NYT has a lengthy article on the first iPhone and its development team.
Posting tidbits:
There are still more at the link. Interesting read.
Posting tidbits:
Grignon was the senior manager in charge of all the radios in the iPhone. This is a big job. Cellphones do innumerable useful things for us today, but at their most basic, they are fancy two-way radios. Grignon was in charge of the equipment that allowed the phone to be a phone. If the device didnt make calls, or didnt connect with Bluetooth headsets or Wi-Fi setups, Grignon had to answer for it. As one of the iPhones earliest engineers, hed dedicated two and a half years of his life often seven days a week to the project.
Grignon had been part of the iPhone rehearsal team at Apple and later at the presentation site in San Franciscos Moscone Center. He had rarely seen Jobs make it all the way through his 90-minute show without a glitch. Jobs had been practicing for five days, yet even on the last day of rehearsals the iPhone was still randomly dropping calls, losing its Internet connection, freezing or simply shutting down.
At first it was just really cool to be at rehearsals at all kind of like a cred badge, Grignon says. Only a chosen few were allowed to attend. But it quickly got really uncomfortable. 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. Grignon, like everyone else at rehearsals, knew that if those glitches showed up during the real presentation, Jobs would not be blaming himself for the problems. It felt like wed gone through the demo a hundred times, and each time something went wrong, Grignon says. It wasnt a good feeling.
Its hard to overstate the gamble Jobs took when he decided to unveil the iPhone back in January 2007. Not only was he introducing a new kind of phone something Apple had never made before he was doing so with a prototype that barely worked. Even though the iPhone wouldnt go on sale for another six months, he wanted the world to want one right then. In truth, the list of things that still needed to be done was enormous. A production line had yet to be set up. 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 couldnt 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.
There was less they could do to make sure the phone calls Jobs planned to make from the stage went through. Grignon and his team could only ensure a good signal, and then pray. They had AT&T, the iPhones wireless carrier, bring in a portable cell tower, so they knew reception would be strong. Then, with Jobss approval, they preprogrammed the phones display to always show five bars of signal strength regardless of its true strength. The chances of the radios crashing during the few minutes that Jobs would use it to make a call were small, but the chances of its crashing at some point during the 90-minute presentation were high. If the radio crashed and restarted, as we suspected it might, we didnt want people in the audience to see that, Grignon says. So we just hard-coded it to always show five bars.
None of these kludges fixed the iPhones biggest problem: it often ran out of memory and had to be restarted if made to do more than a handful of tasks at a time. Jobs had a number of demo units onstage with him to manage this problem. If memory ran low on one, he would switch to another while the first was restarted. But given how many demos Jobs planned, Grignon worried that there were far too many potential points of failure. If disaster didnt strike during one of the dozen demos, it was sure to happen during the grand finale, when Jobs planned to show all the iPhones top features operating at the same time on the same phone. Hed play some music, take a call, put it on hold and take another call, find and e-mail a photo to the second caller, look up something on the Internet for the first caller and then return to his music. Me and my guys were all so nervous about this, Grignon says. We only had 128 megabytes of memory in those phones maybe the equivalent of two dozen large digital photographs and because they werent finished, all these apps were still big and bloated.
Remarkably, Jobs had to be talked into having Apple build a phone at all. It had been a topic of conversation among his inner circle almost from the moment Apple introduced the iPod in 2001. The conceptual reasoning was obvious: consumers would rather not carry two or three devices for e-mail, phone calls and music if they could carry one. But every time Jobs and his executives examined the idea in detail, it seemed like a suicide mission. Phone chips and bandwidth were too slow for anyone to want to surf the Internet and download music or video over a cellphone connection. E-mail was a fine function to add to a phone, but Research in Motions BlackBerry was fast locking up that market.
Above all, Jobs didnt want to partner with any of the wireless carriers. Back then the carriers expected to dominate any partnership with a phone maker, and because they controlled the network, they got their way. Jobs, a famed control freak, couldnt imagine doing their bidding. Apple considered buying Motorola in 2003, but executives quickly concluded it would be too big an acquisition for the company then. (The two companies collaborated unsuccessfully a couple of years later.)
Many executives and engineers, riding high from their success with the iPod, assumed a phone would be like building a small Macintosh. Instead, Apple designed and built not one but three different early versions of the iPhone in 2005 and 2006. One person who worked on the project thinks Apple then made six fully working prototypes of the device it ultimately sold each with its own set of hardware, software and design tweaks. Some on the team ended up so burned out that they left the company shortly after the first phone hit store shelves. It was like the first moon mission, says Tony Fadell, a key executive on the project. (He started his own company, Nest, in 2010.) Im used to a certain level of unknowns in a project, but there were so many new things here that it was just staggering.
As early as 2003, a handful of Apple engineers had figured out how to put multitouch technology in a tablet. The story was that Steve wanted a device that he could use to read e-mail while on the toilet that was the extent of the product spec, says Joshua Strickon, one of the earliest engineers on that project. But you couldnt build a device with enough battery life to take out of the house, and you couldnt get a chip with enough graphics capability to make it useful. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out just what to do. Before joining Apple in 2003, Strickon had built a multitouch device for his masters thesis at M.I.T. But given the lack of consensus at Apple about what to do with the prototypes he and his fellow engineers developed, he says, he left the company in 2004 thinking it wasnt going to do anything with that technology.
From the start of the project, Jobs hoped that he would be able to develop a touch-screen iPhone running OS X similar to what he ended up unveiling. But in 2005 he had no idea how long that would take. So Apples first iPhone looked very much like the joke slide Jobs put up when introducing the real iPhone an iPod with an old-fashioned rotary dial on it. The prototype really was an iPod with a phone radio that used the iPod click wheel as a dialer. It was an easy way to get to market, but it was not cool like the devices we have today, Grignon says.
The iPhone project was so complex that it occasionally threatened to derail the entire corporation. Many top engineers in the company were being sucked into the project, forcing slowdowns in the timetables of other work. Had the iPhone been a dud or not gotten off the ground at all, Apple would have had no other big products ready to announce for a long time. And worse, according to a top executive on the project, the companys leading engineers, frustrated by failure, would have left Apple.
There are still more at the link. Interesting read.
