The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone

by Brian Merchant

There was so much that needed to be done to translate the multitouch Mac mass into a product, and one with so many new, unproven technologies, that

it was difficult even to put forward a roadmap, to conceive of all of its pieces coming together.

The Rokr was such a disaster that it landed on the cover of Wired with the headline “You Call This the Phone of the Future?” and it was soon being returned at a rate six times higher than the industry average.

Its sheer shittiness took Jobs by surprise—and his anger helped motivate him to squeeze the trigger harder on an Apple-built phone.

“It was, ‘Fuck this, we’re going to make our own phone.’”

There were now two competing projects vying to become the iPhone—a “bake-off,” as some engineers put it.

If there’s a ground zero for the political strife that would later come to engulf the project, it’s likely here, in the decision to split the two teams—Fadell’s

Eventually, the executives overseeing the most important elements of the iPhone—software, hardware, and industrial design—would barely be able to tolerate sitting in the same room together.

One would quit, others would be fired, and one would emerge solidly—and perhaps solely—as the new face of Apple’s genius in the post-Jobs era.

“After we made the first iteration of the software, it was clear that this was going nowhere,” Fadell says. “Because of the wheel interface.

It was never gonna work because you don’t want a rotary dial on the phone.”

elements of the iPod phone wound up migrating into the final iPhone;

The iPod phone was losing support. The executives debated which project to pursue, but Phil Schiller, Apple’s head of marketing, had an answer: Neither. He wanted a keyboard with hard buttons.

The BlackBerry was arguably the first hit smartphone. It had an email client and a tiny hard keyboard.

After everyone else, including Fadell, started to agree that multitouch was the way forward, Schi...

“We all know this is the one we want to do,” Jobs said in a meeting, pointing to the touchscreen. “So let’s make it work.”

When the iPod wheel was ruled out and the touch ruled in,

the new question was how to build the phone’s operating system.

This was a critical juncture—it would determine whether the iPhone would be positioned as an acces...

The NeXT mafia saw an opportunity to create a true mobile computing device and wanted to squeeze the Mac’s operating system onto the phone, complete with versions of Mac apps.

They knew the operating system inside and out—it was based on code they’d worked with for over a decade.

The iPod team thought that was too ambitious and that the phone should run a version of Linux,

the open-source system popular with developers and open-source advocates, which already ran on low-power ARM chips.

The software engineers saw P2 not as a chance to build a phone,

but as an opportunity to use a phone-shaped device as a Trojan horse for a much more complex kind of mobile computer.

“We didn’t want to let the iPod team have an iPod-ish version of the phone come out before.”

“We had to create a whole basically separate company just to build the prototype.”

Long after its launch, the iPhone would not only require the creation of such “separate companies” inside Apple,

it would lead to the absorption of entirely new ones outside it.

It would lead to new breakthroughs, new idea...

Siri is maybe the most famous AI since HAL 9000,

Siri is really a constellation of features—speech-recognition software, a natural-language user interface, and an artificially intelligent personal assistant.

When you ask Siri a question, here’s what happens: Your voice is digitized and transmitted to an Apple server in the Cloud while a local voice recognizer scans it right on your iPhone. Speech-recognition software translates your speech into text. Natural-language processing parses it. Siri consults what tech writer Steven Levy calls the iBrain—around 200 megabytes of data about your preferences, the way you speak, and other details.

Before Siri was a core functionality of the iPhone, it was an app on the App Store launched by a well-funded Silicon Valley start-up. Before that, it was a research project at Stanford backed by the Defense Department with the aim of creating an artificially intelligent assistant. Before that, it was an idea that had bounced around the tech industry, pop culture, and the halls of academia for decades;

As with much of the advanced computer research around Stanford then, ARPA was doing the funding. It would mark a decades-long interest in the field of AI from the agency,

“I just think the human mind is kind of the most interesting thing on the planet,”

It’s one thing to train a computer to recognize sounds and match them to data stored in a database. But Reddy’s team was trying to figure out how the language could be represented within a computer so that the machine could do something useful with it.

For that, it had to learn to be able to recognize and break down the different parts of a sentence.

Symbolic reasoning describes how the human mind uses symbols to represent numbers and logical relationships to solve ...

So you could, he’s saying, set up a massive database of every possible date and time, teach the computer to recognize it, and play a matching game.

“But that’s not a knowledge representation.

The knowledge representation is ‘You human being, me human being. Meet at time and place. Maybe o...

and that is the basis for int...

The automated personal assistant is yet another one of our age-old ambitions and fantasies.

“The history of AI is a history of fantasies, possibilities, demonstrations, and promise.”

there were two symbolic approaches to AI. There was essentially pure logical representation and generic reasoning.”

The logic-driven approach to AI included trying to teach a computer to reason using those symbolic building blocks,

The other approach was da...

That model says, “No, actually the problem is a representation of memory and rea...

Gruber was in the logic camp, and the approach is “no longer fashionable.