Former Apple Engineer Gives Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Original iPhone Introduction

[matttye]

I first realised how loyal a fanbase Apple had when I openly criticised the first iPhone because it wouldn't let me listen to music and browse the web at the same time.

Music used to stop playing when I browsed the web. I presume because of a lack of memory, but the issue was fixed with a later software update. I forget which one.

I was told "it's not a computer" etc.

 

[macnisse]

Great read! More of this please!!

 

[kdarling]

Thanks for posting this! Very interesting to go back to read the past rumors and speculation. So Steve Jobs and gang was able to keep the form factor completely secret until actual announcement.

They even kept it secret within Cingular and Apple:

Cingular sent a team of technical personnel to Apple's offices to test the device, making it sure it would work on the carrier's network. That rigorous process is normal for the release of any phone. But this time, technicians weren't allowed to handle or see the actual phone. Instead, they were given access to a dummy version that would only allow them to do the necessary network tests.

- WSJ history

"Even the iPhone's hardware and software teams were kept apart: Hardware engineers worked on circuitry that was loaded with fake software(*), while software engineers worked off circuit boards sitting in wooden boxes.

By January 2007, when Jobs announced the iPhone at Macworld, only 30 or so of the most senior people on the project had seen it."

- Wired history

So, Macworld was where most of the people who worked on the iPhone, finally got to see it in one piece.

(*) Here are some pictures of the fake software that the hardware people used while working on the iPhone:

 

[kdarling]

So Steve Jobs and gang was able to keep the form factor completely secret until actual announcement.

Speaking of the fact the iPhone code developers were using boards in wooden boxes...

Since many people have never seen hardware prototypes, here are a couple of real life examples to get an idea of what it must've been like to program on the iPhone without seeing the real device.

First, here's the original Windows Mobile touchscreen phone prototype:



And here's an actual iPad prototype board:



So you can imagine that the software developers didn't really get a good "feel" (literally) for how things worked when held in one hand

This kind of detached working is pretty common with new products, btw.

 

[PaulOBrain]

An Android manufacturer deceives people - Macrumors goes crazy
Apple deceives people - Macrumors hails it as a stroke of genius

Oh Macrumors... this is why the internet hates you

If the internet hates macrumors it will be because of trolls like yourself

 

[jonnysods]

I love the hustle of Steve. That is such a cool story.

 

[DeathChill]

An Android manufacturer deceives people - Macrumors goes crazy
Apple deceives people - Macrumors hails it as a stroke of genius

Oh Macrumors... this is why the internet hates you

Wait, are you actually serious or are you just making a joke?

 

[PracticalMac]

Steve actually grossly underestimated how much the iPhone would change everything.

Even the visionary did not foresee the chaos he unleashed.

Fortunately the world is a better place.

 

[hchung]

Yes, I'm an iPhone and Android developer. Explain to me what specific FUNCTIONALITY the iPhone had over the Microsoft OS at that time. Actual detailed functionality, like the specific things I pointed out. Ouside of multi-touch.

(I still have PocketPCs, Windows Mobile, and Palm devices packed away somewhere alongside my Newtons)

So, this sounds like you don't have a clue what WinCE was actually like under neath the screenshots.

The original iOS runs the xnu kernel + a window manager running in OpenGL. Basically, the same as the lower layers of OSX 10.5. For whoever writing the apps, you had an entire UNIX kernel with preemptive multithreading, memory protection, power management, sandboxing support in-development, multiprocessor/multi-core support, and a fancy windowing toolkit which drew things smoothly with little effort because it handled offloading a lot of it to the GPU, including MPEG4/H264 support.

Windows CE 5.2 (the basis for the last Windows Mobile before Windows Phone 7.0, launched after iOS), still had a limit of 32 processes, 32MB per process, memory protection that was just enough to casually prevent processes from stomping on each other, no hope of sandboxing, no hope of multiprocessor/multicore support and a Windows 95-era graphics subsystem.

(memory gets hazy) If you're lucky, you might have had a device with Direct3D Mobile. I don't actually recall any devices which had such a thing. Anyhow, with that kind of ecosystem fragmentation, most of this stuff went unused. I think there might also not have been a consistent camera API either. And I think the sound/video APIs had, at best, MP3 audio and MPEG1 video.

And Palm had it even worse than that. In fact, prior to iPhone, it was customary to use a stripped down software platform for smartphones.

For the user, many of these people have already said:
1) iPhone brought multitouch.
2) A web browser that supported desktop web pages complete with up-to-date AJAX/Javascript support, up-to-date CSS support, etc.
Opera was good, but it didn't come close.
3) Integrated voicemail system. Everybody else just told you that there was voicemail, not actually have an interactive app for it.
4) Integrated multilanguage/Unicode GUI support. None of this having French/German/Spanish only on one phone firmware, then English/Spanish on another firmware, and then Chinese-only on a third firmware.
5) full screen, full resolution, 30fps video playback with CD-quality audio. (most other devices either couldn't do it at that resolution at 30fps or could barely do 15fps, and/or couldn't do it with the audio quality, nor H264 at all.)
6) A user-friendly and intuitive on-screen keyboard with multiple language support.
7) Automatic LCD brightness (kdarling might have a counter-example?)
8) A camera that took decent pictures for that time.
9) A UI that didn't stutter like mad during fancy animations. (It's 2013 and a Nexus 4 still can't do this right. What gives?)

----------

I'm not talking about bloatware on propriety carrier OS phone. It was a non-issue on any Microsoft OS phone. I could customize anything on most phones I had. And some of the carrier apps were actually really useful at the time, like streaming TV apps, something that that the first iPhone did not have and a lot of people missed.

Um, no. You are absolutely oblivious to the reality of the situation.

I was on one of the teams who was trying to hack the Motorola Windows Phones to unlock carrier-locked features such as GPS, and they were most certainly not as customizable as you claim. I don't care that you think V-cast or whatever you saw was "really useful", it already invalidated your claim that these phones let you "customize anything".

 

[MacMan988]

I work as a developer and I know that sometimes we only finish certain part of products and demonstrate systems to clients as prototypes before the final version.

But, Steve Jobs really take such an unreliable device that could fall apart at any second to a demonstration and risk all of the company's reputation ? Apple has come a long way and has built a big name...

 

[Mr Bigs]

"An iPod, a phone, and an Internet communicator...are you getting it? These are not three separate devices. This is one device. And we are calling it iPhone."

(That still gives me chills)

The novelty wore off for me less than a year of having it,still falls short in the phone department and always will. The iPad is a different story.

 

[mingoglia]

I believe the App Store is what revolutionized the industry. Personally I still believe the fullsize Blackberries, such as the Touch Bold is a better email and text device. The browser has come a long way, though the last versions I've seen are still not quite as good. As a phone, the phone call quality and signal strength was a big advantage over the iPhone for years, though this is probably give or take. The shortcuts and the "smartness" of the Operating System is still an advantage for Blackberry in my opinion. You can't really have these typing shortcuts on a touch device.

Again, it comes down to the App Store and the whole community of developers. This is what took the world by storm, not the device itself.

I'm a convert that is a few iPhones in now (and about 6 months ago migrated to an iPad with a bluetooth keyboard as my primary machine), but every time I go to upgrade I consider moving back to a fullsize Blackberry (while they're still around). I've been traveling since the 5S came out, but think I may get to the store to upgrade today... but again, I really have a hard time resisting the new Blackberry but I know by the time I get to the ATT store I'll have the App Store on my mind and it will once again guarantee I walk out with a new iPhone. If RIM's "equivalent" was even close to the same planet as Apple's version I'd likely walk out with a BB.

 

[CFreymarc]

There is a something called "The Magic of the Stage" that Steve Jobs used his entire career to make things go right. The iPhone launch presentation was no exception.

Never underestimate the power of a large group of people gathering together expecting something wonderful to occur. That sheer group intention of a large crowd can override common realities where hardcore, anti-religion, science-driven, Niche / Freud types go bat-crap crazy trying to find logic and reason behind what happened.

When on stage and in front of a crowd, be it a concert, theater, corporate presentation or religious service, things happen that do not follow logic nor standard probabilities. The quote "The show must go on!" is part of this and the First Amendment has reenforced it for over two centuries.

----------

I believe the App Store is what revolutionized the industry. Personally I still believe the fullsize Blackberries, such as the Touch Bold is a better email and text device. The browser has come a long way, though the last versions I've seen are still not quite as good. As a phone, the phone call quality and signal strength was a big advantage over the iPhone for years, though this is probably give or take. The shortcuts and the "smartness" of the Operating System is still an advantage for Blackberry in my opinion. You can't really have these typing shortcuts on a touch device.

RIM killed themselves by staying on their high horse. They didn't know how to work with cowboy developers who were not predicable. Apple knows exactly how to work with cowboys giving them a field to work on while also promoting that their problems are not Apple's problems.

Also, RIM was very short sighting viewing an innovative third party app on their phone as a threat to their immediate revenue instead of an enhancement of the platform. The kept in the castle, fought off the sieges only to have the market caravan trade routes bypass their barony.

 

[kdarling]

Windows CE 5.2 (the basis for the last Windows Mobile before Windows Phone 7.0, launched after iOS), still had a limit of 32 processes, 32MB per process, ... (etc)

WinCE was done back when the target hardware was like 150 MHz CPUs with almost no memory. Microsoft had planned to replace it later on. They were just too slow doing so.

As I keep saying, the reason why companies like Microsoft didn't jump ahead like Apple did, was because they felt they had to support legacy hardware and apps and screen sizes. They also had to support touch, cursor, stylus. Apple had no such legacy, and was free to do what they wanted.

Now, of course, Apple has its own legacy issues, which is why it's harder for them to adjust to multiple screen sizes, etc.

(memory gets hazy) If you're lucky, you might have had a device with Direct3D Mobile. I don't actually recall any devices which had such a thing.

Coincidentally, the last WM thing I taught myself was to code for D3D on a Samsung smartphone which had GPU support. I wrote an app that captured the current screen and flipped it away while zooming out. The rotations and shading were nice and smooth. Too little, too late, though.

(The iPhone brought) automatic LCD brightness (kdarling might have a counter-example?)

*laughing* Yes, indeed I do. How about this phone from early 2005:

"Featuring a large bright active matrix color display with automatic brightness control, the Nokia 6680..."

Some devices had an IR setup for transceiving data, and as a TV remote control. In many cases, that included a brightness sensor. Sometimes it just had the sensor. I think HPs had it back in 2002.

I was on one of the teams who was trying to hack the Motorola Windows Phones to unlock carrier-locked features such as GPS,

Now that is definitely one of the things that the iPhone 3G helped out on.

Prior to then, U.S. carriers wanted people to write apps using their (paid) proprietary location APIs. This was actually understandable, as the carriers had put an enormous amount of money into the E911 locating system... especially Verizon who had included A-GPS in almost every handset, even cheap flip phones. Suddenly their reimbursement plan was messed up.

and they were most certainly not as customizable as (claimed).

WM phones were pretty customizable. At least the homescreens were, and you could also change color themes and a lot of UI elements.

As for carrier apps... what's ironic to me is that Steve Jobs mocked the carrier walled gardens, and then turned around and built an even higher walled garden of his own. At least with carriers, a smartphone owner was not restricted to just the family-friendly carrier app stores.

Regards.

 

[powers74]

Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone. And here it is..
Image

This is one thing I love about Apple. They take themselves very seriously, but at the same time they have a real sense of humor that isn't canned, and is very self-aware and honest.

A-la OSX SeaLion. What other corporation can make jokes about themselves like that? Not that I watch a lot of corporate presentations...

 

[kdarling]

This is one thing I love about Apple. They take themselves very seriously, but at the same time they have a real sense of humor that isn't canned, and is very self-aware and honest.

Not canned? They rehearse these shows for days in advance, right down to each word, gesture and "off the cuff" joke.

In this particular case, Jobs knew he had to put up the fake iPod-phone picture, because sooner or later someone was going to spot the patent Apple had filed for about just such a device. (see application image below)



By mocking it himself, he short-circuited possible negative comments about a device design that Apple might well have gone with, if he hadn't been shown a nicer touch demo instead.

(Who the person was who showed Jobs the better way, is a story that keeps changing. In Jobs' biography, Jon Ive claimed he was the one who showed Jobs a demo he'd secretly been working on, and thus convinced Jobs to go with touch.) Personally, I'm just glad that someone did!

 

[haruhiko]

It's funny to see some people here even using the Windows Mobile phones to try to show that the iPhone is not anything revolutionary. Ironically, it's those clunky devices with poor resistive touch screens and crazily small touch target (a stylus is a must) with very slow response that made the iPhone so amazing. Oh... and back then the 3.5" screen was considered to be huge.

That being said, the original iPhone didn't have the App Store and a jailbreak was required to install anything. It also had a very poor camera without AF. Steve Jobs even promoted "web apps" and those were jokes. Also it's a 2G only device when 3G was already very popular everywhere. It's the iPhone 3G in 2008 with App Store that made the iPhone a "smartphone" instead of a great feature phone. Of course, the 3G was not very much more than the original iPhone with 3G radio and it's slow. The 3GS was the one that started to have the power to run all those apps.

And that was the time I switched from my Nokia to the iPhone and has not looked back since then.

 

[hchung]

WinCE was done back when the target hardware was like 150 MHz CPUs with almost no memory. Microsoft had planned to replace it later on. They were just too slow doing so.

As I keep saying, the reason why companies like Microsoft didn't jump ahead like Apple did, was because they felt they had to support legacy hardware and apps and screen sizes. They also had to support touch, cursor, stylus. Apple had no such legacy, and was free to do what they wanted.

Now, of course, Apple has its own legacy issues, which is why it's harder for them to adjust to multiple screen sizes, etc.

Many of the more extreme limitations were definitely legacy; specifically the memory map and process limitations. I recall one of the slowest clock speed WinCE devices, was running on a ~33Mhz MIPS. The 150Mhz ones you speak of were generations later. The last Windows Mobile phone that Motorola worked on used a TI OMAP at 200mhz, I believe.

However, it's not like legacy support held back progress much. APIs were introduced and deprecated often. Most devices were not upgradable. Board support packages were already being built customized to hardware and OS version. Modernizing WinCE simply wasn't a requirement back then because every other embedded OS they competed against was subject to similar limitations.

(While I bring up lots of downsides of WinCE because of the arguments earlier, I actually admire what it had accomplished from a technical perspective. There were a lot of things that WinCE did right too for its time.)

*laughing* Yes, indeed I do. How about this phone from early 2005:

"Featuring a large bright active matrix color display with automatic brightness control, the Nokia 6680..."

Some devices had an IR setup for transceiving data, and as a TV remote control. In many cases, that included a brightness sensor. Sometimes it just had the sensor. I think HPs had it back in 2002.

There we go! Googling for iPaqs and 2002 came up with the iPaq 3800-series with light sensors.

WM phones were pretty customizable. At least the homescreens were, and you could also change color themes and a lot of UI elements.

As for carrier apps... what's ironic to me is that Steve Jobs mocked the carrier walled gardens, and then turned around and built an even higher walled garden of his own. At least with carriers, a smartphone owner was not restricted to just the family-friendly carrier app stores.

Regards.

While smartphone users back then had more freedom in trying to sideload what they wanted and play with the themes, the wild west attitude of it all was part of the reasons for carriers to put up walled gardens in the first place. That freedom also resulted in both WM and Symbian viruses. It's also the reason I will never do online banking from my Android phones.

And while it's mostly for feature phones, might as well mention that Steve's walled garden was a friendly picket fence compared to the iron curtain of Qualcomm's BREW. It was something like $7000 just for an app's approval process.

 

[powers74]

Not canned? They rehearse these shows for days in advance, right down to each word, gesture and "off the cuff" joke.

And of course, by canned, I mean LAME, cliched, hokey, campy LAMENESS that other companies push off as being humorous, funny and lighthearted. Do I think Steve came up with that idea four minutes before he presented it and just slipped the slide in himself? WTF? Yeah, of course it was rehearsed. I'm just talking about Apple having a genuine sense of humor in a very broad sense of the electronics industry and corporate culture in general. But you're a lawyer -- sorry got you mixed up with someone else; engineer, still-- , so I don't exactly expect you to understand that.

 

[karma ink]

Why couldn't they just wait a few months until it was more polished?

Because of FCC regulations for phones they had to submit a prototype to the government for approval, the secret phone would have been blown. That's why they presented the iphone before it was working properly.

 

[kdarling]

Because of FCC regulations for phones they had to submit a prototype to the government for approval, the secret phone would have been blown.

You don't submit a prototype to the FCC for testing. You submit test results that are ready for approval.

Everyone already knew that Apple was coming out with an "iPhone". We even knew that Foxconn was building it.

The FCC story is just typical Apple handwaving. There were multiple ways that Apple could've kept most/all of it secret right up until sales launch week. E.g.

• Request (as they did) that photos and manuals be kept secret after approval. Then the most that would be gleaned would be the overall rounded rectangular shape (because of the sticker location drawing) and what radios it had. This is exactly what they've done with every iPhone since.
  
  
• Or they could've requested that the approval be officially delayed until the week or even day before sales started. That's the most secret way.

In any case, even the FCC info would not have told anything about the UI or the touchscreen... and that's what was really secret, not the well known fact that it was a phone.

That's why they presented the iphone before it was working properly.

Jobs presented the iPhone in mid January, at least partly because a few weeks later everyone else in the world was going to show off their new phones at the annual Barcelona mobile convention.

All-touch cool looking phone concepts were all the rage in 2006... heck, capacitive multi-touch (with pinch zoom!) had already been announced by at least one phone designer in November 2006.



So there seemed to be a very good chance that if Jobs waited until later to demonstrate his phone, Apple would've been seen as simply following everyone else's lead. Jobs had no choice if he wanted Apple to look like an early innovator. His phone had to be shown off first, ready or not. As it turned out, the rest of the world was still dragging its feet, and he could've waited until his phone was actually ready.

 

[BaldiMac]

You don't submit a prototype to the FCC for testing. You submit test results that are ready for approval.

Everyone already knew that Apple was coming out with an "iPhone". We even knew that Foxconn was building it.

The FCC story is just typical Apple handwaving. There were multiple ways that Apple could've kept most/all of it secret right up until sales launch week. E.g.

• Request (as they did) that photos and manuals be kept secret after approval. Then the most that would be gleaned would be the overall rounded rectangular shape (because of the sticker location drawing) and what radios it had. This is exactly what they've done with every iPhone since.
  
  
• Or they could've requested that the approval be officially delayed until the week or even day before sales started. That's the most secret way.

In any case, even the FCC docs would not have told anything about the UI or the touchscreen... and that's what was secret, not the fact that it was a phone.



Jobs presented the iPhone in mid January, because a few weeks later everyone else in the world was going to show off their new phones at the annual Barcelona mobile convention.

All-touch cool looking phone concepts were all the rage in 2006... heck, capacitive multi-touch (with pinch zoom!) had already been announced by at least one phone designer in November 2006.

View attachment 439211

So there seemed to be a very good chance that if Jobs waited until later to demonstrate his phone, Apple would've been seen as simply following everyone else's lead. Jobs had no choice. His phone had to be shown off first, ready or not.

Again, or... Macworld was their largest event at the time.

 

[thehustleman]

Interesting topic

 

[kdarling]

Again, or... Macworld was their largest event at the time.

Even then, remember that the question was:

Why would Apple show anything a whole half year before it was ready to sell, especially if there was a pretty good chance it would lock up on stage?

Apple doesn't usually play that game. Otherwise, why not announce every product months ahead of time... especially products that are much less important that the first iPhone was.

Apple likes to announce and sell soon after. But maybe you're right. Has there been any other major Apple product that they announced six months ahead of time?

 

[BaldiMac]

Even then, remember that the question was:

Why would Apple show anything a whole half year before it was ready to sell, especially if there was a pretty good chance it would lock up on stage?

Macworld being their largest event seems a pretty good reason by itself. (And the feeling that they had to release at Macworld rather than waiting another couple months is part of the reason they abandoned Macworld.) But I'm sure that the FCC claim and other potential for leaks as they ramped up manufacturing played a role as well. They certainly weren't going to wait until WWDC to unveil it.

Apple doesn't usually play that game. Otherwise, why not announce every product months ahead of time... especially products that are much less important that the first iPhone was.

Apple likes to announce and sell soon after. But maybe you're right. Has there been any other major Apple product that they announced six months ahead of time?

The iPad was announced 2.5 months ahead.
The Apple TV was announced 6.5 months ahead.

I think there is an exception for new product lines as you don't have to worry about the Osborne Effect.