Battle of the Titans: How the Fight to the Death Between Apple and Google is Transforming our Lives. Fred Vogelstein

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      The final deal between Apple and AT&T, which acquired Cingular in 2006, took more than a year to hammer out. But it would prove easy compared to what Apple went through just to build the device. Many executives and engineers, riding high from their success with the iPod, assumed it would be just like building a small Macintosh. Instead, Apple designed and built not one iPhone but three entirely different devices in those two years. One executive on the project thinks Apple made six fully working prototypes just of the device it ultimately sold—each with its own set of hardware, software, and design tweaks. Many on the team were so burned-out, they left the company shortly after the first phone hit store shelves. “It was like the first moon mission,” said Fadell, who was one of the key executives on the project, and who left Apple to start his own company, Nest, in 2010. “I’m used to a certain level of unknowns in a project, but there were so many new things here that it was just staggering.”

      Jobs wanted the iPhone to run a modified version of OS X, the software that comes with every Mac. But no one had ever put¹⁸ a gigantic program like OS X on a phone chip before. The software would have to be a tenth the size, and even then there wasn’t a phone chip being made in 2005 that could run it fast enough and with a long enough battery life. The chips that run Apple laptops were never considered because they generated too much heat and would suck a phone battery dry in minutes. Millions of lines of code would have to be stripped out or rewritten, and until 2006 engineers would have to simulate chip speed and battery drain because actual chips weren’t available until then. “Initially we just worked on Gumstix boards [cheap circuit boards hobbyists buy],” said Nitin Ganatra, one of the early software engineers. “We started with the Mac address book—a list of names—and to see if we could make it scroll [on a screen] at between thirty to sixty frames a second. We just wanted to figure out if there was any way to make this [OS X on a phone chip] work—whether we were even in the right ballpark. We wanted to know if we could push bits fast enough to get that iPhone look and feel. If we couldn’t get it to work on a Gumstix board, we knew we might have a problem.”

      No one had ever put a capacitive multitouch screen in a mainstream consumer product before either. Capacitive touch technology—which creates “a touch” when a finger or other conductive item completes a circuit on the device—had been around since the 1960s. Elevator buttons in office buildings and screens on ATMs often used it. And research into multitouch technologies had been around since the 1980s. Trackpads on laptops were probably the most sophisticated use of this technology because they could recognize the difference between one- and two-finger inputs. But it was also well known that to build the multitouch screen Apple put on the iPhone and produce it in volume was a challenge few had the money or guts to take on. The next steps—to embed the technology invisibly in a piece of glass, to make it smart enough to display a virtual keyboard with auto-correct, and to make it sophisticated enough to reliably manipulate content such as photos or web pages on that screen—made it hugely expensive even to produce a working prototype. Few production lines even had experience manufacturing multitouch screens. There were touchscreens in consumer electronics, but over the years these had typically been pressure-sensitive touchscreen devices on which users pushed on-screen buttons with a finger or a stylus. The PalmPilot and its successors such as the Palm Treo were popular implementations of this technology. Even if multitouch iPhone screens had been easy to make, it wasn’t at all clear to Apple’s executive team that the features they enabled, such as onscreen keyboards and “tap to zoom,” were enhancements that consumers wanted.

      As early as 2003 a handful of Apple engineers, who had done cutting-edge academic work with touch interfaces, had figured out how to put multitouch technology in a tablet. But the project was mothballed. “The story was that Steve wanted a device that he could use to read email while on the toilet. That was the extent of the product spec,” said Josh Strickon, one of the earliest engineers on that project. “But you couldn’t build a device with enough battery life to take out of the house, and you couldn’t 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 been a student at MIT for a decade, getting his B.A., master’s, and Ph.D. in engineering. He was a huge proponent of touchscreen technology, having built a multitouch device for his master’s thesis. But he said given the lack of consensus at Apple about what to do with the prototypes he and his fellow engineers developed, he left the company in 2004 thinking it wasn’t going to do anything with multitouch.

      Tim Bucher, one of Apple’s top executives at the time and the company’s biggest multitouch proponent, said part of the problem was that the prototypes they were building used software, OS X, that was designed to be used with a mouse, not a finger. “We were using ten- or twelve-inch screens with Mac mini–like guts … and then you would launch these demos that would do the different multitouch gestures. One demo was a keyboard application that would rise from the bottom—very much what ended up shipping in the iPhone two years later. But it wasn’t very pretty. It was very much wires, chewing gum, and bailing wire. It left too much to the imagination.” Bucher, who has never before talked publicly about his work at Apple, had hoped to keep pushing the effort forward, but he lost a political battle with other top executives and left Apple in early 2005.

      Few even thought about making touchscreen technology the centerpiece of a new kind of phone until Jobs started pushing the idea in mid-2005. “He said, ‘Tony, come over here. Here’s something we’re working on. What do you think? Do you think we could make a phone out of this?’” Fadell said. “So we sat there and played with the demo (he was showing me) for a while. It was huge. It filled the room. There was a projector mounted on the ceiling and it would project the Mac screen onto this surface that was maybe three or four feet square. Then you could touch the Mac screen and move things around and draw on it. I knew about it [the touchscreen prototype], but I didn’t know about it in detail because it was a Mac thing [Fadell ran the iPod division]. So we all sat down and had a serious discussion about it—about what could be done.”

      Fadell had serious doubts about whether such an enormous prototype could be shrunk so much. But he also knew better than to answer no to Steve Jobs. He was one of Apple’s superstars, and he didn’t get there by being timid about thorny technological problems. He’d joined Apple in 2001 as a consultant to help build the first iPod. By 2005, with iPod sales exploding, he had become, at thirty-six, arguably the single most important line executive at the company.

      “I understood how it could be done,” Fadell said. “But it’s one thing to think that, and another to take a room full of special, one-off gear and make a million phone-sized versions of that in a cost-effective, reliable manner.” The to-do list was exhausting just to think about. “You had to go to LCD vendors [companies that make the screens that go in computer monitors and TVs] who knew how to embed technology like this in glass; you had to find time on their line; and then you had to come up with compensation and calibrating algorithms to keep the pixel electronics [in the LCD] from generating all kinds of noise in the touchscreen [sitting on top of it.] It was a whole project just to make the touchscreen device. We tried two or three ways of actually making the touchscreen until we could make one in enough volume that would work.”

      Shrinking OS X and building a multitouch screen, while innovative and difficult, were at least within the skills Apple had already mastered as a corporation. No one was better equipped to rethink OS X’s design. Apple knew LCD manufacturers because it put an LCD in every laptop and iPod. The peculiarities of mobile phone physics, on the other hand, were an entirely new field, and it took those working on the iPhone into 2006 to realize how little they knew.

      To ensure the iPhone’s¹⁹ tiny antenna could do its job effectively, Apple spent millions buying and assembling special robot-equipped testing rooms. To make sure the iPhone didn’t generate too much radiation, Apple built models of human heads—complete with goo to simulate brain density—and measured the effects. To predict the iPhone’s performance on a network, СКАЧАТЬ