The untold story of the birth of the iPhone

The invention that Transforming Apple into a world-beating, billion-dollar-selling, society-changing behemoth wasn’t about a laptop or a music player; It was the iPhone. It looked like it came out in 2007, fully formed, beautifully designed, confident, and conceptually clear.

But behind the scenes, the iPhone we know today was made possible by more than just bold bets, fanatical attention to detail, great design, and a vision for the future; There were also false starts, last-minute redesigns, and some strokes of luck.

For starters, the product Apple set out to build first wasn’t a phone. It was a tablet.

Multidisciplinary teams in Apple is always experimenting with nascent technologies. “There are hundreds of small startups walking around doing things,” says Sensors Vice President Myra Haggerty. “Sometimes someone says, ‘Hey, come and see what we’re working on!'” Then you go to a random lab somewhere, and they’re doing this really cool thing. “What can we do with this?”

Take Duncan Kerr’s projector demo, for example.

In 1999, Kerr, a British designer with a cross-cultural design background – engineering, technology, industrial design and interface prototyping – joined the studio of industrial design chief Jony Ive.

In early 2003, he began holding Tuesday meetings with interface designers and input engineers to explore new ways of interacting with computers. After all, the old “point mouse, click button” routine was 25 years old. Kerr’s team has experimented with technologies such as camera-based systems, spatial audio, haptics (vibrating feedback), and 3D displays. “We would invite researchers, or companies that had some weird technology,” he says. “We did a lot of demos, trying things out.”

Kerr was particularly fascinated by the idea of ​​manipulating on-screen objects with the fingers. But mocking ideas on paper can only take a team so far. He, along with interface designers Bas Ording and Imran Chaudhri, wanted to create a real-world multi-touch display to continue their explorations. Enter: the iGesture NumPad mouse/touchpad.

It was a black flat trackpad, 6.25 x 5 inches, made by a Delaware company called FingerWorks. Wayne Westerman was a pianist who suffered from repetitive stress. He and his teacher, John Elias, invented a set of keyboards that required only the touch of a single feather. Since they can detect and track multiple finger touches at once, they can also interpret them Gestures Which you draw on the surface, replacing mouse actions. For Open, for example, you move your fingertips across the surface as if you were opening a jar.

In late 2003, Apple commissioned FingerWorks to build a larger version of its multi-touch pad: 12 by 9.5 inches, a better approximation of the size of a computer screen. The Kerr team set up a test rig in the Infinite Loop 2 design studio. They mounted an LCD projector on a tripod, shining directly onto the trackpad. They taped a white sheet of paper over it so that the projector image — generated by a nearby Power Mac — would be bright and clear. Then the fun began: developing ways to interact with the elements on the screen. You can slide your finger to move an icon in the displayed image. You can spread two fingers apart to zoom in on the map or image. Using both hands, you can tap, move, and extend objects. It was magical.

In November 2003, Kerr’s team showed the demo to Ive, who also showed it to Steve Jobs. everyone Anyone who saw the multi-touch demo loved it and swore it was the future. What, they weren’t sure yet.

In late 2005, Jobs attended the 50th birthday party for the Microsoft engineer, who is the husband of his wife’s friend Lauren. Over dinner, the man lectured Jobs about how Microsoft was solving the future of computing by inventing a tablet with a stylus: portable, powerful, and unrestricted.

“But he was using the device the wrong way,” Jobs later said, according to Walter Isaacson’s book. Steve Jobs. “That dinner was like the tenth time he’d talked to me about it, and I was so sick of it that I came home and said, ‘Fuck this. Let’s show him what a tablet can really be.”