Apple’s Secret iPhone Launch Team: The Event That Began It All

Apple had never done anything this massive before and that's when bill turned Steve and said Steve this is gonna be bigger than the Mac and Steve said I know we looked around and we noticed that almost everyone around us had phones and everyone was complaining about their phones and we thought could we build something better you know it's a rollercoaster ride and if it ain't scary it ain't fun the iPod was selling is selling better and better there's probably 50% of our sales around this time and so we kept asking ourselves what is what concerns do we have about the iPod success long-term what will cannibalize iPod sales and one of the biggest concerns was cell phones first we were making the iPod plus phone with a you'd say away a hardware keyboard cause it was using the interface of the iPod well we tried I think 30 40 different ways of making the wheel not become a old rotary phone dial right and nothing seemed logical or intuitive and so at the end of day you couldn't you could select from a list right that was what the iPod was all about but then to actually dial a real number it was so cumbersome it was like this is never gonna work and I remember one day sitting at lunch with Steve and he and I both had our phones out and Steve said you know that technology were building to do touch for the tablet could we shrink that down into something the size if something could fit in your pocket and make a phone out of that technology Steve goes come over here I need to show you something I said sure show me something and so he walked me into the room and he goes it was basically like a ping-pong table size demo with a projector that was projecting a Mac interface on it and he was like check this out it was and you would use your whole hand and you could touch different things like it was a big Big Mac he's like look at that and I can do two and I can do three like let's get all around it and do it and it was literally a ping-pong sized multi-touch display and he goes I think this is gonna solve our problem there was a time in 2005 I think it was that we'd been doing a lot of designs but the designs weren't quite there yet it just it didn't feel complete and Steve came to one of our design meetings and he said this isn't good enough like this is it you have to come up with something so much better this is not good enough he didn't have to read tea leaves I mean he said if you don't start showing me something good soon I'm gonna give the project to another team as they have two weeks and so we went back and Greg assigned different specific ownership of different pieces of the design to different people and that team worked 168 hours a week for two weeks they just they never stopped when they did stop Greg got them a hotel room across the road so they wouldn't have to drive home if you live in San Francisco and at the end of those two weeks and we're looking at this thing and thinking this is phenomenal like this is it like we have cracked it the first time he saw it he was completely silent he didn't say a thing and say a thing in Cheshire and ask a question then he sat back said show it to me again and so we go through again we go through the whole thing again Steve was pretty much blown away by the demonstration was great work our reward for doing a great job on that demonstration was to you know kill ourselves over the next two and a half years the biggest science project of the entire endeavor I think for software was the soft keyboard we we knew would be a to create a keyboard but we knew we'd be compared against the blackberry blackberry was the most popular smartphone out at the time it's called the crack barrier right we hadn't seen multi-touch in action right was multi-touch touchscreen actually going to deliver a good enough and how good is good enough compared to this keyboard this CrackBerry keyboard you know we're bringing up a whole vocabulary we're bringing up a visual vocabulary what the touch interactions would be like pinch to zoom and the scrolling behavior with the you know we call rubber banding the balance at the end of a scroll to indicate here at the end of the list it was all new I remember we got somewhere in those early 2006 and I could see the light at the end of the tunnel for for the iPhone OS I could see when it was going to ship the keyboard wasn't there its accuracy was poor it was just it was hard to use if you wanted to write an email you'd give up and so I went and I froze all development on all applications every UI developer at this point moved over and I said we're gonna spend a few weeks and everyone's building keyboards and at the end of you know I say three weeks we all got together in a conference room everyone got up and started demoing the keyboards they created and some of these were just crazy I mean you'd do these gestures these super complex gestures that were really hard to learn and one guy came in with his keyboard looked like a natural QWERTY keyboards the kind of keyboard you use on your computer look just like that he started using it and it worked amazingly well it was so accurate which is completely different from the one we had three weeks earlier that looked similar but didn't work at all so he started digging into what did you do and they're all these techniques he use a technique sand others to figure out what you're trying to type so if you type the letter T there's a high probability you're gonna type H next to does a common word so the H button would stay the same physical size to your eye but the hit region would grow and so when you went toward the edge you're probably gonna hit the H now and now the e is probably huge as a hit region and you're gonna hit the e it would figure these things out we have all these teams learning in parallel right we had to have an intention and so we all made out like a 1.0 prototype phone and we're like if we would have known what we know now back when we were making this prototype we would have done this differently and this differently this one we're like okay blow it up now let's build the real one and that's what was shipped we were given you know okay the screens gonna be this big right and then we were given plastic prototypes of the touchscreen technology we knew the general form factor but it was a while before we saw anything approaching final industrial design just as we weren't seeing the hardware at the time the team working on the hardware it wasn't allowed to see the software half the time I mean it was very compartmentalized we put a poster up on the wall that was to post your Fight Club suppose the first rule of Fight Club you don't talk about Fight Club first rule about the purple project that was that code name was you don't talk about the purple project I can't speak to the efficiency but I can tell you that it worked because not one person knew what iPhone was gonna look like right before that keynote people thought they knew that Apple was doing the phone but nobody knew what they were going to see that day in January at the keynote every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything we download almost every feature we played music we took calls during music we we went to really large and complex websites I mean it was it was a major real demo and everything was live so i sat there just sweating the whole time I was so nervous about it when you run into bugs today that's because it's been worked out like then it's just the first time like and you would go okay press this one now wait two seconds press this now but it was so choreographed if you went off the script it could write so you had to make sure when the demo worse knew exactly what they were supposed to do at which time do a great demo at Macworld Expo the people in the audience are either media Apple employees or people who would pay money to like go to this conference about you know the products of their favorite computer company it's pretty industry specific the fact that you saw people in lines around stores are in line stretching into parking lots at not just Apple stores but at every AT&T store was in retrospect it's really the first inkling that this is going to have a broader societal impact rather than just being the best phone ever you

Channel: Wall Street Journal

Views: 1,556,205

Rating: 4.8564582 out of 5

Keywords: Greg Christie, Scott Forstall, Steve Jobs, Tony Fadell, IPHONE, APPLE, 10TH ANNIVERSARY, Smartphones, Computers, Consumer Electronics, Telecommunications Technology, Equipment, Personal Electronics, Cellular, Mobile Phones, Handheld Electronic Devices, Technology, Personal Technology, Political, General News, Living, Lifestyle

Id: xxBc1c3uAJw

Length: 9min 39sec (579 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 29 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Aleyla]

Now I know the reason why the stupid onscreen keyboard seems to pick a character I wasn’t typing half the time. Now someone just needs to “invent” a way to turn that off.

[u/Geeekus]

They talk about the keyboard development at 5:20 and specifically talk about Ken Kocienda's work at 5:52