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Now that the guy is no longer actively litigating early stage startups that he Angel invested in, and the true origin stories of the iPhone are more widely known he has become mostly irrelevant.

However I would say there is meta information with value[1] in that he was able to get Fast Company to publish a puff piece on his Steve-Jobs-Like genius of coining the term “Rush Hour Pricing” - when in popular culture (and any editor would point out) we just use the simpler phrase: “Surge Pricing”.

[1] In the same way you can discount information from any outlet that publishes “The suit is back” in their fashion column as a serious article: https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html



> the true origin stories of the iPhone are more widely known

Out of the loop on this but very interested: what are the true origin stories of the iPhone, and what is the traditional narrative they contrast?


tldr Jobs put two teams to work on the iPhone development- the iPod team led by Fadell and the iPad team lead by Forstall (Apple began work on the iPad before the iPhone, though Jeff Han’s 2006 TED talk changed everything). Fadell presented an iPhone prototype with click wheel. Jobs went with Forstall’s concept. Much later, Forstall became pretty unpopular and few people had qualms with Fadell taking credit.

A lot of this is covered in various CHM fireside chats - this is a good one: https://youtu.be/5xDRdWFdsoQ


I know Han’s demo was a big deal publicly, and maybe it did change things by priming the public to get excited about multitouch gestures.

But Apple’s multitouch implementation was based on research that started long before, in the late 90s, and they had already bought the resulting tech company (Fingerworks) more than a year before Han’s TED talk.


Ohh interesting, thank you I'll have a watch!




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