Hello, and welcome to The Verge Cast. There's usually a whole little bit I do at the beginning of our show here, but this is a very special edition of The Verge Cast. It's just me, Neil Lappeteller, and I'm joined for the full hour here by Brian Merchant, who is author of The One Device, a new book about how the first iPhone was made. Hey, Brian.
Hey, Neil. Wait, I don't get the Cesar Bucca treatment. Oh, man. One day someone's going to write a book about that.
So I want to start with just a little story about how you and I came to meet and how we end up running a big excerpt from your book on The Verge, which has caused some controversy that I want to talk about. But I have said on The Verge Cast many times, I don't think anyone's ever told the story of how anyone made the iPhone. Like, the real story isn't out there. And Brian, as you mentioned, is a Verge Cast listener.
And he emailed me and said, I'm writing this book. So several months ago, he came by The Verge office, we hung out, and I was like, I cannot wait to read this book. And when it comes time, I want to run a chunk of it. So we did.
But it's amazing. I love it when little things happen because of the podcast. Yeah, absolutely. I just couldn't help myself.
I heard you say that. I think I may have literally put my hand up in the air doing dishes or whatever. I'm like, I did. I did.
I know the answer. Yeah, I just had to reach out. So we will definitely talk about it. But let's start at the start so people know what's going on with this book.
So just tell me about your book. Yeah. So the One Device is the secret history of the iPhone. That's the billing.
It's sort of about all of the human stories, which are often invisible, that go beyond sort of the narrative that we all kind of glom onto about, you know, Steve Jobs and presenting this thing, which is a big part of the story. But, you know, I just kind of woke up one day, and it was actually, I left my phone in a cab. I think everybody has this moment where you are without your phone for an extended period of time. You feel a little uncomfortable.
And I was fortunate enough to go years without ever having that. But I did eventually leave it in the back of a cab. And, you know, the cab driver turned it into the police, nicely enough. So, I mean, there are just so few things where you're like, okay, you know, that's my day.
I'm taking the day off work to go down to the police department, get my phone back. Like, everything else can wait. So I'm sitting there in line just, and I'm just kind of musing on it. And I was just thinking about this thing that has so much power over us.
And I really kind of quickly arrived at the conclusion that I had very little idea of how it works or what goes into making each one or how it became so ubiquitous, how it became the most popular device on the planet, how it became the one device. So from there, I just started peeling away at it. And as I detail in the book, I really pretty early on went to the folks at iFixit, just curious about what was under the hood of this thing. And then that's when it really kind of sunk in, when they were explaining piece by piece this whole, like, sea of components and materials and concepts that they were talking about.
So I really sort of saw an opportunity to kind of create, you know, something like an atlas of our moment. Like, this is its invention, its technology, its labor, its marketing, its culture. It's, you know, everything kind of has been poured into this thing very, very successfully. So the book is about homing in on all those layers and, you know, going piece by piece.
Like, how did this happen inside Apple? I think as I was reading it, and listeners, if you read it, which I recommend you do, because it's great. It's almost every other chapter is there's the inside narrative of Apple in, you know, sort of mid-late 2000s when you're making the thing, and then there's extreme present day, you're in a tin mine, you're in, you know, lithium mines, literally, where the battery components are being made, talking about how they physically have to make it. What kind of prompted that part of it?
Yeah, so the goal was really to kind of obtain sort of as comprehensive an understanding of how we arrive at this moment as possible. And that means, just as you said, on the one hand, understanding how it was built as a product, but on the other hand, it means trying to understand the nature of a device, of a thing, of something that is comprised of minerals that have to come from somewhere, of parts that have to be put together somewhere, and this massive spiraling, you know, supply chain that sort of binds them all together. So I really kind of did my best to condense, you know, what makes the iPhone the iPhone into a series of chapters, and then I explore them one by one. So you have the concept of a smartphone in the very beginning.
Like, why do we even want this thing, this audio-visual communicator that puts us in constant touch with anybody that we've ever met and, you know, hundreds of thousands of people that we never have or never will? Why do we want this? And so I look at the history of where that sort of idea evolved from and how it was inspired by both fiction and technology. And then I move on to, you know, the basic mineral parts.
Like, this thing is made of silicon and tin and tungsten and, you know, so many different elements that have to be mined and pulled out of the earth by real people that we wouldn't have this thing in our hands if there weren't miners, sometimes child miners, for instance, in Bolivia, pulling this stuff out of the earth so we can get this final product. So, like, for me, like, the iPhone is really a malicum of all these threads, and it was really just pretty incredible to get the opportunity to pull out each of them. Yeah, I think in talking to you and talking to the publishers, we were figuring out what extra we're going to run, it is interesting to me how much you focus on the labor side of what's happening here and how important that is to you as part of the book. Yeah, because I think it's one of the most overlooked and most invisible parts.
You know, from time to time, there will be attention given to manufacturing, for instance, in China, in the mega factories operated by Foxconn. You were out there, too. I did. You know, I really was interested from the very beginning.
It's actually one of the first things I did for the book is I flew out to Shanghai and I went over to Shenzhen, which is home to Longhua, which is probably the most famous Foxconn factory where the iPhone used to be made almost exclusively, and now it's not so big that it's made in other plants. But, yeah, so one of the things I was fortunate enough to be able to do was to get inside Longhua, this famous factory that had a suicide epidemic years ago, and to discover by talking to a lot of the workers, the former workers, the people who live right next to this behemoth factory and the people who work within it, that it's still ongoing, that this thing that we kind of marbled over and was very tragic and struck us in Cosmedia stir five or six years ago is still ongoing. It still permeates the culture there. It's still very, very difficult to manufacture technology products.
It's still, you know, it conditions are a little bit better. They're getting paid a little bit more. But it's, you know, every single device that we use, it feels so seamless. It feels like this beautiful, you know, responsive artifact goes through, you know, dozens and dozens of hands, and these people see hundreds, sometimes thousands of iPhones go through their stations, and they have to do this very difficult, repetitive work, and there haven't been massive correctives to that work culture.
It remains long hours, on your feet, brutal management style. You know, people last a year, and there are still, sadly, still some suicides. One of the people we interviewed was a line worker who had just quit because he couldn't take it anymore, and he knew somebody who had just had enough and had committed suicide by jumping off the buildings in one of the places where there are not nets. The CEO of Fox famously installed nets to catch the bodies falling down.
Yeah. And didn't really, yeah. So long story short is that there's still, there's a lot there. I hope people pay attention to that chapter.
That chapter may be coming out in an excerpt as well. But I think that it's important to really connect those two parts of the process as something goes from an invention and an idea and a bona fide innovation, and then, you know, we kind of outsource its realization. We outsource collecting the hard materials and putting it together, and oftentimes there are exceptions. So we really feel like I think we would do well to internalize and to combine all of the factors that, you know, make possible this incredible device.
Yeah, we're going to talk about sort of the inside Apple part of it for the rest of this podcast. I'm sure that's the section that we ran, which was one of the most fascinating decision points inside Apple. But as I read the book, I was struck by there's as much emphasis on that part, and I think on the labor and resource part. And I think it's very few authors have decided to focus on that as much as the other thing and, you know, the drama inside of the company making the innovation.
I thought it was very smart, so I want to make sure we talked about it right off the bat. But having done that now, let's do some drama. So who did you talk to? Because one of your big theses in the very beginning is there's a myth of the sole engineer, right, Thomas Edison's Steve Jobs, and they're rightly line-ized because it takes a lot of effort and will and dedication to bring innovations to market in the way that those people did.
But then there's these huge branching chains of people working below them to actually realize the stuff. So you talk to a lot of people who don't get the credit, basically. Right, yeah. Yeah, no, that's exactly the point I'm trying to make.
And, like, yeah, like, name one person who worked in Edison's lab who, like, you know, helped perfect that bamboo filament that made the light bulb work. We can't, there's a lot of history that we glom onto these figureheads. And for a wide range of reasons, and sometimes parts of that's justified. I talked to anyone and everyone that was willing to talk, basically.
I just reached out to current, former, and affiliated Apple employees, people who all worked on the iPhone project or who had inside knowledge of it. I spoke to, you know, in a book like this, you know, like, that's unauthorized by Apple and given Apple secrecy and its sort of non-disclosure policies, which I also touch on in the book. I didn't do a lot of on-the-record interviews with current members. I did do a number of anonymous interviews with current employees, but this is more people who left out Apple for whatever reason.
So I think some figures that come to mind are like Bossorting, who is one of the great unheralded sort of user interface geniuses and his partner, Imran Chhabri, who together have probably done more to, you know, under the leadership of their boss, Greg Christie. This human interface team is really one of the unheralded sort of design forces in all the technology over the last 20 years. I really believe that. That sort of they took ideas that had been, you know, lying around that were kind of, maybe there was a, you know, this patent or a paper here or there for a little, you know, pinch to zoom or multi-touch.
But these guys really took the software and using like Adobe Macromedia, like built the entire user interface that is like, like Imran says, it's like water. It is. It's everywhere. We touch.
We expect things to sort of move like paper, like a tactile object when we touch them. And that's because of the work that these guys did, really sort of perfecting this interactivity paradigm. So that crew is really important. And then I highlight a bunch of the early engineers who really were sort of cut from this like OG Apple sort of cloth from the Mac days where they're just like gung-ho like crazy.
Like, let's, let's like throw together these prototypes. Let's make a rig. Let's do whatever it takes to sort of make, you know, these sort of like abstract ideas turn into like functional technologies. So, yeah.
And I went up the chain and I talked to Tony Fidel, who was an executive at the time. I talked to people who become VPs, like Henri Lamoureux, who was just fascinating, just interviewed, just really, really, really interesting things to say. Richard Williamson, who was sort of the brains behind Safari and then subsequently the brains behind squeezing Safari and a bunch of these other maps down from Mac size to iPhone size. Richard was, Richard is a really fascinating, really brilliant person.
So there's all these people. And then under them, you know, Evan Dahl, who was at the time sort of in the trenches, sort of jack of all trades, engineer, helping out on the iPhone and went on to found Flipboard and is now, I think, a bigger wig at Apple. But it really took this huge sort of concerted effort. Neen Ganatra did mail.
They knew that was going to be a big thing. So, yeah, there's dozens of interviews. So you talked to Fidel. You point out in the book, right, there's three people.
There's Fidel, who's sort of in charge of hardware bring-ups. There's Scott Forstall, who's famously in charge of the software. And there's Johnny Ive, who's in charge of the design. And there's a line in your book that by the end of it, these three people would not even speak to each other.
Right? So you got Fidel. Did you talk to the other, too? I actually did.
I did not talk to Johnny Ive again. No sitting Apple people participated on the record. And I did not talk to Scott Forstall on the record. We drew from the existing sort of his heated court testimony, unfortunately, which was lengthy.
Pulled from that. He didn't sit for a profile with Bloomberg Businessweek. And, you know, he worked very, very, very closely with Henri, Richard Williamson, and Neen Ganatra, who were kind of his core sort of managers underneath him. And, you know, a lot of these guys spend every day together.
They're eating out of meetings, bouncing ideas back and forth, you know, and perfecting things in this crazy hurricane that was the iPhone development process. Yeah. It seems like Apple just wasn't, like, they were not very responsive to you. Did you reach out to them?
What was that like? So Apple was made aware of this book. I reached out to them as soon as I inked the deal. I just wanted to be completely above board.
And I would have loved to interview their, you know, entire staff. And everybody who was involved in the iPhone project would have interesting things to say about it. And people who are working with it today, obviously, it would have been great to hear from Tim Cook. But I, yeah, no, you know, I made it very clear.
It was very transparent about everything that I was doing. I gave them outlines. I gave them lists of people that I was hoping to speak to. I gave them many, many, many opportunities to comment.
And we kind of played a year-long game of email tag. I met with one of their reps in Cupertino. And we had this chat where he's like, you know, Apple might be opening up. And it turns out they never did.
But they did. They did. I mean, they did. But that's like a, yeah, there was a time when Apple was like, we're opening up.
Those of us in the press have watched it happen and not happen in different ways. But I'm sure every journalist has an anecdote of some Apple person saying that Apple's opening up now. So I want to start at the very beginning, sort of the proto-history, kind of a sense of what the book is about, who you were talking to. There is, I've never heard this before.
I found this fascinating. The origins of like touch computing at Apple started with this group, ENRI. And they were doing like the first, it was like a projector over a Mac. Tell me about that.
Yeah. So there was a period, you know, at Apple where things kind of seemed sort of a little more informal and looser. And just this sort of this collection of guys from different departments had slowly sort of met one another over the years. Beginning in the late 90s to early 2000s, there were a boss and I'm around who we mentioned earlier, were on the Cuban Interface team.
And they've been doing a bunch of stuff with a Mac, trying to update its OS and sort of pulling it out of the gray, black and white content style stuff. So they kind of built their renown, sort of making the little icons sort of bounce around and be more playful and look more stylish. And so there started kind of rose and they got a little more freedom to do what they wanted. Meanwhile, there was a couple of guys on the input engineering team, Brian Huffey and then Josh Strickon, who just wanted to, they were kind of, they come to Apple to innovate to do the build crazy stuff and they did want to do more than just build laptops.
And then there was, they both knew Duncan Kerr, who was this kind of, this guy who was on the industrial design group, but a little less siloed there. Like he was interested in software too. So this group just started kind of like informally meeting every week and it called the meetings Explore New Rich Interactions. The idea was...
that the way that we interfaced with computers, which around the time was all mouse, keyboard, was getting too cumbersome. The media was getting richer. The internet was getting faster. Processing power was improving.
We were going to want to be able to do more stuff. And they sort of focused around this concept of direct manipulation, where if you have a mouse, it's still indirect manipulation. There's still an intermediary between you and the computer and what you wanted to do. So they kind of really looked at a bunch of sort of technologies, some of them a little more mundane, like just like force feedback mice and stuff that was way more out there, like iterations of sort of like the Kinect style, you know, hand sensing, field sensing stuff.
And they kind of like gravitated around this technology that had just gotten a boost called multi-touch, which now is sort of like the computer language we all speak with our hands. But at the time, it was very niche, and it had been developed by another one of the great unsung heroes of the iPhone development process, Wayne Westerman, who Wayne just has this incredible story. Like, again, I couldn't speak to him because he still works at Apple, but I was able to get in touch with his sister and learn his story. And he has a hand disability, where he has kind of severe tendinitis.
And while he was writing his dissertation on AI, he realized he just couldn't write, so he had to build himself a system that was less hard on his hands. So he kind of looked at multi-touch, which was kind of this experimental technology, and had been bubbling up for a while, but never got much traction. Fingerworks, and it just so happened that an intern had brought one of these hand disability... This was like a cording keyboard, and I'm sure half of the virtual class listeners know what I'm talking about, and half don't.
But they used to advertise it in print Macworld, this Fingerworks cording keyboard, where you would put your hands on it, and you would push literally piano chords to make letters. And so an intern at Apple had purchased one of these. Right, exactly. And Wayne had played piano all his life, and so that was kind of part of the inspiration.
And yeah, with the intern... Well, actually, I take that back. She was described to me in an interview as an intern, but she was not. I think she was a junior engineer who had just been hired.
But she had brought one in, and they had noticed it, and they just said, okay, what can we do with this thing? And as the discussions progressed, they really kind of got the sense that this thing was going to be the kernel of being the future. So what you were talking about is... And they sort of pulled this thing onto a table, brought in a projector screen, put a piece of paper over the keyboard, over the Fingerworks pad, rather, which was this black, opaque pad, and that piece of paper was going to be the screen.
So they were like, what if we just shine down basically a Mac home screen onto this, and then we just kind of tweak it, tweak the software so we can make it register touch, and we can see what this will look like. It was a totally slipshod. They totally just kind of hacked this thing together. There was...
Greg Chrissy, the head of HI, told me that he just went home and fished a camera lens out of his garage and screwed it onto the top so they could focus it up well enough. And meanwhile, it's just funny. So they were doing this all in this abandoned user testing lab that was down the hall from the ID studio, because after Jobs had announced it, they had built this user testing lab where you bring people in to see how they respond to it. You know, you focus group technology, basically.
And when Steve Jobs came back, he was like, no, we're not doing that anymore. We're going to tell them what they want. So this place had sat idle, so there's all these cameras, and it's weird. There's like VHS tapes.
There's all this kind of like this sound mixing studio, one-way mirror. And anyways, that was where they got to work, because no one would plug them in there. So VHS and Imran and Joss Strickon and Brian Hubby all sort of really started trying to hack this thing together to see if they could, you know, make a demo that they could show to Johnny and then to Steve as maybe as a way to the future doing this direct manipulation stuff. Because at this point, Steve Jobs had no idea this was going on, both because, well, mostly because they didn't want him to say, what the hell are you doing in here?
And then kill the project, you know? Walking on this crazy projector rig with a piece of paper. If I caught somebody here doing that, what are you doing? Please get back to work.
Oh, I would sign with them, totally. Sounds like just like a crazy, crazy mess. But, you know, and the funny stuff about this process was that, like, they were really sort of going about it. Like, old school, DIY.
They were looking at videos on the internet. Joss Strickon was reading, you know, the available literature. Like, Sony had done something sort of similar with a giant table-sized touchscreen called SmartSkin. So they look at that and they...
I love the story. They, like, read the research paper and copied it, right? Or something like that? And they got in trouble?
Well, so I don't know that they actually got in trouble. But they got, so, you know, they're busy... Not in trouble with Sony. Like, internal management trouble.
Internally, right. So, like, they're just doing this freewheeling. And Joss Strickon was just, like, this guy right out of MIT. So it was, like, anything goes.
You take your pull from research. You, like, you know, you incorporate other ideas. You copy when necessary. So, yeah.
So he built, you know, like, they... I guess they were still... They had some trouble with the finger work stuff for technical reasons. But they just got it a different way because it was opaque.
And they could layer the sensors and the chips inside it differently. But they needed a glass screen that you could interact with directly. So the Sony SmartSkin stuff was closer to that. So he was, like, oh, yeah, we did it this way.
And then when they, you know, periodically you check in with the legal team. And they're, like, oh, yeah, we just did this. Like, because somebody did it. And they were, like, wait, wait a minute.
Like, no, stop looking at other stuff. We're doing it ourselves. It's our intention. That's great.
So we've got this weird research project happening. A bunch of people in a projector with this finger work keyboard. The sort of canonical story of how the iPhone happened, Steve Jobs actually told to Walt Mossberg at the conference. He said, at first I had to make a tablet because I wanted a tablet.
And then we couldn't figure out what to do with it. So I put it on the shelf. And then later I wanted to do a phone. And we took the tablet off the shelf and made the phone.
That's the, you know, 30,000 foot Steve Jobs version of the story. How do you go from a bunch of crazies in a room to tablet to iPhone? Well, so, yeah. So I think, like, the second half of that is accurate.
And we'll probably get to that in a second. But, yeah, the engineers all took issue with the first part of that statement and that Steve Jobs asked for this. When it was really kind of them that came up with it. So what happened was I think they were imagining it first as sort of a new, like, sort of input paradigm for the Mac.
But then once they realized they could do it with the clear screen, they sort of naturally started gravitating around a tablet and doing a, you know, kind of prototyping something that would look closer to the iPad. And when they showed something like that that would be sort of in the trajectory towards tablet to Johnny Ives, that's when he says that he loved it. And he, in turn, showed it to Steve Jobs, who initially did not. But then, you know, it was, and then Steve Jobs came around to it because he, you know, he thought about it.
And he's a smart guy, obviously, and he sees sort of the potential there. And he's got, meanwhile, like, a couple of his best user interface guys like who are just in love with this project. I mean, the way that these guys talk about this project, it's just like they were down there experimenting. The days would, like, turn into night.
They're in a window, so, like, they forget to eat. And they were just, I mean, it's like, they talk about it like, you know, like a painter who, like, painting his brick through a masterpiece or something. Like, it really is something that is near and dear to them. So there's clearly a lot of passion motivating the project.
And it's, you know, Steve Jobs signed on to it. And there's this funny quote from Greg Christie where after he does kind of give it the green light where, like, he comes back and, you know, the team's kind of all gathered around the table. And they're like, oh, so you've been talking to Steve. Like, what did he say?
And Greg Christie's like, well, we're going to have to change our notebooks, guys, because it turns out Steve Jobs invented multi-touch or something like that. Just because he got so excited about the idea then that he owned it, you know. Yeah, which is like a classic job story, right? Classic jobs.
And that's part of what, like, made him such a great leader, too, is that he, like, absorbed all that passion and said, you know, like, tablet and the input engineering team sort of doubled down on that effort and went through a bunch of hurdles that, you know, they're going to Radio Shack. They're, like, scavenging parts. They had to buy a Windows computer to run some of the firmware. And they just kind of, like, managed to, like, hack this thing together that looked like a big, fat, kind of ugly iPad.
And that was called the Q79 project. It was codenamed. It got more resources, got a little more visibility. But it still had its share of hurdles, mostly that it was looking like the thing was going to be expensive, like, just as much as a laptop, maybe more, because you didn't have all these parts to scale.
No one was making multi-touch-capable touchscreens or sensors at the time. So, like, you had to work out supply issues, and you needed new chips, you know. You needed pretty much, you know, to invent a lot of stuff. And that's what these guys were doing.
They were perfecting a lot of stuff that was out there. They were making big innovation leafs on their own. You know, Justricon has a patent for sort of integrating the SmartSkin-esque technology into a more, like, Apple-y tablet and eliminating sort of the grid work that would otherwise appear on the screen. So there's a lot of, you know, a lot of innovation had to go into, you know, even getting it that far.
So now we shift into the real drama. The contrast is disrupted after we publish this thing. So at the same time, it's dropped its organic phone. It was not clear.
I was talking to Deere, who usually hosts the British Aspen. The idea of an iPod phone, which was the other concept, the idea of an iPod phone made total and complete sense because of the way that carriers controlled the market, the idea that they were dumb phones, that limited functionality, the idea that you could just glue an iPod and a cell phone together and call that a cell phone was totally legitimate given the state of the market at that time. So they're pursuing both tracks. Right, and totally, and not only that, but, like, iPod is one of the most powerful brands in the world at this time.
It's, like, the coolest device. So, like, iPod phone, like, okay, you can see that leap being made easy enough. And it would just be, it wouldn't have been that difficult from a technological standpoint to just, you know, get a radio in there and allow it to take calls, which they did, in fact. They didn't, and they, you know, hacked in, you know, a modem, they hacked in a radio, and they were working callable iPod phones.
So, yeah, just to back up a quick second, and this part has been told a little bit before, but Apple was really kind of, like, feeling the heat from smarter handsets, smarter cell phones, in that they were going to encroach on iPod territory pretty soon. iPod was a big cash cow. When the Henri guys started experimenting with this new stuff, it wasn't the iPod was just a belief. It was this kind of weird accessory that Apple was making.
But come, you know, 2004, 2005, the iPod is a hit, and, you know, it really looks like, you know, computers are going to be getting small and powerful enough to fit an entire little operating system onto a phone. It's easy to squeeze, like, songs onto phones. Like, people like their iPod, they, you know, stomach their cell phones just fine. Like, let's put them together.
That makes sense. So it was really kind of, like, motivated by this business imperative. And, yeah, and then so when they started casting around, say, okay, what do we have? We have this hit product, this incredible, like, you know, proven technology with an iconic click wheel, iconic look, iconic brand, and what else?
Well, we have this, like, great experimental, like, like, touchscreen-based rig. Like, it's tethered. Like, the battery lasts for, like, 45 seconds if you unplug it, and it's, like, it heats up, and it's, like, there's this thing. And early on, you know, according to everybody, like, Jobs did.
Like, you know, that's when that lines up. He was, like, this would be great for that. Like, this would be able to eliminate some of our issues because we can have carriers to subsidize it. It would be a little easier to manage the technology because by virtue of its size, it would sort of, you know, it would be easier to get the touch to register.
There'd be less, like, awkward. You'd have to deal with fewer sensors, that kind of stuff. But subsidize the expense, right? Because the initial problem with the touch stuff was it's going to be so expensive.
And Jobs is looking at the business model of the carriers and saying, well, they pay for most of this anyway, which I think is fascinating. Yeah, that's what a couple of these guys who are familiar with the dealings said. So, I mean, meanwhile, like, it's kind of a stopgap. You know, there's the Motorola Rocker is this thing that Apple...
I don't want to spend one second talking about the Motorola. It's not deserving of any attention. It has to be one of the most... Whenever I bring up interviews, it's just, like, one of those universally reviled products.
But it was important for one reason, and that's it got Apple and got Jobs into the meetings with the telecom folks. There was a great comment on the excerpt. There's a comment for somebody, which we obviously can't verify. It's a great comment.
It's like, Motorola deserves credit here because Ed Zander told all the engineers to just be as open as possible with Apple because he thought he would get paid by Jobs. And Jobs told his engineers to just steal everything and, like, learn as much as they could and walk away. And that guy apparently worked in the world at the time. Anyway, so now we're on to, okay, Tony Fidel, you're in charge of...
I think he's in charge of P1, which is iPod phone. The codename is Purple 1. Scott Forstall is in charge of software for P2, and they're basically a bake-off. Yeah, exactly.
So there basically wasn't any hardware for P2. It was really just, like, perfecting this interaction paradigm. So it was... And it wasn't like they were both sort of like...
It was like, okay, you two, you know, like, one of you is going to be the winner. You know, Tony do your best, Scott do your best, and, you know, whoever has a Chinese product wins. It kind of worked out that way, like, you know, effectively, but not... But it wasn't, like, the imperative from the beginning.
They just both had these two sort of tracks that were going. And Tony, to his credit, saw early on that there was movement towards the phone, and he got a team doing Skunk Works early to get this iPod phone ready so that he could just show Jobs and say, like, oh, you want one? Like, here's what it looks like. Unfortunately, like, it just kind of boiled down to the fact that you can't make calls with, like, a rotary dial wheel.
It just... Well, you can, but, like, the world moved beyond that fairly quickly when the iPad had a digital. Right. So you had...
So there's a third element. There's, like, Tony doing the iPod phone. There's Forstall and Williamson and those guys are working on the software side. And then there's the human interface team, which is working on both.
So, like, Boss and Imran went over to see if, after the rocker failed, Jobs apparently called, like, all hands and said, okay, like, we need to do a phone, we need to do it better, and we need to do it fast. And since Tony's project was the closest one to realization, he's like, okay, HI, Boss, Imran, HI team, see if you can, like, make this thing work. So they built, like, predictive, you know, text analysis. They built, like, this...
They tried to mess with the UI to make it more amenable. They did all these things. And it just, you know, I think after months and months and months of trying, and Tony's version of the story, Jobs is adding them on to try to get it to work, it's just not bearing any fruit. Meanwhile, like, the touch paradigm, the scrolling stuff, like, the demos that they're working up with a multi-touch is looking more and more compelling.
Like, Boss has whipped up, like, a really good sort of scrolling through the address book demo, for example, like, and that's one of your key things. If you have a phone, you want to be able to, like, flip through your address book in a way that's not cumbersome, like, typing through names or, like, jamming on a hard down button. So they were working on stuff like that, and they knew they could do richer media stuff, like, pinching and zooming and sort of swiping around. So that, you know, became the next focus.
And there's a great story from Greg Christie, who was also, you know, trying and failing to meet Steve's expectations with this thing, where they had all these, like, little demos and shards, and Christie calls them to us. But Joss is like, I don't, like, this isn't what I want. Like, I don't want this, like, these abstractions. Like, show me something that looks and feels like a phone or something.
we can relate to a phone otherwise i'm gonna give it to another crew uh and then christy goat says they went on what he calls a two-week death march where people are just sleeping in there crashing at his house this place stinks it's you know and they're hacking up uh you know this really sort of rudimentary thing that he says at the end of that two-week stretch was sort of like the basic sort of foundation layout of what we would recognize as the iphone today that's wild so let's get into it so the excerpts published there's a moment where they're arguing about what's gonna happen and you have a story from tony fidel that says in the middle of all this phil schiller who's still head of marketing apple is insistent that they do a hardware keyboard we publish the excerpt uh there's another quote in there for a guy named bill bilbrey who says phil is not like smart like jumps up around uh because he sees a technology like grandpa grandpa grandpa so obviously i think this surprised you it was less surprising to me everyone seized on this moment in the excerpt uh tony tweeted today this is not true which is incredible because it's just a quote from tony right is it true like what's going on here yeah i mean so here's what i can say about it so like i wasn't in the room i wasn't in the room at apple you know 10 15 years ago when this would have happened but i you know this is a quote verbatim as tony fidel who was in the room told it to me and he told me this quote in such detail uh and gave this such a vivid account and i had no reason not to believe it was untrue um so and you presumably you were like in a restaurant with him right you presumably like taped it right and you transcribed it yeah i'm just like this is the basics right i mean like his claim is this isn't true but it's a quote and i was saying to you earlier i know tony i like tony tony is a very colorful person a huge personality but you just quoted him right i did i just i just quoted him so this whole thing and not only that but i have a source i wanted to say anonymous corroborate not corroborate the whole thing but corroborate the the fact that uh that that phil had been against um multi-touch technology so i felt comfortable in including this direct quote from an interview uh that was you know this quote was given on the record um so i i i 100 percent stand by that and the whole thing is a little perplexing to me you know i know that there's professional relationships and whatever that that uh you know people get concerned about but yeah this controversy has kind of kind of blown me away it was there's there's very little controversial about it to me before before i uh saw any of the fallout so you haven't been a part of the apple media circus i guess in the past because to me this is a train that i just saw coming um but it's a quote i mean it's a direct quote with his name by it so i figured yeah quotes their names it's a direct quote you know i've verified the quotes you know as soon as this dust started kicking up and you know it's i mean it's unfortunate that uh that he feels uncomfortable about it now but like yeah it's again it's a very straightforward situation you know a an interview in person quote was given you know it's it's very very straightforward and i wanted to also want to comment on the the the real base stuff because it's i think like he everybody's taking it as this like sort of vicious insult which i can see how it kind of is but it's also like you want somebody like that at the higher echelons who's not who's not going to be like so deep in the weeds that like he only understands what power users are going to do with this thing so i think that was great strength actually right so i think what brett was trying to say was that and maybe it stems from some frustration with uh with shiller or something but it didn't seem like it seemed like he's just saying like look like like like phil you know has this strength he interprets technology he can he can say like okay this is going to play well uh with a with an older generation or folks who are not you know just early adopters or beta testers or whatever you know so i think that that that's that's part of it um can i just interrupt you for a second yeah so like i said i know tony i know tony's pr person i asked tony this pr person what's going on here and i just got a email back from her that says tony stands by his tweet and has nothing more to say about this so that's that's that's where he's landed like i said i like tony a lot i hope one day he tries to explain what is going on in his mind with these quotes well he did so yeah i mean that's what that's that's what he's saying he stands by his tweets and he says it's not true i don't you know i don't know what else to you know what else to say about this he did i mean he did write me and say i i told you a lot of funny hyperbolic stories when we met i did not mean for you to take the iphone keyboard story literally i don't know what that means um i don't i like i said i like i really enjoyed our interview together i really thought that it was pretty straightforward um i think that it's a case of somebody you know maybe regretting saying something after the fact and uh wanting to preserve a professional relationship or i don't know i shouldn't really speculate i don't know because yeah well here's what i think the two quotes together are they work interestingly together right so there is the extreme hindsight of knowing that physical keyboards weren't the right answer which we have a decade of hindsight exactly but at that moment yeah blackberry ran the world yeah uh and everyone thought the iphone was stupid because it didn't have this keyboard so when they launched that was the primary criticism of the iphone was there's no physical keyboard so to have someone in the room saying we're screwing this up without having this keyboard is actually fine and appropriate but then there's this other in that context of the del story is fine right like it's just a moment that happened that it would have been honestly pretty weird if it hadn't happened based on the market at the time then there's the other quote that's like phil's phil's not a technology guy which is a quote right um and i think those two paint this picture of phil that is i will say this i've you know seen phil i've talked to phil uh i've had nerdy conversations about cameras with phil walt has had many many more conversations with phil than i have over the years and he assures me phil is just as geeky as it gets with some of the technology stuff but and this is walt saying to me he says a lot of times engineers have contempt for people who aren't engineers and phil not engineers a marketing person yeah and that you can see how that can filter up and down so i don't doubt that phil if you know phil was on the show or phil's he goes on a junker show all the time when they get into the weeds about the details of consumer technology i'm sure he's there and he's he knows what he's talking about i think it's this other level of here's what i'm actually doing way down in the nitty-gritty of engineering and that's there's this disconnect there and i think it's like but i think that conversation around should this thing have a keyboard in 2005 2006 2007 right before this thing comes out that is like a that is the conversation to be having mobile technology at that time yeah exactly and i think that like that that quote it wasn't it certainly wasn't intended to make phil schiller look dumb it was it was an opposing viewpoint i think like you're saying in hindsight like now that now it's like now that it is like water to quote imran chowdhury it does like how could you be against this thing but so it was like somebody with the interests of like the current echelon of technology users in mind and somebody that you know knew very well the marketing uh power of something like blackberry or a hard keyboard was making this argument um i the reason that i think that i paired them together is that i do have you know other sources who have said things to this effect um and i think primarily it has to do with with this this multi-touch moment and the opposition to multi-touch and maybe not understanding fully at the time what you know these what the guys that were trying to convince people like the marketing department to take this on as a product you know to give this more resources uh i i think it was like there's some frustration that he wasn't on the same page with them i don't you know i don't i don't know anything beyond the quotes that i'm given the stories that people tell me and the you know the research that i've done about what it was like to be an apple at the time uh through you know you know documents phil schiller gave his own court testimony and and there's been plenty of reporting over the years so you know i think that this whole thing is maybe just a little uh blown out of proportion i think i think that it's i think that it's totally fine to be a dissenting voice and to you know want to contextualize this emerging technology and even be opposed to it like you said why would you not have someone in the room who was forcing people to think critically about this uh potentiality so i i think that there's you know uh a lot of people who don't you know like to see that kind of who interpret it negatively and i don't think it necessarily is yeah well the apple the apple media the mac media they used to call the mac web way back ago but it's not like the iphone web but the apple web if you will is that is a unique force in the tech media it's it's funny i went right before the show i was like well welcome to this because sometimes sometimes i take things at necessary extremes i think in order to to make sure apple looks good in the end yeah i mean i'm getting that sense too and i don't you know i can't really speculate on the machinations behind sort of the efforts to uh you know discredit or if they even exist or what's what's going on at all behind some of this blowback but you know i will say that i was i'm sure that it was destined to happen you know people there is a culture of appreciation for apple that in many ways is well deserved like it's this crazy uh they created this incredible run of products that people love so you know i don't begrudge anyone for for you know having a stake in it i do think that it's you know it's it's interesting to see some of the pre-coiled backlash uh from from some of the people who just you know don't who have an image of apple that they that that's that they want to you know hold up themselves and and promote especially some some of these bloggers and and commentators uh so maybe this maybe this narrative and maybe some of the stories in this book will violate some of the apple myths that are more deeply held uh but i think that's a healthy thing i think that the truth is is that like a lot of these ideas like percolate uh and spring up from the ground and i think that a lot of people who really make apple apple a lot of the people in the you know in the trenches the engineers the designers quality assurance people people who like are tasked with like really sort of hacking together these crazy uh these crazy products and doing the the grunt work um you know elude a lot of a lot of credit and i'd like to focus on everything that they did too and you know honestly i'd like to focus more on that than than you know uh war words between executives yeah but sometimes it's like unavoidable you're in it yeah it's part of the culture too for sure so there's one thing uh i don't want to ask about um and it was interesting you know i read it i read the book i read the excerpt again when we put it up and i noticed that in our comments a lot of people picked up on this that the icon had broken up marriages like multiple marriages and there was a little bit of a debate on is that you know is that a part of the culture is that good is that how it is now what's your sense of that were you expecting people to focus on that little detail is that a pervasive thing that you heard about give me some more on that yeah absolutely it was um it was pervasive that is um it was yeah i don't necessarily think that it is endemic to apple's culture alone um you know apple's demanding sort of work culture may have played a role in amplifying it during this project but i think that we should look at this more as sort of a relationship between uh people really really brilliant smart hard-working people who are sensing that they have an opportunity to work on something um revolutionary so to speak something that is going to be big you know you can sense a bigness and wanting to want to tap into it and to you know really sort of dedicate themselves to it so i think it's more of a comment on the toll that they paid uh you know they had choices of course i've seen some of those comments too that you know like it's you know you they could have gone home earlier they could have you know maybe that would have been tolerated under a under the management during the time but nobody really spoke of it in those terms i wanted to like communicate the terms that people spoke in it which spoke about that particular element which is like this is what it took there wasn't much of a question about it and i think greg christie like put it put it the best like it's nice like you know like you know we could have done things differently but it but but at the moment we couldn't we just we just really we really were so absorbed in the task at hand the pressures were so great that we didn't ever really think about you know abdicating work and you know that it was so stressful it was stressful for some more than others um depending on which department you were in and what your tasks were what you what you're responsible for but um i think it's worth examining that uh this sort of uh lionization of of work especially in silicon valley you know i was just i just was randomly pulled into like a twitter thread a week or so ago where this vc was saying like you have to you know like we only found people who you know work weekends work all the time work everything and you know there's something that's a little bit toxic about that i think in making those demands and perpetuating this culture of of you know round-the-clock work as a norm or as mandatory for success uh but you know in this book you know i did a lot of interviews with people who would live the consequences of that and some said you know like i would do it all over again the same way and some are much more in biblend and uh some you know are still sort of coming to terms with what what even uh that sort of investment of time and resources at the expense of family uh meant some feel like they have to sort of pay penance to like make up for it which is interesting yeah the other thing i'll say um we've talked now for just over an hour uh you've mentioned a lot of names a lot of people not one female name so far right this is like a male-dominated team i think there's only one you pay attention to this in the book there's only one uh woman on the core iphone yeah there's uh and in the beginning there you know in from the design phase on up there there were none um which is sort of like a well you know it's a problem obviously and it's something that's been true of silicon valley for a long time and it's it's something that you know a lot of the guys that i interviewed um didn't quite you know know what to make of it when it would come up in interviews and and some some you know sort of lamented it and it was you know it's it's crazy it's crazy this device that is in you know has a billion sold it's inspired you know its design paradigms and its software have inspired mock-offs uh that have many more billions sold in android phones and you know many of the design flourishes and uh the design architecture has been changed but it's but it's incredible to think that this it was designed you know by men ostensibly for men um mostly white men um you know it's in the human interface design team which came up with a lot of the interaction design it was a little more diverse uh there were there were you know two non-white members as opposed to to less than that but yeah it's it is a snapshot of this industry uh 10 years ago which was it was doing even less about diversity then than it is now and you know i don't really know what the biggest you know uh result of the of sort of like the way it was designed in the software but you know it is you know a lot of a lot of smart writers uh have pointed out that it's like these products are designed with men in mind and that's sort of you know like roseablet for instance has done a lot of interesting work uh looking at you know the implications of design and when you have a room full of men designing a product it's going to come out more tailored for uh men's hands and men's usage so that's a real thing that we should be thinking about and not only that but the culture was very masculine you know there you know there's that's what of people looking at pornography in the hallways of the place. There's a lot of testosterone. I can't imagine what it must have been like for a woman working on that team. And the woman who was there, Kim Forath, is a polarizing figure as a result of these interviews.
People call her derogatory terms, and that could be just because she collided with them on a personal level. But you have to think about it. You have to think about what this means for the product at large. So what's your last kind of big thought about this?
Obviously, when people read the book, tell them when it comes out. What do you want people to think about? Yeah, I want people to think about technology products, especially one that's become as ubiquitous as the iPhone, which means Androids, and it means this smartphone sort of staple, this iconic black rectangle. I want people to think about the whole immense sort of tapestry of work, of invention, of ideas, of innovation, that all has to be threaded together.
I really hope people come away from this book looking at the iPhone and being cued to think, oh, okay, there's the work of Olivia Minor in there. Oh, okay, there's the work of Imran Chowdhury, the great UI designer in there. Oh, there's the work of Wayne Westerman, who built multi-touch and brought it to fruition because of his hand injuries. Oh, there's Sophie Wilson, the brilliant transgendered architecture designer.
There's just so many different people and personalities and centuries-long ideas stewing that all bubbled up to make this thing possible. So I really want everybody to be able to look at it and kind of recognize what it takes to create something so ubiquitous and think about how that reflects back on us, too. So now you've got to pitch the book. When can you buy it?
How much does it cost? How much does it cost? If you pre-order it, you get a special deal. It's $18.50.
So pre-order it on Amazon, on iBooks. There's something really special about buying the book on iBooks, I think. Yeah. It feels like you're closing the loop.
Yeah, exactly. Complete the experience and then read it on your iPhone. Exactly. Great, man.
Well, thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you for diving deep in the weeds of the controversy. Thank you for experiencing the Apple press with me because very few people know what that's like on the other side. And thank you so much for writing this book and doing the work.
Again, I've read it. I think it's outstanding. I was proud to publish a big chunk of it on the verge. I hope everybody else reads it, too.
All right, man. Well, thanks so much for having me on. It was a pleasure to talk about some of this stuff. And I'm just thrilled with the excerpt.
And the verge cast, man, this was fun. Have a good night. Thank you. See you, everybody.
All right, bye.