Transcript & Summary: The Struggle of Building the Original iPhone - The Untold Story

[00:02] every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything today Apple is going to reinvent the phone here it is why in the world would Apple Computer want to jump into the handset market with so much competition we use all the handsets out there it's really frustrating it's a category that that needs to be reinvented with over 2 billion units sold the iPhone is the most influential product of all time it created the modern smartphone and turned the device into an instant gateway to the world [00:42] everything you desire in the palm of your hand it changed everything but where did it come from if it wasn't a sudden idea from Steve Jobs who actually came up with the idea who are the people that built it and what are their stories with the most recent release of the iPhone it's easy for many people to forget just how revolutionary it once was today we're gonna see how it all began and how the pressure of doing the impossible cost some people their marriage and their health this video will include my exclusive interview at [01:14] kenka gender one of the pioneers of the original iPhone he worked directly with Steve Jobs on the project this is the secret history of the iPhone you are watching ColdFusion TV [Music] [01:44] [Music] to begin our story we have to go back to the early 2000 at this time human-computer interaction was a mess before smart devices manipulating digital objects was a chore in the early 2000s zooming in on an image usually meant clicking on a menu selecting the zoom option and then selecting the amount you wanted to zoom in by how we zoom in on an image today couldn't be more different we can simply pinch a screen and manipulate it with our fingers back then such interactions weren't obvious and only became possible [02:16] with touchscreens touchscreens existed back then but they were predominantly resistive touch that's the kind of screen where you have to use a lot of force to touch think ATM screens or information screens at train stations and airports on smaller screens resistive touch is inexact and frustrating in the 90s Apple tried to use resistive touch in a device called the Newton but it failed before even dreaming of a device like the iPhone this was the first problem that had to be solved by 2007 the world was looking [02:49] for a new way to approach the mobile phone they just needed a company to be in the right place at the right time with the right product he may be surprised to find out that the first seeds of the iPhone came not from Apple but from a small company in Delaware called finger works founded in 1998 by Wayne Westerman finger works had figured out how to use a different type of technology effectively it was called capacitive multi-touch it was fast responsive precise and most importantly smart enough to recognize multiple [03:23] fingers and what they were trying to do I reached out to Wayne for an interview but unfortunately after his company was bought by Apple in 2005 he was whisked away and sworn to secrecy he couldn't give me any interviews about his work in the early 2000s finger works released a trackpad called the ire gesture it helped people with wrist injuries to easily use a computer without aggravating their injury Wayne westerman the founder of finger works had suffered from a wrist condition himself sometimes he couldn't tie more [03:54] than a page without his wrist instead of despairing this condition motivated him to innovate new solutions for his university research paper and this resulted in the finger works technology Wayne even wrote a simple AI program to help the system understand the differences between accidental and intentional touches when gestures were performed the pet would interpret them and turn the movements into computer shortcuts like copy paste and scroll Wayne Westerman and finger works would play a critical role in the development [04:23] of the iPhone he is Ken Kashi anda to talk about it a bit more my name is Ken cash Enda and for many years I worked at Apple from 2001 until 2017 in 2005 I was asked to join the iPhone project I had very good experience working with Wayne but back at the beginning he had a company called finger works which is an independent company which Apple bought apart for the technology and part to get him because he was so talented [04:58] early on Steve Jobs hated the idea of Apple making the phone he was concerned about a lack of focus in the company the precise issue that he'd solved on his return to Apple in 1997 Steve Jobs believed that a phone would only serve a niche gink market cell phones at the time were not the easiest to use so you can understand why it wouldn't have seemed bright for a trendy company like Apple to get into this market as we all know this sentiment would later change [Music] meanwhile within Apple a group of [05:35] engineers and software designers would meet weekly and what used to be a user testing room there were all from different departments but united by curiosity and imagination they realized that the web and digital revolution was bringing richer and ever more complex media to computers they realized that clicking and typing may not be the best way to navigate this new future what if there was a more fluid way to interact with content with this idea that would start an informal human-computer interaction group within Apple their [06:06] goal was to improve our interaction to a technology one day in 2002 an Apple employee by the name of Tina Huang brought a finger works device to work due to a wrist injury it was a black rectangular pad that allowed the seamless execution of complicated computer tasks by just the use of her fingers the finger works touchpad was seen by some curious Apple human interaction employees and they use a testing room because they're already thinking of new ways to interact with technology to them multi-touch interaction was an [06:41] interesting prospect inspired they whipped up a demo to show Apple's marketing department using the multi-touch gesture pad and a projector they displayed an interactive image of Mac OS the idea was that you could use finger based gestures on the pad to manipulate elements of the desktop software the demo was met with minimal enthusiasm from the marketing team they just didn't see a need for it and how could they there was no product that would really need it unfazed the interaction group continued to have [07:12] weekly meetings to discuss the possibilities johnny if' who was one of the weekly members of the informal group had also shown Steve Jobs the concept initially Jobs rejected it he remarked that would only be good for quote reading something on a toilet in quote Johnny I EV being of a sensitive nature took the comment personally and was hurt by it after some further thought however Jobs warmed up to the idea and the project would be greenlit but it became riddled with problems and was ultimately shut down [07:49] July of 2004 Steve Jobs had a surgery to remove a tumor in his pancreas the realization that he might have a limited time on this planet helped accelerate the timetable of what needed to be done at Apple about a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas I didn't even know what a pancreas was the doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months [08:24] I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself if today were the last day of my life would I want to do what I am about to do today and whenever the answer has been no for too many days in a row I know I need to change something your work is going to fill a large part of your life and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work and the only way to do great work is to love what you do if you haven't found it yet keep looking and don't settle as with all matters of the heart you'll know [08:57] when you find it around this time Tony Fadell who led the successful iPod division suggested two jobs that it would be a good idea to put Wi-Fi in an iPod while Jobs thought about it Tony and his small team would get to work on a new iPod a PDA hybrid prototype the result was a disaster imagine an iPod with modified software allowing users to navigate the web with a click wheel Jobs hated it he understood his that it worked but thought it was a rubbish experience Jobs told Tony to try another way [09:33] [Music] in 2005 best sorting a programmer and UI designer received a call from Steve Jobs asking him to make a demo of a touch interface of a scrolling list Steve now wanted to do a touchscreen phone demos were the way that Apple as a company worked through creative concepts and ideas to see what could be the next product and then we would make demos and something you could try out right away and you know the thing is these first demos and prototypes are never any good you know you think that there is going [10:14] to be some genius aha moment but it never worked like that well hopefully there's some little kernel in there there's some aspect of it that's stronger than other aspects of it and so you you go and look for those strong parts natural world uses natural selection generation after generation improving and improving in technology we have creative selection taking our ideas and building up a product from these humble beginnings it's a long iterative evolutionary process while ording was making the contactless demo he noticed [10:53] that when scrolling the text image would suddenly stop when he hit the bottom of the screen because of this sudden stopping of all the motion he thought that his code had crashed after some time ording noticed that he had in fact reached the end of the list this gave him an idea why not have the image balanced so that there's some visual feedback that lets you feel like you've reached the end of the list and not like it suddenly crashed this was the genesis of the rubber banding effect on the iPhone when Steve saw audience rubber [11:22] banding effect for the first time he realized that a phone could indeed have a touch interface while work on the scrolling list demo was happening other touchscreen projects were secretly going on at Apple as well as cool as these demos were there were no more than a bunch of disjointed concepts some pinching and zooming here a few widgets there some notes and the calculator but nothing with a unified structure Steve wasn't impressed with the disjointed array of demos didn't seem like those a product to sell in early [11:57] 2005 Jobs gave the team two weeks to create something great and it had to be great or else a small team at Apple spent two sleepless weeks trying to get the company's first touchscreen phone right they focused on the vision of a phone and its function how do you make a phone call on a touchscreen how do you get from a calendar to web browsing what's the logical flow of getting from one application to another amazingly by the end of the two-week period they had something to show jobs the first time [12:27] Steve Jobs saw the prototype he didn't jump for joy or exclaim anything he was silent sitting back and he said show it to me again he was in fact blown away the project would be top secret with an apple from that point forward around the same time Apple would purchase finger works bringing finger works his whole team on board to try and help figure out this new jackpot [12:55] so now Apple had two choices on how to transform this technology into a product one enlarged the already successful iPod into a phone or to shrink Mac OS down into a phone using finger works touch technology nobody knew which would work best so Steve let both ideas run the iPod enlarging team was led by Tony Fadell and the multi-touch Mac OS team was led by Scott Forrestal force tools team was seen as the underdogs after all Tony Fadell had helped push millions of iPod sales and was also working on to Smash Hits the iPod Nano [13:33] and the iPod video the battle had begun neither team was allowed to know what each other was doing in fact the hardware guys weren't allowed to see any software and the software guys weren't allowed to see any hardware hardly anyone working on the phone at Apple knew what the device was going to look like until the keynote and they weren't given a solid date for that either during the stress some members would quit and others would be fired at one point Phil Schiller head of marketing had had enough and thought [14:04] that both projects should be scrapped an Apple phone with a blackberry style keyboard seemed like the most sensible option while these projects were going top Apple executives convinced jobs that something needed to be done about encroaching the mp3 capable mobile phone sales and quickly Jobs agreed to partner with Motorola the coolest phone company at the time with their thin razor phone they would make an iTunes phone the idea was people would try out iTunes on the phone and then hopefully go off and buy [14:38] an iPod Apple would have no involvement in the hardware only focusing on iTunes integration the result was the Motorola ROKR already outdated on release the thing just sucked I go there and I just resume my music right back to where it was well I was supposed to resume my music right back to where it was [15:04] I hit the wrong button but you can resume your music right back to where it was if you hit the right one the rocker was so bad that it was soon being returned at a rate of six times higher than the industry average consumers for expecting something big from Apple and this wasn't it after the Motorola failure Jobs returned his attention back to the iPod phone which was Tony fedele's team as it was the safer option he still did leave the touch Mac OS team led by Scott Forstall to continue Tony's team tried a plethora [15:37] of designs one of which was similar to an iPod video but with a phone mode if you wanted music it would behave like a regular iPod would touch controls for play pause etc around a scroll wheel when he needed to dial a number you would switch it into phone mode and the device would behave like a rotary phone it wasn't perfect but Jobs still insisted that the idea could work nobody within Apple really knew what this new device was the iPod team saw it as another portable accessory like the iPod so software wasn't important the [16:11] touch Mac OS team on the other hand saw it as a fully fledged multi-touch computer that fit in your hand Tony Fadell and his team were certain that this new phone should run a beefed-up version of iPod software while Scott Forstall and his team thought a shrunken down version of Mac OS would be better they theorized the mobile chip technology had become powerful enough to run a version of Mac OS it was juddery at first but soon they managed to get scrolling to work smoothly on a compact version of Mac OS and from this point it [16:43] was decided that this would be the way to go the shrunken down version of Mac OS will become known as iOS and soon Tony fedele's iPod phone idea would be abandoned and all efforts would be focused on iOS as the software began to take place details have to be ironed out how do you unlock this thing without doing it by accident in your pocket there's actually an interesting story to have this was solved one day Freddy answers a user interface designer within Apple found the solution in the most unlikely of places a toilet [17:16] one day Freddy was on a US domestic flight and felt the need to relieve himself he got up from his seat and went to the toilet as Freddy lost the cubicle door he happened to observe the locking mechanism it was so simple he just slide it to unlock and that's it this concept little light bulb and the result was the famous original slide to unlock feature to test out this concept an iPhone engineer later gave a prototype to his three-year-old daughter without hesitation she took her finger slid and unlocked the phone if a [17:49] three-year-old to figure it out anyone could [Music] meanwhile Johnny if' was beginning to imagine what the hardware of this phone could look like although later designs would stray the first sketch from Johnny if' was close to the final product he was imagining an infinity pool quote this pond where the display would magically appear the rest of the device had to get out of the way end quote interestingly Johnny if' didn't want a headphone jack in the original iPhone as the project dragged on tempers rose [18:25] within the company due to secrecy competition and the time pressure of the project and it was no wonder everything the teams were making was new touchscreen technology was in his infancy the Apple engineers had to figure out how to make a transparent version of multi-touch mass-producible untested custom chips had to be developed so reception had to be worked out material designs needed to be perfected basically these teams which had never made a phone before were now trying to make the most ambitious device ever imagined imagine [18:59] how it must have been for the developers - if any app they're working on crashed it could have been because of virtually a million things from their coding to any one of the numerous experimental hardware components by February of 2006 the team at Apple's didn't have a CPU basically the brain of the device and they was supposed to ship in a year they decided to contract Samsung who they'd partnered with previously for chips within the iPod they are Samsung if they had any powerful CPUs within certain [19:29] specifications and they did but the only thing Samsung had was from a cable box without telling Samsung about the iPhone Apple said they would have need modifications to this chip in just six months this is much less than half the usual development time for a new chip and this would later cause problems by early 2006 the iOS software was making great progress but the keyboard still sucked it was just too small to type on and it failed in all of the demos without a good keyboard the whole phone wouldn't have worked realizing that the [20:03] entire project was in jeopardy Scott Forstall paused all development of applications on iOS and made everyone focus on the keyboard issue everyone on the team built keyboards for three straight weeks when it came time to test the results of their work they all still were no good there was only one engineer left to demonstrate his keyboard it was Ken Koshi endo nervously he set it up for Scott to type on surprisingly it worked and it was accurate the breakthrough was made by using primitive AI to figure out [20:34] what was actually being typed essentially a predictive text for example if you were to type the letter T there was a high chance you're going to type the letter H next so the keyboard would make the contact to region four age larger without changing the appearance of the button to the naked eye Ken also had the foresight to use a dictionary to power suggestions and order correct it was clear to me after the first couple of demos that's since the screen was so small and since there were no there was no tactile feedback on [21:08] the touchscreen that there was gonna need to be some new element now my first ideas were different shaped keys different different ways of highlighting the keys so that that you would just move your fingers but that was that was a failed idea that didn't work and so it was the dictionary and software assistance the notion that some code running in the background looking at your touches on the screen and trying to figure out well what did you mean and so combining that notion with the notion of a dictionary and a lot of work and a lot [21:50] of experimentation gave you know printed help to produce that that first result of auto correction through for the first iPhone without Ken's ideas in that high-pressure moment it's possible that the iPhone wouldn't have made it off the ground [Music] as always all coming down to the wire for Apple disaster struck just three months before the launch the custom CPU chips from Samsung still had bugs that cause the phones to crash would such little time left on the clock it was looking like a catastrophe wasn't [22:28] the making a stress built engineers started working seven days a week and some slept in their offices tempers flared and employees shouted at each other one employee slammed the door so hard out of frustration that the door handle broke and she got trapped in her office and had to be broken out with a baseball bat it seemed like the iPhone which held so much promise would be apple's greatest disaster other aspects of the iPhone were still being slapped on very late in a product development cycle one [22:59] of its killer apps Google Maps was only added as an afterthought on the hardware side the original iPhone screen was supposed to be plastic like the iPods but the decision to use glass was made one month after the launch [23:17] when the day of the keynote came on january 9th 2007 none of the teams that Apple knew exactly what the final iPhone product would look like even though they had worked on the project for years when Steve Jobs took to the stage some things were still incomplete the iPhones buggy CPU is she hadn't been properly solved yet only patched up for the demo this meant that the phone could crash at any time during the presentation the Apple team held their breath sweating as they sat and watched Steve Jobs excitedly proclaimed and [23:49] we're calling it iPhone it was mostly positive reaction from the crowd but also some uncertain laughter as some thought that Jobs was joking about the name yet the demo was going well the crowd was loving the smooth scrolling and technological magic they were witnessing there we go right there and to unlock the phone I just take my finger and slide it across all right I'm gonna see that again okay sleep we wanted something that you couldn't do by accident your pocket and just slide it across boom well how do I scroll through [24:23] my list of artists how do I do this I just take my finger and I swirl [24:38] I mean that cool rubber banding up my run off the edge we call it the pinch I can bring them closer together and move them further apart to make it bigger or smaller and so I can just move them further apart and stretch the image and move it around [Music] as Tony Fadell leader of the iPod fine team looked on Steve Jobs did something pretty cool when showcasing to the crowd had until a contact he gleefully slid Fidel's name of the iphone contacts list Tony's changed his number I gotta update this anyway so I'm [25:17] gonna get rid of that and I could just remove Tony boom there we go it's that simple to edit these things he was basically saying to Tony you're fired it's got four still states that during rehearsals of the presentation Steve would always delete a random contact never Tony's to the crowd it was just a demonstration of how this phone made everything fun and cool to use to those working at Apple it was a message Tony was in trouble in all of this there was one glaring omission Wayne westerman on lookers never knew his name and Wayne [25:52] wasn't even invited to the event but without his multi-touch innovation there would be no iPhone instead on stage Steve Jobs stated that Apple had invented multi-touch these events were a summary of how the project had been for most brutal the project was so hard in the secret teams that are ruined marriages and cost some workers their health some employees worked every day giving up their nights and weekends for years at a time iPhone engineer Andy Greenland speaks quote the iPhone is the reason I'm [26:30] divorced it was probably professionally the worst time in my life he created a pressure cooker with a bunch of really smart people with an impossible deadline an impossible mission and then you hear that the future of the entire company is resting on it there wasn't really any time to kick your feet back on the desk and say this is going to be really awesome one day every time you turned around there was some just imminent demise of the program just lurking around the corner it was especially hard on the married [26:58] guys there were a lot of oblivious to the sacrifice the world was electric with the buzz of the iPhone but that new phone that yeah there right now you see Brandis on tops everything here we go many people were anticipating the Mac World Trade Show this week including Andy and so far they've not been disappointed the latest from this show Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiling what many are calling a revolutionary new product the iPhone you scroll lists like by flicking like this and it's like a roulette wheel stop like that it's just [27:29] so cool it's very clear to us that the world's going mobile and we really believe that that a device like this which is you know an order of magnitude more powerful than any mobile device or any cell phone that's ever been created and yet vastly easier to use is the future when it was all said and done keen fans lined up to get one you paid five hundred dollars to secure a spot in this line know just yeah come and sit here what are you looking forward to using your iPhone for um just the fact that I could put all my music and [27:59] everything on there and it has a touchscreen and I don't know I seen the commercials it looks really cool for me in 2007 after seeing Jobs's demo of scrolling in gestures it made sense to me that this was the perfect interface for a small screen device the iPhone had way more than a thousand times more computing power than NASA did in 1969 when they put man on the moon yet it was super easy to use with a full web browsing experience to boot even children could pick up an iPhone and know what to do [28:28] capacitive multi-touch and gestures had broken down the walls of human-computer interaction the future had arrived finally a computer in your pocket his Apple software engineer Henry lamb uruk's would put it quote we took a Mac and we squished it into a little box unquote other small touches like a proximity sensor that turned the screen off during a phone call so that it didn't touch your face by accident and an accelerometer that could sense if you're holding the phone in portrait and landscape made the whole package feel [29:00] like magic today it's just so easy to forget just how much of a leap the original iPhone was what followed the iPhone was a complete shift in how we thought about technology now information in news was instant we became totally connected all the time though in the next decade this over connectedness will cause some issues [Music] once the initial fanfare was over the sales of the iPhone would be slowed it would take the introduction of the App Store in 2008 to really kick things off again for Apple if it wasn't for the App [29:38] Store the iPhone could have just been one of those devices that look cool and was cool to use but never caught on for an entire year after the iPhones launch it could run a grand total of 16 apps there's only one home screens worth of apps and that was it and this isn't to mention how limited the iPhone was compared to some other devices out there they had no multimedia messaging no video camera no cut and paste no 3G and the list goes on but that wasn't important Nokia blackberry and the rest of the [30:09] established phone companies had been providing these features for many years but the difference was for the first time a device was now a changeable blank canvas with no buttons since the device could run apps on it the iPhone software creators could make it whatever they wanted it to be their creativity it was only limited by their imagination and the hardware capability today billions of apps have been sold and the mobile app space has become a new industry companies like Nokia blackberry and pom [30:38] thought they knew the game but they couldn't visualize the future they thought things would never change and before they realized it was too late to prosper in this brave new world Google was working on their own BlackBerry's star phone with a hardware keyboard but when they saw the iPhone presentation they abandoned that idea and went for full touchscreen the result was the very first Android phone but that's a story for another day [Music] as the years passed people became less and less excited with each new release [31:12] of the iPhone maybe who have reached a point where the devices are just so good there's only incremental improvements we can make I asked Ken what he thought of Apple's direction and he stated that if he was perfectly happy with Apple he wouldn't have left in 2017 but he hopes that they continue to innovate as we all know Apple isn't the only game in town anymore competition is much stronger than ever before will may be the next big thing from Apple is around the corner but at this stage only time will [31:43] tell the story of the original iPhone is one of great sacrifice risk and reward a story that shaped technology and the world as we know it it gave the average person an interface to almost infinite information and knowledge all in the palm of their hand but sadly almost nobody knows who invented these technologies and what the cost was to innovate such a device to finish off we'll have some words from Ken I hope that you all use technology and and enjoy it and some of the products that may be that I made are useful and [32:21] meaningful to you and bring you some joy in your life if they do then I've done my job in all of this something has to be said for Steve Jobs he may not have invented the technologies and Ken told me he wasn't the nicest person to work for but Steve did care about making great products and he would push people and squeeze the very best out of them to make these products happen and in that vein without Steve there also would be no iPhone if you've watched this video to the end thank you I appreciate it I [32:58] hope you can now look down at your iPhone all the other smart phones that followed and appreciate how they came to be if you want to see more video documentaries from my book new thinking there's a playlist below if you are new here you can subscribe so you don't miss out on more videos like this in the future [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [33:33] [Music] [Applause] [33:57] [Music] cold fusion are you thinking [Music]