Remembering the iPhone
Apple is 50 today. And while the first 25 years was bumpy. Boy, have they made it look easy in the past 25 years. Every year, like clockwork, Steve Jobs and now Tim Cook have regaled us with innovation after innovation. The company almost went bankrupt in 1997. Today it’s worth $3.76 trillion.
Jobs, as many of us know, was particularly good at the big unveil. Watching him pull the first iPod out of his pocket, or the first iPad out of a manilla envelop made you think that these incredible devices emerged fully formed.
All of us knew that wasn’t true. And back then it felt important to me to show that to the world – to take readers into the development trenches of their most famous and most audacious product, the iPhone.
I’d always been way more interested in the engineers working in the trenches than the big bosses who got all the credit. They’re the folks actually building the stuff we use, after all.
What emerged was a 2013 book called “Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution.” It was my attempt to shine a light on the people who actually make the innovation magic happen in Silicon Valley. The NYT Mag ran an excerpt featuring one of the key engineers on the project Andy Grignon.
It wasn’t just Apple’s 50th birthday that made me think about all this. It was because I thought, with the 20th anniversay of the iPhone approaching in January 2027, that it was worth revisting what Silicon Valley was like when it was solely about building cool stuff and before it became home to the biggest and most controversial companies on the planet.
Today Claude and OpenClaw are digitizing and automating everything from coding to our to do list. But back then, even though Apple was building the ultimate digital device, its worth remembering that a lot of its development was astonishingly analog.
Many of the hurdles Grignon and the many other engineers on the project encountered involved just getting prototypes from place to place or figuring out how the iPhone software, hardware and design teams could each separately work on their part of the project without them seeing what the other two teams were working on.
The iPhone screen was to be hard plastic. But Steve Jobs famously demanded it be glass at the last minute because his keys scratched the screen of a test model.
It was among the first devices without a physical keyboard, so engineers spent hours typing on the iPhone’s screen testing auto correction sofware. The design team built physical prototypes.
Tony Fadell, one of the bosses of the iPhone project, told me there were so many new technologies that they needed to make work perfectly that it made him wonder if it was like the work of the first moon mission in 1969.
Obviously the Apple Google relationship has evolved into more of a mutual dependency than outright rivalry. Google pays Apple billions for special access for their software on iPhones. In return, Apple has held off building a search engine and going after Google’s advertising empire. They have a similar relationship with Google’s Gemini AI.
What’s important to remember is how human building the iPhone was, and how humans remain a critical part of the innovation equation today – despite our fears.
Here’s how I described the way Grignon felt when Jobs finally unveiled the device they’d been killing themselves over for more than two years:
As Grignon and others from Apple sat nervously in the audience, Jobs had the iPhone play some music and a movie clip to show off the phone’s beautiful screen. He made a phone call to show off the phone’s reinvented address book and voice mail. He sent a text and an e-mail, showing how easy it was to type on the phone’s touch-screen keyboard. He scrolled through a bunch of photos, showing how simple pinches and spreads of two fingers could make the pictures smaller or bigger. He navigated The New York Times’s and Amazon’s Web sites to show that the iPhone’s Internet browser was as good as the one on his computer. He found a Starbucks with Google Maps — and called the number from the stage — to show how it was impossible to get lost with an iPhone.
By the end, Grignon wasn’t just relieved; he was drunk. He’d brought a flask of Scotch to calm his nerves. “And so there we were in the fifth row or something — engineers, managers, all of us — doing shots of Scotch after every segment of the demo. There were about five or six of us, and after each piece of the demo, the person who was responsible for that portion did a shot. When the finale came — and it worked along with everything before it, we all just drained the flask. It was the best demo any of us had ever seen. And the rest of the day turned out to be just a [expletive] for the entire iPhone team. We just spent the entire rest of the day drinking in the city. It was just a mess, but it was great.”
I haven’t cracked David Pogue’s book on Apple: The first 50 years that’s getting so much attention. I’m looking forward to it.
