by Adam Fisher
Matt Rogers: I was part of the hardware team responsible for building the product. And there was a separate team at Apple led by Scott Forstall that was building the software. And we would meet at some kind of neutral territory to make sure things got together.
Andy Grignon: Scott knew that his path to world domination was holding that UI under lock and key.
Scott Forstall: On the front door of the Purple dorm, we put up a sign that said FIGHT CLUB, because the first rule of Fight Club is “You don’t talk about Fight Club”; and the first rule about the Purple Project is “You do not talk about that outside of those doors.”
Andy Grignon: This is when Steve’s leadership and management style started to permeate the company. Tony and Forstall started to adopt Steve’s mannerisms and persona because it was a pressure cooker—but also you emulate what works, right? And so everyone started screaming at each other. It became just like the thing to do: Fly off the fucking handle.
Tony Fadell: It became, “Your teams can’t see the apps, your team can’t touch any of this stuff.” We had to create a whole other operating system for diagnostics and manufacture.
Andy Grignon: An app that my team had written called Skankphone is what most of the people involved on the project could actually use. It was like blue buttons on a red background. It was just awful to look at. We did it on purpose. It was supposed to be hideous.
Tony Fadell: Then Steve and Scott would say, “You can’t even show the devices to your people.” And my engineers were saying, “We need to use these things, we need to try them. Because we have to make phone calls in the wild, we have to start testing cell phone networks, we have to test all kinds of different things!” It was driving a wedge.
Matt Rogers: Imagine trying to get a product that has never been done before done in record time—and yet you were not working with the guys that were your counterparts. We went from there basically to the product we know today, the product that we ended up shipping. At the time it was two years out. It was a monumental effort around the company. It was nuts.
Andy Grignon: The iPhone is a product that by all accounts should never have succeeded. There wasn’t a single stable proven element in the entire stack: We’d never made a phone before! Now granted, lots of people have been building phones, so what do you do? The very first thing is you start to go shop for people who know how to do this. Well, Steve being crazy, but also being the genius that he was, told us we were not allowed to hire people who knew how to build phones! It was not because he was being a dick. Actually he was a little bit—but he wanted us to invent the knowledge ourselves.
Scott Forstall: There were a number of challenges. One of which was that everything we dealt with before was based on a mouse and keyboard. So we had to rethink everything. Every single part of the device had to be rethought for doing touch. So we started with a brand-new user interface, instead of something that was existing.
Andy Grignon: Then product design—Jony Ive’s guys—would come out with a model and say, “We’re going to make it look like this.” “Oh, it doesn’t have any buttons? Yes, so we need to invent a keyboard? All right.We’ll just add that to the list, right?”
Nitin Ganatra: One of the things that terrified me was How the heck are we going to make a virtual keyboard work anywhere near as well as a physical keyboard?
Scott Forstall: If you look back to 2005 when the engineering team started on this, smartphones all had physical keyboards. The most popular at the time was probably the BlackBerry, and it had a physical keyboard. And many people at the time thought we were actually crazy to try to build something without any form of a physical keyboard: not a slide-out one, not one on the front screen, nothing. And so it was a science project for us to be able to create an on-screen touch keyboard that could work really well and then get out of the way when you weren’t using it.
Nitin Ganatra: We actually had sort of a hack contest that Scott Forstall put together, where anybody who was an engineer on the iPhone software development team could go off and create their own version of what a virtual keyboard should be and how it should work.
Andy Hertzfeld: Steve Jobs himself told me he thought a lot about General Magic while he was working on the iPhone. And, reading between the lines, I think he was mainly talking about the projected keyboard. That’s the main breakthrough of the iPhone: to not have the keyboard. But because he had used the General Magic devices he knew that you can do the projected keyboard effectively. It turns out that the screen resolution of the original iPhone was identical to the General Magic devices.
Andy Grignon: But again, going back to why this thing shouldn’t have succeeded… let’s start from the bottom. We’re using a chip that’s never been tested before. It’s a brand-new part, and Samsung has made lots of chips before, but they’ve never made one with the configuration and the random requirements that we had. So the chip is not stable. We don’t have a reference design for a phone, so we had to make that. So now we’ve got a piece of hardware we think we can make work, but we’re using a finger to interface with a product. We’ve never done that before, how do we do that? And by the way it’s supposed to work with five fingers at a minimum. So now all of a sudden we were now increasing the complexity and craziness of this product. Now we get into the software space. We’re now putting an operating system that to date has only run on a different class of processor, an Intel processor, and rebuilding the software for ARM, this whole other instruction set, which is completely different. That’s crazy!
Nitin Ganatra: Seeing our software run on the very first iPhone, the M68 hardware. That was the second breakthrough.
Andy Grignon: Everything had code names, so P2 was the program name, and M68 was the name of the actual hardware, the actual thing.
Tony Fadell: The original iPod was called P68, and we were in the M-series now, so I thought, Let’s just name it M68, because hopefully it’s as good as the regular P68.
Andy Grignon: And we used to send people over to China with empty suitcases. They would take units off the factory line over at Foxconn and turn around: Just fly there, pick them up, and fly them back. That way nothing could get lost in shipping. We’d pay the border guards off, or whatever the fuck, but that’s how we’d ensure that the units got back safely and quickly without going through all this mumbo jumbo. And we had gotten our very first units back. You’re looking at it like, This is my baby. This is why we’ve been working so fucking hard. You’re seeing a thing light up the first time and you’re like, Oh, that’s fucking baller!
Nitin Ganatra: It was another one of these holy-shit-we-actually-did-it moments. It actually works, and it actually works a little bit better in some ways than we were anticipating! Yes, it was just amazing.
Andy Grignon: And we were sitting around in the hallways: It was our very first time actually using a fully completed thing. And it was just a moment of silence. We were all sitting there playing with it. Right? It was the very first time you could hold the thing in your hand and it was like, “Oh, that’s pretty fucking cool!” And of course you start doing the pinch. You start to do all this multitouch stuff, right?
Guy Bar-Nahum: My team was worried. They came to me saying, “The fucker doesn’t dial well. It’s the worst phone I’ve ever used!” I told them, “Look, guys, you’re missing the whole point. We’re not making a phone. We’re making a laptop killer. That’s what we’re making here, right?” I told them, “Nokia is about connecting people. What do we do? We separate people. We’re Americans. We want to be alone. We don’t want to be connecting to other people!” Dialing people is not the killer app for this thing.
Andy Grignon: So we’re sitting there. We’re browsing. We’re playing with Safari. And I was like, I wonder what’s the first thing that people are going to do? They’re going to browse porn! So I went to this porn site, foobies.com, which was just a boobie site, nothing big, but I was like, I’m the first guy to surf porn on an iPhone! I was like, Yes!
Guy Bar
-Nahum: I told them, “The killer app for this thing is browsing the web and checking e-mail. And if someone is going to call me, I don’t give a fuck about that.” And after that they relaxed. They were like, “Okay, okay, I get it.”
Andy Grignon: It still had a lot of flaws. You still look at your baby with a very critical eye, right? Like, Oh, it doesn’t do this. It’s kind of fucked up. This shit is totally broke. It’s all that kind of stuff, right? None of us had really let the idea sink in that this was the next gigantic hit for Apple.
Nitin Ganatra: The big deadline that we had was the January 2007 announcement at Macworld. There was going to be a long and very extensive demo that was going to be done by Steve. We probably first learned about this in October 2006 and it was, “Holy crap! We are going to be demoing this thing in January!”
Matt Rogers: Apple is a unique place. Apple is tens of thousands of people and they work on five products. And those products are awesome. And every engineer, every designer, every product manager, knows that everything must be awesome. When you set a schedule, you don’t miss a schedule. There are thousands of people depending on it.
Andy Grignon: And we had this impossible deadline, just to hit the announcement.
Nitin Ganatra: There was going to be this demo of the deep functionality of the iPhone and at the very end this grand finale where Steve then goes back and does this multistep task involving numerous applications to actually show both that, “Hey! This thing actually can have value!” and that this isn’t just smoke and mirrors—that this is the real deal.
Christopher Stringer: This broke new ground. It was more than a phone. Smartphones existed, but they were more like tiny little computers.
Nitin Ganatra: So it was understood that Steve was actually going to try to use this thing like a normal user would, and he’s going to do it in January, and he’s going to do it up onstage in front of the whole world to see. We were just terrified, because it’s one thing to write software that works in isolation, but to actually have something that works integrated with a lot of other components? That’s when a whole other class of bugs make themselves known. Holy crap! Nobody was going home for vacation. Nobody is going home for Thanksgiving. In fact, what are you doing this weekend?
Matt Rogers: And the previous four weeks were insane. I cannot even describe it. Myself and a team of about twenty-five were over in China basically hand-building them from scratch. We literally were working 24/7 to make sure that those first two hundred or three hundred units were perfect.
Andy Grignon: These were the show phones, right? Jony and Steve literally graded, with a jeweler’s loupe and white gloves, every single phone. They’re looking for the most minute imperfections, and then they grade them. The best are AA: “If we were to make it today, that’s what we would want.” Now right before these phones go to Moscone Center, it’s time to flash that new software that has all the fixes on them, right? And so we bless the build: Everything is good. And someone goes to install the software on our units—the show units—and he’s got a gang programmer, so he can burn the software into eight phones at a time. He starts off with the AAs. And so when we put new software down, the phone thought that we were trying to do something subversive, it thought it was being tampered with, and it lit the fuse. The chip has a security feature which lights a piece of metal up deep in the processor for the baseband, and when that’s gone the phone is dead. We turned these phones into bricks. We had burned up our best units for the show! On the weekend before we’re starting to go through the run-through!! I should have gotten fired on the spot for that… So we ultimately fixed that problem. The phones are there. Then we did the launch.
Eddy Cue: It was the only event I took my wife and kids to because, as I told them, “In your lifetime, this might be the biggest thing ever.” Because you could feel it. You just knew this was huge. The iPhone was the culmination of everything for Steve.
Andy Hertzfeld: It was kind of a privileged ticket to be there. And Steve really is a bit nuts about levels of privilege at events. He really cared about who he invited to that and who we didn’t. And so I was excited to go.
Phil Schiller: People had been waiting so long and were so excited about this upcoming event at Macworld. The energy was amazing: Electric, I would call it.
Andy Grignon: Except there wasn’t a completed anything, and so a couple things could happen. The phone could crash, hard crash, so you would see the Apple logo and it shits the bed and you know it’s rebooting from scratch. That’s a bad one, that happened, but largely what happened is you would use all the memory and there was this part of the operating system which would shoot an app in the head to free up memory, right? Mail was a particularly poor performer in that respect. Or for web pages, same thing: The OS would be like, “You know, that one is using too much memory,” and then it would just go away. You would see the app just disappear, right? Or more subtle things: The base band—the chip that makes the actual phone calls—would crash and the signal strength would come and go, or whatever, but that would be very obvious to the audience watching the projected screen. We were just on pins and needles. We’re like, “What the fuck is going to go wrong?”
Nitin Ganatra: The most terrifying time is when your bits, the bits that you’ve actually worked on, are up on the big screen and Steve is interacting with them, because God help you if there’s any kind of screwup at all.
Andy Grignon: You know, during the announcement Steve sent a message to Tony. He deleted Tony. And that was the end of Tony—onstage.
Nitin Ganatra: During the Macworld demo in front of the whole entire world, Steve went and deleted Tony Fadell’s name from the list of favorites within that phone app.
Andy Grignon: He joked about it, like, “Let’s say there’s somebody here who I don’t want to talk to anymore?” And then he scrolls through and he comes up to Tony’s name. “And I can just do one swipe, tap Delete, and he’s gone.” People laughed about it, but everybody knew. Steve doesn’t do things like that for fun. Steve was a complicated guy. Steve was in many ways diabolical, and Tony and Steve’s relationship had grown increasingly rocky. Steve would just fly off the handle on random things and Tony just had to take it. And by this point Forstall and Tony had developed a full-on feud with each other.
Tony Fadell: That demo script was created by Scott Forstall.
Nitin Ganatra: Now you could innocently look at it as, “Look, I can add things to favorites easily and I can delete things that are no longer my favorites easily,” but I think it was understood that Steve doesn’t do these things by accident. Steve will run through these scripts dozens of times, just on his own. It looks so fluid and natural up there, but the amount of preparation that goes into it is just staggering.
Andy Grignon: We had outlined what was called the “golden path,” right? The path that Steve had to do, each and every time, and if he didn’t, the phone would crash because it was running out of memory or whatever. It was if you opened this e-mail before you opened that e-mail something would get corrupted, and we just couldn’t figure out why. We’d eventually get to it, but we just don’t know why then, right? But if Steve did it in this exact order, we’re good—just nobody breathe on it.
Nitin Ganatra: We were sitting in the audience. We were in the third row and Andy pulled out a flask and there was this drinking game that happened where every single time somebody’s piece was shown on-screen, and everything worked well, and Steve went on to the next thing, the flask got passed to the person who was largely responsible for those pieces working.
Andy Grignon: So after each chunk it was like, “Knock ’em back!” I ended up doing eight or nine shots and I was completely obliterated by the actual end. That’s when it seems like a great idea to just finish the bottle, because you’re like, “Oh fuck yes!” It was a flawless demo. So we drank the rest of that bottle, then we went out and smoked a bowl, and then just got messed up for the rest of that day.
Nitin Ganatra: Early on there was a wh
isper campaign by BlackBerry and by Nokia—these other companies who already had phones out there—that was going around: “Yes, the iPhone was really cool looking, but it’s not a serious business device.” But we understood that this is kind of how the business works.
Guy Bar-Nahum: I told my team, “Look, guys, look at Nokia. They’re laughing at us. They’re saying, ‘That’s not even a phone, that’s a piece of crap,’ but they don’t know what just happened to them.”
Nitin Ganatra: We were immediately drawing parallels to what happened to the Macintosh in the ’80s. It was exactly what was being said about the Macintosh right when the Macintosh came out, too.
Guy Bar-Nahum: The first iPhone was just like the Mac: It was a fully owned, closed system. Steve was like, “I don’t want third-party apps on my perfect thing.”
Andy Grignon: Steve had made the edict. His reason was that the second we let some knucklehead app developer write some software, we take the risk that it crashes the phone. At the end of the day you don’t know what the fuck some developer who is coked up and on a bender is going to cook up.
Guy Bar-Nahum: And then Google came along and said, “We’re doing Android.” So what’s the difference? Android was going to allow people to download third-party apps.
Steve Wozniak: The first iPhone did not have the App Store.
Guy Bar-Nahum: Steve panicked, and literally all of a sudden everything clicks through his head and he realizes that he was like a mile behind Google!
Steve Wozniak: Openness is so important, and the App Store is a type of openness. It wasn’t the original idea of the iPhone. Steve had to be convinced of it.
Guy Bar-Nahum: And so he went to Forstall and told him, “Hey, Forstall, we have to open up an ecosystem,” and that’s where Forstall shined the second time, after making the iPhone UI. He told him, “I was working on it the whole time.” So Forstall had actually ignored Steve’s verbatim order and he worked on it in the basement and made it happen. You have to have balls of steel to do something like that.
