The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone

by Brian Merchant

workers simply have to mine an awful lot of earth to get a small amount of, say, neodymium,

which makes for an energy- and resource-intensive process and resul...

Apple—and just about everyone else—outsources the operation to China, largely because the country doesn’t have the environmenta...

approximately 34 kilograms (75 pounds) of ore would have to be mined to produce the metals that make up a 129-gram iPhone.

It takes a lot of mining—and refining—to get small amounts of the iPhone’s rarer trace elements,

A billion iPhones had been sold by 2016, which translates into 34 billion kilos (37 million tons) of mined rock.

That’s a lot of moved earth—and it l...

Each ton of ore processed for metal extraction requires around three tons of water. This means that each iPhone “polluted” around...

Producing 1 billion iPhones has fouled 100 billion liters (or 26 billion gallons) of water.

I have never previously thought of the ties between the iPhone (and other consumer electronics) and mining. Nor had I thought about the immense environmental consequences. And I did not know that the vadt majority of rare earth minerals are sourced from China because of these massive environmental impacts, nkt bevause they are "rare" and only found in China.

The sum of this human cost is difficult to comprehend, and there are stories like this taking place on almost every continent behind many of the dozens of elements in the iPhone.

It’s an uncomfortable fact, but one we’d do well to internalize: Miners working with primitive tools in deadly environments produce the feedstock for our devices.

Many of the iPhone’s base elements are dug out in conditions that most iPhone users wouldn’t tole...

Cash-poor but resource-rich countries will face an uphill struggle as long as there’s a desire for these metals—demand will continue to drive mining companies and ...

tempering,

strengthening glass with heat,

lay...

types of glass that expanded at different rates when...

both tempering and layering. It soon led to a new, ultrastrong, remarkably shatterproof—and scratchproof—glass.

The ingenious chemical-strengthening process relied on a new method called

ion exchange.

Corning had prototyped the stuff fifty years ago but never produced the material in any significant quantity.

Within years, it’d be covering the face of nearly every smartphone on the market.

Perhaps the best example of thr importance of timing to product-market fit?

Gorilla Glass is now one of the most important materials to the consumer electronics industry.

CERN has been host to a twenty-plus-nation collaboration, a haven that transcends geopolitical tensions to foster collaborative research. Major advances in our understanding of the nature of the universe have been made here.

Almost as a by-product, so have major advances in more mundane areas, like engineering and computing.

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.

A major leap of the iPhone was that it used multitouch to allow us to interact with the web’s bounty in a smooth, satisfying way.

ideas from remarkably disparate industries and disciplines had to flow together to bring multitouch to life.

Over the course of half a century, impassioned efforts to improve creativity, efficiency, education, and ergonomics combined to push touch and, eventually, multitouch into the iPhone,

Through the 1980s and into the 1990s, touch technology continued to improve, primarily in academic, research, and industrial settings.

Motorola made a touchscreen computer that didn’t take off; so did HP. Experimentation with human-machine interfaces had grown more widespread, and multitouch capabilities on experimental devices like Buxton’s tablet at the University of Toronto were becoming more fluid, accurate, and responsive.

Out of necessity, he started looking for alternatives to the keyboard.

They used some of the algorithms they developed for the AI project to recognize complex finger strokes and multiple strokes at once.

But it struck some of their colleagues as a little odd.

Who would want to tap away for an extended period on a flat pad? Especially since keyboards had already spent decades as the dominant human-to-computer input mechanism.

the algorithms we invented helped surface typing feel crisp, airy, and reasonably accurate despite the lack of tactile feedback.”

“In the past few years, the growth of the internet has accelerated the penetration of computers into our daily work and lifestyles,”

That boom had turned the inefficiencies of the keyboard into “crippling illnesses,”

“the conventional mechanical keyboard, for all of its strengths, is physically incompatible with the rich graphical manipu...

“by replacing the keyboard with a multitouch-sensitive surface and recognizing hand motions… hand-computer interaction ...

Apple took FingerWorks’ gesture library and simplified it into a language that a child could understand—recall

Why did it take so long for touch to become the central mode of human-machine interaction when the groundwork had been laid decades earlier?

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 iPhone made a quantum leap in terms of being the first really successful digital device that had, for all intents and purposes, an analog interface,”

Collectives, teams, multiple inventors, build on a shared history. That’s how a core, universally adopted technology emerges—in

One of the messy things about dedicating your life to innovation—real innovation, not necessarily the buzzword deployed by marketing departments—is that,

more often than not, it’s hard to see how, or if, those innovations play out.

Of course, it takes another set of skills entirely to develop a technology into a product that’s universally desirable, and to market, manufacture, and distribute that product—all of which Apple happens to excel at.

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.