The One Device

Book by Merchant

On paper, the logic looks impeccable: The iPod was Apple’s most successful product, phones were going to eat the iPod’s lunch, so why not an iPod phone? “Take the best of the iPod and put a phone in it,” Fadell says. “So you could do mobile communications and have your music with you, and we didn’t lose all the brand awareness we’d built into the iPod, the half a billion dollars we were spending getting that known around the world.” It was that simple... while it was becoming clear inside Apple that they were going to pursue a phone, it wasn’t clear at all what that phone should look or feel like. Or how it would work, on just about every level.

“We were gonna build what everyone thought we should build at the time: Let’s bolt a phone onto an iPod,” says Andy Grignon. And that’s exactly what they started to do...

“Steve called a big meeting in the boardroom,” Ording says. “Everyone was there, Phil Schiller and Jony Ive and whoever.” He said, “Listen. We’re going to change plans.... We’re going to do this iPod-based thing, make that into a phone because that’s a much more doable project. More predictable.” That was Fadell’s project. The touchscreen effort wasn’t abandoned, but while the engineers worked on whipping it into shape, Jobs directed Ording, Chaudhri, and members of the UI team to design an interface for an iPod phone, a way o dial numbers, select contacts, and browse the web using that device’s tried-and-true click wheel.

In 1979, a young squad of Apple engineers, led by Steve Jobs, visited the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and laid eyes on its groundbreaking graphical user interface (GUI) boasting windows, icons, and menus. Jobs and his band of “pirates” borrowed some of those ideas for the embryonic Macintosh. When Bill Gates created Windows, Jobs screamed at him for stealing Apple’s work. Gates responded coolly: “Well, Steve, I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.”