of the things that made them so captivating. Part of his legend was that
noticeable product-demo glitches almost never happened."

What is interesting is that product-demo glitches happened all the time. We
went to one presentation in which Steve had to ask for people not to use the
Internet because they had not enough bandwidth.

But mistakes were so "naturally handled" that people just did not care.

I think Edison said, you will not be remembered by your mistakes, but from
your successes.

~~~
afterburner
Chamberlain?

------
cbr

        "The solution, he says, was to tweak the AirPort software
         so that it seemed to be operating in Japan instead of the
         United States."
    

Great solution, but illegal. Did they get permission or just do it?

~~~
MikeCapone
Better to be a pirate than join the Navy, I suppose...

------
Aloha
The technical details of the presentation are interesting, but less relevant
than how well the device worked at launch. It worked. The iPhone was a success
not because it was the first, but because it was the first really usable
device, it put everything that came before it to shame.

~~~
zmmmmm
> The iPhone was a success not because it was the first, but because it was
> the first really usable device

This is both true and a horrible rewriting of history. People _loved_ their
Blackberries. The term Crackberry was invented before the iPhone was even a
rumor. And don't tell me it wasn't mainstream, it had taken over most of the
business and government market. It was confined to those markets, but within
those huge markets it was utterly mainstream. But even before that other
people _loved_ Palm devices.

The capacitive touch screen was a clear advance - but don't tell me there was
no "usable" device prior to that.

~~~
philwelch
Suits loved Blackberrys. Not normal people.

~~~
ewoodrich
I could type faster on my Blackberry Curve (a consumer targeted device) than
my current Galaxy Nexus or any iPhone/iTouch touchscreen (plus I could
literally type a full message and send by touch-typing, without any doubt as
to what I was actually doing without looking at the screen).

I admit I prefer the button-less form factor in many respects, but boy do I
miss that well-designed tactile keyboard.

~~~
Peaker
Even with Swype/Kii keyboards?

I find they're quite fast!

~~~
ewoodrich
You probably can type faster than I can using Swype/Kii/etc. But for whatever
reason, I do best with tactile feedback.

(I use a Das Keyboard for the IBM Model M "clicky" experience, and hate my
laptop or other keyboards after getting it. I completely understand that I may
be in the minority, but regardless, I loved the response of my Blackberry
keyboard).

------
siglesias
Amusingly, there was one technical snafu during the presentation. Steve's
clicker stopped responding [1]! Of course, the way he handled it, in my
opinion, made the presentation that much better and that much more human.

1)
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hUIxyE2Ns8&feature=youtu.be&...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hUIxyE2Ns8&feature=youtu.be&t=1h14m39s)

------
plg
"In the span of seven years, the iPhone and its iPad progeny have become among
the most important innovations in Silicon Valley’s history. They transformed
the stodgy cellphone industry. "

What other stodgy industry is there that Apple could easily disrupt? How about
this: how does it make you feel when you use the DVR box that your cable /
satellite company forces you to use, to watch tv? I know the answer for me.
Seems like low hanging fruit with potentially enormous payoff for Apple.

~~~
Tloewald
It's not low-hanging fruit.

On the technology side Apple has actually built everything necessary (AppleTV
+ iTunes streaming) but the problem is dealing with the content silos.

If Apple could it would simply license all the content and stream it to
customers either for a standard price (e.g. $1.99 per episode of 480p
programming, $2.99 per episode of 1080p) or via subscription (e.g.
MLB/Netflix) or ad-supported (e.g. Hulu Plus).

The _only_ reason AppleTV isn't TV nirvana (at least in the US) is licensing
issues. (BTW you can program an AppleTV to recognize any remote, so you can
seamlessly make you TV remote also control your AppleTV, without even
switching modes).

In case you're wondering, the basic problem right now is that TV networks get
paid about $2 (I did a bunch of back of envelope calculations, so I may be
significantly off, but it's in this ballpark) in advertising per viewer-hour,
so if a family of four watches an hour of TV, then the network gets about $8
in ad revenue. Apple is offering $1.40/h, and it's also messing with DVD sales
and syndication so there's a big gap there.

Now, I seriously doubt that the production company that makes the content gets
much of that $8, so if Apple could deal with content producers directly...

~~~
erichocean
_If Apple could it would simply license all the content_

Sure, but that won't work: the content is _paid for_ by the cable companies.

It's, what, $30 billion per year going to content creators straight from the
cable companies, up front? The content creators absolutely need the cable
companies today, there's no other way for them to operate. They don't self-
fund, period.

So Apple would need to pony up. If they came to the content creators and said
look, we want to do this thing, here's $100 billion for the first three year,
up front—it'd happen. Money talks in Hollywood. It might be the only thing
that does.

Sadly, there's no way in hell Tim Cook could (or would) make that happen. He's
way too conservative. Hell, he couldn't even handle Scott Forstall.

Apple certainly has the money and doesn't know what to do with it other than
buy their own stock. Well, _that 's_ what they could do with it. $100 billion
and you own cable television.

~~~
Tloewald
I'm curious about the $30B figure. How did you arrive at that?

~~~
erichocean
I didn't arrive at it, it's a well-known industry figure, I'm not sure where I
heard it first. (I live in Los Angeles and lived in Hollywood for years,
working mostly on the film side, but I know a lot of people in TV, too.)

Here's an article for consumers on unbundling[1] I found after one Google
search that says that _ESPN alone_ receives $7.2 billion per year from US
cable companies, which sounds about right to me. (They also earn money for
ads, I don't know if any of that is kicked back to the cable companies. I
doubt it...)

It shouldn't be surprising even if you crunch the numbers yourself. There's
~100 million cable subscribers, and the average combined bill
(Internet/Cable/Phone) was $128/month in 2011.[2] So that's $153.6 billion per
year. It's not hard to imagine that ~20% of that goes to the people making the
content that's playing on cable. If anything, it'd be surprising if it were
lower than that.

[1] [http://money.cnn.com/2013/08/02/technology/cable-a-la-
carte/...](http://money.cnn.com/2013/08/02/technology/cable-a-la-
carte/index.html)

[2]
[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020347910457712...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203479104577124494272500550.html?mod=e2tw)

------
valgaze
The unsuccessful partnership with Motorola (& Cingular wireless) mentioned in
the article was probably w/ the "Rokr"

See press release: [http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/09/07Apple-Motorola-
Cin...](http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/09/07Apple-Motorola-Cingular-
Launch-Worlds-First-Mobile-Phone-with-iTunes.html)

------
chernevik
The timing of the project launch is pretty remarkable. It seems that Jobs
wanted to do this for some time, but was waiting and watching for technical
feasibility. From the effort they had getting the demo to work, it seems that
they launched the project something like immediately after the progress of the
component technologies brought that feasibility into view. And even then they
had to manage risks, and then they had to get the thing into production.

And while that suggests some pretty deep technical savvy at executive levels,
they still had heartburn over seemingly simple questions like "can you put
radio waves through aluminum?"

It seems to me that the genius of Jobs was 1) to envision customer experiences
based on really remarkable extensions / integrations of existing tech and 2)
to judge the moment when those visions had gone from "someday" to "now".

------
codeulike
Watching the original iPhone unveil, it was pretty surprising to see all the
Google love from Steve, and Eric Schmidt come bounding onto the stage
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxUDiS3AR0M](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxUDiS3AR0M)

~~~
abrowne
Maybe surprising now, post "thermonuclear war", but not for 2007.

------
daned
I thought I had it tough as a Sales Engineer but I am a piker compared to
these guys.

------
mistercow
>What worries Apple fans most of all is not knowing where the company is
headed.

As a former Apple fan, I actually find the iPhone's hemorrhaging of market
share and Apple's uncertain future extremely encouraging. I always attributed
the things I liked about Apple to their struggling underdog status. They lost
that with the iPhone, and they've never been the same since.

It will be fascinating to see if some of the old Apple shines through in the
years to come.

~~~
mercer
If you look at the general course of Apple, they've generally been quite
consistent in their road map. I think the incredible success of the iPhone
might cause a slump for a while, but then they'll just continue what they've
been doing for a while: releasing good, high-end and profitable products and
comfortably occupying multiple niches.

Alternatively, they might create a few more iPhone- and iPad-like successes
and continue ruling new and existing product categories.

In both cases, they'll keep 'shining' for quite some time. If that stops,
it'll suck for people like me who are fully invested in their ecosystem. That
said, I switched to a Nexus 4 recently and it was surprisingly painless.

------
AndrewKemendo
I think it is hilarious how Jobs basically reinvented the wheel when it came
to operations security, when there have been major organizations doing secret
things for decades that he could have pulled the lessons from.

------
yashg
I always thought Apple took the iPod and added phone radio to it, then they
took out the radio, made the screen big and called it iPad. Not anymore. This
is interesting stuff.

------
ChikkaChiChi
A nice reminder that the screen sharing built for the initial demo still
doesn't exist without jailbreaking a device. :)

------
YOSPOS
Keep this story in mind when idiots on the internet talk about a "rectangle
with rounded corners".

~~~
Kylekramer
I am not seeing what relevance this story has to patent disputes.

------
vonsydov
I'm still on 4s with ios 5. don't use siri.

------
bitwize
iOS is starting to regain marketshare from Android. Now that Apple is making
serious downmarket moves with the 5C, it may soon be time to rethink whether
Android was ultimately successful at competing with Apple.

Within two years, non-iPhone smartphones will be niche players with partisan
user bases, but the bulk of mobile development will be once again for iOS.

~~~
untog
_iOS is starting to regain marketshare from Android._

They just released a new iPhone. It's probably fair to say that that will be a
short-term bump that will flatten in good time.

I think it's seriously disingenuous to describe the 5C as a "serious
downmarket move". It's a token move at best, and doesn't get anywhere near the
price point a "downmarket" device would require.

~~~
Tloewald
Based on the pricing we're seeing on the 5C (some offers for $50 or $100 less
than announced price) Apple is putting some flexibility in its wholesale
pricing to give third parties more wiggle room with the 5C. So it's by no
means a "cheap" phone, but it's not as expensive as it first appears.

As for Apple gaining market share in the US, I think what we've seen is that
Android is starting to run out of feature phones to replace, so it's now in a
fight for the high end space with Apple, which will probably see movement in
both directions for a while. I suspect a significant portion of the iPhone
market and a larger portion of the Android market is really just phones with
touch screens -- these are people who don't buy apps or use most of their
phones' capabilities. The "network" effects that will determine the fates of
the ecosystems depend on people using their phones as computers rather than
merely phones.

In Europe recently Windows phone (i.e. Nokia) is doing very well. It will be
interesting to see how that plays out too.

