The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone

by Brian Merchant

Our brains don’t tidily compute such ecosystemic narratives. We want eureka moments and justified millionaires, not touched pioneers and intangible endings.

The Apple CEO looked for products, not science projects.

Jobs’s approval raised the profile of the project, and, unsurprisingly, stirred up interest inside the company.

A project was greenlit to translate the fragments, ideas, and ambitions of the ENRI experiments into a product.

Not only could multitouch power a new kind of tablet that users could directly manipulate—one that was fun, efficient, and intuitive—but it could work on a whole suite of trackpads and input mechanisms for typical computers too.

A phone was still the furthest thing from their minds.

As the project grew, more and more people wanted their hands on it.

The team knew that if they didn’t deliver, executives might lose interest.

As the project drew on, some members of the team chafed under Apple’s rigid culture.

Strickon, for one, wasn’t used to the corporate hierarchy and staid atmosphere—he was an ambitious, unorthodox researcher and experimenter, recall, and still fresh out of MIT. His boss, Steve Hotelling, chastised him for interrupting superiors (like Hotelling) at meetings; Strickon, meanwhile, shot back that Hotelling was a square “company man.”

Worse was the old boys’ club that had a stranglehold o...

that club was already kind of established.”

Jobs would chew out his colleagues in a mean-spirited way that made Ording not want to participate.

“I just didn’t want to go. I was like, ‘No, Steve’s an asshole.’

Too many times he would be nasty for no...

Amid all that, the team had no clear idea of what, exactly, they were trying to make.

A fully powered Mac you could touch? A mobile device on a completely different operating system?

there were no touchscreen tablets...

they were still more familiar as Star Trek-esque fictions th...

“For the first time, we had something that’s like direct manipulation,

That sort of direct manipulation meant the rules that governed point-and-click computing were out the window.

“Because we could start from scratch, and we could do whatever, so there was much more animation and nice transitions to get the whole thing a certain feel that people hadn’t seen before,”

To craft that new virtual reality, Ording followed his instincts toward

playful design.

he baked in gamelike tendencies to try to make even the most insignificant-seeming int...

“Games are all about that, right? They make you want to keep playing the game,”

So his design sensibility makes you want to discover the next thing, to tinker, to explore.

“For some reason, software has to be boring. I never got that, why people wouldn’t put the same kind of attention to the way things move or how you interact wit...

Inventing the future is less fun with stagnant wages.

the marketing department remained skeptical about the product, even with Jobs on board.

They couldn’t quite imagine why anyone would want to use a portable touch-based device.

“That was the biggest problem.… We were trying to define a new class of computing device, and no one would really talk to us about it,”

just as the tablet program should have been hitting critical mass, it was ensnared by a series of setbacks.

First, it was unclear what the software was going to look like—what operating system the touch device was going to run on

Second, it was fast becoming obvious that the tablet would be expensive.

Finally, and not least, Jobs had fallen seriously ill,

“It’s brilliant in the phone market,”

“It’s sort of subsidized by the carriers. You can have this thing that’s eight hundred bucks selling for two hundred because they know they’re going to have you hooked on it. ”

Jobs would soon pit the iPod team against a Mac software team to refine and produce a product that was...

The herculean task of squeezing Apple’s acclaimed operating system into a handheld phone would take a...

Executives would clash; some would quit. Programmers would spend years of their lives coding around the clock to...

The concept of the iPhone wasn’t the product of Steve Jobs’s imagination—though he would fiercely oversee, refine, and curate its features and designs—but of an open-ended conversation, curiosity, and collaboration.

It was a product born of technologies nurtured by other companies and then ingeniously refined by some of Apple’s brightest minds—people

“It was like that… this strange little detour that turned into this big thing that’s been highly influential, and it’s kind of amazing that it worked out,”

Salar de Atacama, home to the largest lithium mine in the world.

Atacama doesn’t look ultradry; in the winter, snowcapped mountains are visible in the distance. But the entire forty-one-thousand-square-mile high desert receives an average of fifteen millimeters (about half an inch) of rain a year.

Hardly anything lives in the most water-scarce regions of the Atacama, not even microbes.

we have this barren, unearthly place to thank for keeping our iPhones running.

Chilean miners work this alien environment every day, harvesting lithium from vast evaporating pools of marine brine. That brine is a naturally occurring saltwater solution that’s found here in huge underground reserves. Over the millennia, runoff from the nearby Andes mountains has carried mineral deposits down to the salt flats, resulting in brines with unusually high lithium concentrations.

Lithium is the lightest metal and least dense solid element, and while it’s widely distributed around the world, it never occurs naturally in...