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The iPhone is more profitable than a relentlessly marketed drug that physically addicts its customers.
the Edison myth, or the myth of the lone inventor—the notion that after countless hours of toiling, one man can conjure up an invention that changes the course of history.
iPhones are sealed with proprietary screws, called Pentalobes, that make it impossible to open up your own phone without a special tool.
Under Jobs, Apple would show consumers what they wanted, not solicit their feedback.
The story of the iPhone starts, in other words, not with Steve Jobs or a grand plan to revolutionize phones, but with a misfit crew of software designers and hardware hackers tinkering with the next evolutionary step in human-computer symbiosis.
But at Apple, “people didn’t feel empowered to have ideas and to follow through.… Everything was micromanaged by Steve,” Strickon says.
Bas Ording, a user-interface wunderkind who took cues from typesetting and gaming; Imran Chaudhri, a hacker-influenced designer who could straddle the gap between SV and MTV; Joshua Strickon, an MIT-trained sensor savant with an ear for electronica and a feel for touchscreens; Brian Huppi, a jack-of-all-trades
It’s impossible to understand the modern language of computing, or the iPhone, without understanding what that means.
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
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.”
feel that ideas are very fragile, so you have to be tender when they are in development. I realized that if he pissed on this, it would be so sad because I knew it was so important.”
“Jony felt it was time to show it to Steve Jobs,” Huppi says. At this point, it was as much a matter of timing as anything else. “If you caught Steve on a bad day, everything he saw was shit, and it was like, ‘Don’t ever show this to me again. Ever.’ So you have to be very careful about reading him and knowing when to show him things.”
One day, a visionary innovator at one of the world’s best-known technology companies decided that the future of communication lay in combining mobile phones with computing power.
While the iPhone was the first smartphone to go fully mainstream, it wasn’t actually a breakthrough invention in its own right.
“The iPhone is a confluence technology. It’s not about innovation in any field,” he says.
are finally wising up to its value, and he’s about to ship it off to the Smithsonian.
“We approached Motorola about doing a joint project, essentially a smartphone project, and Motorola said no.
“The Simon was ahead of its time in so many different ways,” Canova says, a bit wistfully. That’s an understatement. Smartphones wouldn’t conquer the world for two more decades.
Visions of iPhone-like devices can be traced back to the late 1800s. One of the earliest and most striking is an 1879 cartoon by George du Maurier that appeared in the satirical Punch Almanack. Titled “Edison’s Telephonoscope,” it’s
“In a historical sense, the computer is no more than an instantaneous telegraph with a prodigious memory, and all the communications inventions in between have simply been elaborations on the telegraph’s original work,” according to the history of technology scholar Carolyn Marvin.
“It’s a phone first; it wasn’t a computer at all,” Canova says of his Simon. “It did have to have all of these features behind it which needed a computer, but you shouldn’t expose the computer to the end user. You have to expose a very simple, basic user interface; you want the computers to be invisible.”
But Bell was a determined developer, presenter, and marketer, a lot like his contemporary Thomas Edison and a lot like Steve Jobs.
“If I could make a current of electricity vary in intensity precisely as the air varies in density during the production of sound,” Bell said,
Cerro Rico
Solder
Windshields need to break in car accidents if the humans inside are to survive. Chemcor ended up in some of AMC’s classic Javelin cars, but production was soon discontinued.
“Well, Steve,” the exec said, “we have a glass prototype, but it fails the one-meter drop test one hundred out of one hundred times—” Jobs cut him off. “I just want to know if you are going make the fucking thing work.”
Jobs told Weeks he doubted Gorilla Glass was good enough, and began explaining to the CEO of the nation’s top glass company how glass was made. “Can you shut up,” Weeks interrupted him, “and let me teach you some science?”
It’s clear why Jobs would want to lay claim to multitouch so aggressively: it set the iPhone a world apart from its competition. But if you define multitouch as a surface capable of detecting at least two or more simultaneous touches, the technology had existed, in various forms, for decades before the iPhone debuted. Much of its history, however, remains obscured, its innovators forgotten or unrecognized.
Buxton calls this phenomenon the Long Nose of Innovation, a theory that posits, essentially, that inventions have to marinate for a couple of decades while the various ecosystems and technologies necessary to make them appealing or useful develop.
“The thing that concerns me about the Steve Jobs and Edison complex—and there are a lot of people in between and those two are just two of the masters—what worries me is that young people who are being trained as innovators or designers are being sold the Edison myth, the genius designer, the great innovator, the Steve Jobs, the Bill Gates, or whatever,” Buxton says. “They’re never being taught the notion of the collective, the team, the history.”
We aren’t great at conceiving of technologies, products, even works of art as the intensely multifaceted, sometimes generationally collaborative, efforts that they tend to be. Our brains don’t tidily compute such ecosystemic narratives. We want eureka moments and justified millionaires, not touched pioneers and intangible endings.
