This Week in Silicon Valley Mythology: Long Reads on How the Original iPhone, Twitter and the New Nest Protect Came to Be
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A handful of feature-length tech tales have hit the presses (and pixels) this week, just as I hit the halfway mark of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs, which I’d finally gotten around to picking up at my local independent bookseller. Coincidence? Perhaps—though I can’t help but wonder if the savvy folks at Simon & Schuster saw fit to publish the new-book-table-worthy paperback edition about halfway between the wide release of Jobs and the publication of Fred Vogelstein’s forthcoming Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution. I’ve been slogging through a backlog of long-ish reads for as long as I can remember, but I knew I had to read the excerpt in the New York Times Magazine, a well-researched chronicle of very first iPhone as soon as I stumbled across it on the forums the other day.
The story touches on many of the challenges and milestones of product design, as well as some that were unique to the iPhone, a foray into uncharted territory both for the wizards in Cupertino and as an entirely new product category. “…it wasn’t at all clear to Apple’s executive team that the features they enabled, like on-screen keyboards and ‘tap to zoom,’ were enhancements that consumers wanted.”
Of course, the longstanding rivalry between designers and engineers comes up; forumite Mrog’s favorite part is a quote from Phil Kearney: “Most of the designers are artists. The last science class they took was in eighth grade. But they have a lot of power at Apple. So they ask, ‘Why can’t we just make a little seam for the radio waves to escape through?’ And you have to explain to them why you just can’t.” (Guess which side Kearney was on?)
Vogelstein’s article is chock full of similar gems—I personally found the level of secrecy to be quite remarkable—and well worth the read. Also interesting: at one point, hardware exec Jon Rubenstein uses the idiom “put all your wood behind one arrow,” which I had never heard before. A thread on Stackexchange includes some interesting trivia on the turn of phrase, noting that it was often used by deposed Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy… who, of course, crossed paths with Jobs and Apple many times over the years. Quoted in a Fortune article (following his ouster) in 2010, McNealy said: “Jobs has been brilliant, and he also understands the power of the secret better than anyone I have ever seen”… which is the very premise of the public’s abiding obsession with his life and times.
Read “And Then Steve Said, ‘Let There Be an iPhone’,” then watch the Macworld event below. Then do something—anything—on your iPhone and marvel at what just happened…
…then hit the jump and keep reading (about recommended reading, as it were).
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