The Story of the Original iPhone's Development

jds91md writes "Today's NY Times delivers a great story of the development of the iPhone by Apple. It focuses on the events during the leadup to Steve Jobs taking the stage with shockingly buggy prototypes and pulling off the show that is now history. 'Only about a hundred iPhones even existed, all of them of varying quality. Some had noticeable gaps between the screen and the plastic edge; others had scuff marks on the screen. And the software that ran the phone was full of bugs. The iPhone could play a section of a song or a video, but it couldn’t play an entire clip reliably without crashing. It worked fine if you sent an e-mail and then surfed the Web. If you did those things in reverse, however, it might not. Hours of trial and error had helped the iPhone team develop what engineers called “the golden path,” a specific set of tasks, performed in a specific way and order, that made the phone look as if it worked.' One of the big problems was the phone's connectivity. The man in charge of the iPhone's radios, Andy Grignon, had to deal with Jobs's anger when rehearsals didn't go well. Grignon said, '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.'"

Comments

Terminology

[MrEricSir]

Except they weren't really "Apple innovations". Apple did a great job with the design and engineering of the iPhone, and they popularized these ideas and interfaces. But the innovations themselves largely came from Palm, Nokia, and a whole bunch of startups.

The word "innovation" does not mean "invention." What you're describing, however, does fit the definition of innovation.

Re:Terminology

[multi io]

The innovation of the iPhone was in the overall design, the vertical integration of the touch screen with the new "physical" touch UI and the sensors, the unified co-design of hardware and software and applications and later the app store model and so on

Palm did the same thing before Apple and was very successful with it. Apple did not invent or was the first to succeed with the app store either. The iPhone was simply an evolution from previous platforms.

No. I owned a Palm Pilot. It was a very different device from an iPhone. There was nothing like the app store either. OTOH, all current smartphones, including Android and Windows Phone offerings, aren't very different devices from an iPhone. Even though those devices have developed several unique feature sets and UI paradigms, the basic way the whole package works is fundamentally similar to -- and can be traced back to -- the first iPhone.

and they have since totally disrupted and recreated the entire smartphone market.

Apple has always remained a small player in the smartphone market, so they neither "disrupted" nor "recreated" it.

That's not a valid line of reasoning. You can disrupt and recreate a market without subsequently dominating it for a long time. The available Android and Windows Phone devices are very competitive offerings. Still, as stated above, they're fundamentally similar to the original iPhone in many ways. As an indication you can just look at the way mobile browsers have developed. Until 2007 they were tiny, clunky apps that nobody used. After 2007, everybody scrambled to make their browser work like the iPhone's. There is a reason why e.g. Opera basically pulled their browser from the market and started laboring internally for one or two years. There is a reason why Microsoft essentially terminated their entire mobile OS line, which had been quite successful previously, and started working on a new one. There was a smartphone market before the initial iPhone, and then there was a very different smartphone market after the initial iPhone. That's what constitutes the market "disruption" and "recreation".

Re:A testament to engineers

[stenvar]

Couldn't they just wait till it actually worked? Its not like anyone was racing them to market in those days.

Android had been in the works since 2005 and probably could have been released on a phone in 2007, but their acquisition by Google probably cost them a year. And at the time, Palm, Microsoft, and Nokia were formidable competitors. In 2007, they had become complacent and failed to update their OSes, but Apple didn't know that at the time.

Yeah, people were "racing them to market", and the initial iPhone was a pretty iffy proposition and pretty limited device.

Not very inflexible at all

[SuperKendall]

But considering how inflexible the first version of the OS was, not impossible.

If you look at the jailbreaking stuff from launch time though, the platform itself was not really inflexible at all. Many of the classes iOS developers know and use today were there at launch. The device itself have a limited set of applications but underneath it really was running a scaled down OSX and using ObjectiveC for applications just as the desktop did...

I totally agree with you on the need for groups to be able to work together being a reason why the announced it so far ahead of launch (comparatively). They got it as far as they could (really farther) with the left hand not being able to know what the right was doing.

Re:A testament to engineers

[bensyverson]

iOS (then iPhone OS) basically is a miniaturized OS X. Nothing changed.

Re:give proper credit

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey dumbass. They've been dominating the market BY REVENUE for YEARS now.