Oral History of Kenneth Kocienda and Richard Williamson Part 2

all right it is November 13th I am handsome sue with Mark Webber and we are here with Ken coach Enda and which really I'm sending again for part two so let's get back to where we were and start where we left off so we were talking about sort of working on iPhone 1.0 and one thing that I didn't get to ask is what was it sort of the the experience like of being on that team and working in secret and the long hours and that general sort of the feeling or the the life of working on that project it was intense there's a lot of pressure it was fun because we had something that from the very beginning seemed like it could really be big important for the company I don't know quite thought that it would be important for the world but important for the world of Technology humanity well I think we hoped that it might be and the people were just terrific it was very inspiring all the time to be surrounded by people who were so smart and so good at making the software that we were trying to make and so it it it made me feel like to keep running as fast as I could to keep up with everybody else but also if I got stuck that there were people around me that I could turn to who would have insights or an opinion or some notion about what to what to do what the solution might be so it was I I think about it now and looking at the product at how it turned out to me it makes sense that it turned out that way it was not a fluke I agree with pretty much all of that me also it was a time when I was working with people that loved what they were doing just like I loved what I was doing and when you're in that kind of community it's really not like work it's really you know it's a passion and you know even though the hours were intense you know there were many all-nighters and most weekends we worked it didn't really matter it wasn't I didn't know point I think any of us thought about well what about overtime you know we're working to hide and what am I going to get out of this it wasn't like that at all it's that we were creating something an artifact that was really gonna change the world and it was one of the best times of my life yeah there were you would get a problem and I don't know for me I would get a problem and I couldn't stop thinking about it so just like what Richard said is you know this notion of like weekends or clocking out it just was not part of it because you know for me personally I I didn't work as long hours as other people in the office simply because that's my work schedule that's how you know I have a certain amount of sensory input I can take in during the day and then I need to go and be an introvert but that didn't mean I stopped thinking about the problems and so and again like Richard said just to second his comments that's what everybody was doing there was this real alignment there were not people going off in all different directions north all different priorities about our approach to the project so that just made it really it's like a like a superconductor no resistance just never any any problem with you know getting that current flowing in the right direction was was a difficult on relationships or your family that you were working such long hours for me yes but wasn't until you know after the fact that I really recognize that you know I I had three kids during the course of my work on the iPhone and missed a lot of those early years and you know can't get that back but strangely it was you know even though I'm dedicated thousand percent to my family I I didn't feel like struggle I felt like I had to work on the iPhone at that time yeah and you know there's lots of stories about other people working on the iPhone that had you know significant relationship problems I was very fortunate my wife was very understanding and I have great kids but yeah obviously family life was impacted because we want that many others weren't there yeah I I'm lucky in that I'm married to somebody who is extraordinarily understanding so there was never really any tension on our relationship over working long hours or even when I was home still thinking still so obviously thinking about the work you know just get this faraway look and she's talking to me and as a way would like I said she is just really extraordinarily patient and understanding and understanding that I was doing something that I loved so she can give me trouble over it hmm was did the secrecy of the project impact the way you guys worked was it a hindrance or was it beneficial but not really for me because we were with the people that knew about the secret tool time so it wasn't as though we were at a social event and couldn't talk about things because we worked and socialized with all the people that were working on the same project and I was lucky enough to actually be one of the people that carried around a phone very early on and to my kids my young kids well actually got to play with the iPhone before we launched it and honestly you know I didn't hide it from my wife so you know like I pulled probably you know have something to say about that now but you know I think I think Scott knew and it was for me it wasn't wasn't an issue at all the secrecy no no it wasn't as distinct I think we were all very focused inwardly on making this making this product as good as it could be and we were self-sufficient in a way we had enough people with enough of different skills to to get that done now there was one time in particular while I was working on the keyboard where I did want to get help from some outside experts at Apple certainly not outside the company and I'll address that in a moment but some folks who had long experience now obviously Apple shipped operating systems with text entry systems particularly for Asian languages Chinese Japanese Korean has some pretty sophisticated input methods and and also a text processing and so particularly for like junk mail filtering latent semantic mapping was one a pretty sophisticated text processing algorithm and so when I was developing autocorrection for the keyboard I wanted to talk to these people but I couldn't hmm eventually I talked to Henry libero Richard's manager and then just Scott who was unreasonably running the whole software organization for the iPhone I got the permission to talk to them but couldn't tell him what for and then actually turned out to be alright because they worked at Apple they knew that it was something something some secret and so we I asked them questions and and they ants ate they talked about their work and it was helpful to orient me in this new problem space it would have been Minh different if it was somehow possible to really enlist their help but I I that would have changed the dynamic of the organization was a small team and we were all given the responsibilities to figure out what to do in our own areas and we did so and when it comes to like looking at other cellphones or thinking about whether companies were doing at the time or you know like for me playing with a blackberry guy never did I never played with a blackberry keyboard to see what their software did while I was making the keyboard software for the iPhone or any other phone any other Nokia I mean I think there were a couple phones around or whatever but I didn't want to look at them we were making something new and so that's what the focus was on yeah well why not that I'm not good what would have been the harm in looking at other ones how did you think about it because we were thinking blue sky yeah in general it that was true across the board that we didn't really look at competitive product you know we were creating something new and we had a lot of really great ideas so there was never competitive analysis and maybe elsewhere in the organization your marketing perhaps had done some of that research but within engineering we didn't do any of that no did you feel like it would have tainted or narrowed you know restricted your creativity to do well taint tainted is a loaded word so I think in terms of taken from a legal perspective I don't think anybody was thinking about that at all so we don't the engineering organization and yeah I think you know we had this sense of not one to be constrained by what had been done before you know to try and do something if we could do this from scratch you know what would it look like what would be the best way to do it and you know just going with a sheet of glass and no buttons you know that was really you know really new did that come from with him the blue sky impetus came from within the team or from above or both both both yeah Steve really wanted to play something new obviously and the design team you know they had a lot of great ideas the engineering team had a lot of great ideas and we just didn't feel the need to do the competitive kind of analysis we wouldn't we went like oh what are we gonna do here we have to look at what did like Mary do you know it wasn't it wasn't that the problem was never gosh boy I wish we had some ideas here yeah but that was never the problem there were too many ideas and so it was really a matter of picking the best ideas from this huge list that we already had rather than oh my gosh we'd better go out and see what other people were doing so that we can figure out what to do with this thing that was it was was not like that at all we had too many ideas so it was it was really just a matter up again focusing inwardly and and and editing our list and picking the best and then refining and honing and and also keeping track of the things that maybe we crossed that earlier because maybe those things some of those things would come back later can you mentioned that you had consulted with the you know the Asian input people on you know for auto autocomplete and things like that was that pretty significant that you know they had I mean they had already had this experience doing essentially auto completion of full you know phrases or sentences in Chinese or Japanese and you know you know you're doing this for for English was that how significant was that it wasn't at all right and is it it's kind of a timeline issue too I mean we had you know the initial launch we didn't have a lot of input from those teams but post points they took ownership yeah eventually eventually those same people who worked on contrary the Japanese input method wound up being the ones who took over Japanese text and put on the iPhone eventually of course the very first release of the iPhone was English only didn't have any text completion at all had only correction okay if you to the extent that there was there's no spelling correction either there was only input correction and it was only if you typed five keys you would get five letter Auto Corrections just tied to the number of keys that you type very very simple system I focused completely on input correction that you couldn't get the the the base idea was that you since you couldn't actively feel the keys that the software would help to figure out give you what you meant rather than what you did but for the literal keystrokes not for a higher level of either gross but figuring that you you know how to spell what you're trying to spell and that you try to type the right keys but you probably missed a couple so give figure out what one of the neighboring keys would be better to sub in here there but then you said that the the group that own codori later on took over just Japanese justice okay just you so then the English autocorrection and Mandarin and that st. that's in group yes I see not Nucky a new we Debra goldsmith yeah right yeah yeah Lee Collins yeah yeah kita son kids ano good great group right yeah experts but then the the English auto correction and text completion was that was a separate group or were they also drawn by a further further first two releases for the first two releases of of English it was still my software and then we cut over as I recall for whatever that was antennal codename yeah I think that was three very the third released third major release then we cut over to some software that Lane Westerman wrote which had roots going back to finger works Oh earlier you mentioned you know the management Ching honoree and then Scott Forstall what was it like working for them what were they like his manager is what confound me was was great he was I wouldn't say a hands-on manager so he he had to go hat why I suppose still had he's not dead yet has a great ability to kind of see all of the details involved in something and keep track of what needs to be focused on not necessarily the most technical people but you know he would send out daily and weekly roll up reports of all of the outstanding issues that had to be addressed and you know yet had graphs did he want us to drive down you know the point on the graph to to get through his few bugs as possible and he was always on top of those details and you know one of the things that the we did as a management organization is roll up a lot of information to Scott so you know I spent a lot of time talking to on me about you know what the teams were doing and then he would wall it up to Scott and Scott would you know put together into booklets of kind of status to briefing books I guess you could call him and so we spent quite a bit of time doing that but not no it wasn't overly burdensome you know we always had arguments about status reporting and how much time we should spend doing that and I think we've struck to my balance but on an kind of personal interaction level on me was great to get along with you know he was kind of the opposite of Scott Scott was like hard-charging and right there let's do this break the four laws of physics you know we'll make it happen but no news like okay let's go to try so he was great to work for yeah I did to me I I agree with with what Richard said and I I think that's it that's an important dynamic that he mentions that Henry was so different from Scott that you would get and sometimes like a good cop bad cop sort of approach to things my recollection of of on Rita is that probably nobody like lived on the software from the earliest stages as much as him and you know and even it's in my memory you know took going later on it's a heap it's always he was like an extra QA engineer he always be installing the system always be do you know doing the race installs or the different kinds of or the install the update installs you know and and he'd be do it so he knew what was going on with the software and and was you know and this this dynamic that I haven't always had is that is that a you know you say dogfooding or at least that's the determined technology we didn't say that so much but that's what he did he was he acted like a customer this is actually an interesting point on QA it's little tangent from the question about management style but we had very little q a specific engineers working on the original iphone and that meant to individual engineers had to really be on top of the quality of their software and you know i think that was because we had dedicated engineers and they were able to do that down the road some other things that relate to this that we can talk about later but i think that was it's it's kind of unusual in an organization to have so little QA support and to rely on the engineers from but you know I can say that for me again my responsibility being tight you know text entry and the keyboard so you know keyboarding and the widgets as well so nobody used it more than me I mean I was on it it was my responsibility and so it wasn't a matter well I'll just code this up and you know this API looks good and whatever and then the testers will test it knows my responsibillty personal right if somebody found a bad bug no I I felt terrible yeah how did I not catch that and it's true the whole organization there's never a sense of just write the code throw it over the wall and QA teams will figure it out never it was I mean pride a pride of workmanship yeah there is this funny story of a woman locking herself in her office were you there for that so yeah so we had almost daily meetings with kind of the key the key management folks and we had John Wright was in a meeting I was there and Scott was there Kim was there Kim is the woman question Kim breath and the I think neaten was that too public I don't remember exactly and John and Kim got in a shouting match I mean they were swearing at each other I mean with it's been very long hours everybody was tired and you know they were just insulting each other and Kim stormed out and out of the meeting and I said I don't even remember what the issue was it wasn't even that important they don't think and she walked towards her office and she slammed the door really hard so the whole building kind of shook and and then she tried to open the door it wouldn't open and you know trying to get out and she couldn't get out and then Scott came out of the meeting and he tried to open the door and he couldn't get out couldn't open the door and then he caught security and but before that I think the baseball bat baseball baseball bed yeah he got here there was a bunch of toys lying around picked the best of all and I think booked the lock oh he broke the whole mechanism why I mean yeah the next next day I came in and made this is just a hole in the door with you know hardware line security came by and they were like okay but yeah that was yeah I mean it was been written about a lot that incident but I think it was just kind of an indication indication of the pressure that was building towards release and also that was close to the close to release I hope it was close to some of the deadlines so it was always a deadline yeah I mean really there was always it was always intense but afterwards everybody had kind of a laugh about it yeah Kim worked with John right three years after oh yeah yeah Kim became it has had a tough job because it just wasn't in the engineering organizations she was no direct report into Scott she actually ran the QA teams okay and as well as EPM yeah the program office is responsible for scheduling some EPM kind of functionality at that point but mostly it was scheduling and QA and you know she was just trying to marshal everybody and get her be moving in the right direction but you were saying there were not many there's not much formal QA testing so so there was some be had okay there so and she was not hard to that no not much I mean if you I probably I'm gonna make a wild guess just to get you in the right ballpark four to one engineers to QA Wow or even less maybe maybe maybe maybe like their warrant yeah as soon as 2025 engineers and three or four or five QA people and that that changed after I did overtime I mean was it I mean were there any I mean she was she the only woman on the project one of the very few and so we had Vicki Vicki really yeah had been with you on Safari yes but I bought it over to the t-shirt and she was a QA engineer yes yes yeah who else I think America was on the project for a short time well she in charge of camera systems yeah yeah but she was his any pm4 can work directly for Kim for a little while yeah before she went back to doing camera stuff yeah thank you guys h-hi designers I guess yeah Carolyn Carolyn you know and cranville better yeah when it comes to diversity question not do vertical right don't they vary you know a couple people in color come all women and and then mostly white men yeah but I mean did did any of these social dynamics yeah were what was it affected by that or you know well not far as I'm concerned I mean it didn't make any difference you know whether you're a man or woman you're black or white oh I mean the work was what is important no I know who you were how you looked but you know it's kind of a self-selecting group that you know now we recognize more and more that its diversity is really important but we was never even a topic of conversation yeah that's the work was so intense again it goes from you know the perspective of now even though it's it's not so so long ago that it was so not on our radar now I will I will say that I don't think that anybody ever disrespected Kim oh she's just a woman that was not ever part of me to do something you know I would do it because I knew that you know that was her position in the organization she needed something done by a certain time and she was the owner of the schedule and so I just did it I mean it was not a matter of oh well you know she's just a woman I don't think that anybody thought that way I mean so we can wish you know going back you know revised you making a product for the world that it would have been you know it's conceptually better of course to have the development team look more like the world but it just wasn't but do you think it looked very different from Apple at the time in related areas yeah I'll take any food yeah it was I I think a cross-section of Apple but again I mean that doesn't that's a that's not us that's not the looks like they just I think you kind of this self-selecting I mean I I think that you know I I don't really know because I've never spoken to Scott directly about it but I think he was the person most instrumental in choosing choosing the team of obviously Richard and Andre and neaten had you know considerable input on that as well but I don't know that we really hired the great majority of the people working on the project just came from inside Apple selling in the early days yeah I mean I think not great majority of all of them Francisco thank you Scott a mouse key yeah yeah I mean that was an interesting phenomenon that I remember you know being at Apple at that time was that there was a sort of there was the kinds of people who would who would self select or get picked for these types of secret projects was sort of the cream of the crop of of the engineers that were kind of well-known to certain managers I guess and there was everybody else who would just be sort of you know stuck in their whatever organizations they were there were and I'm just wondering if there's there's sort of this I mean you mentioned self selection right there's this sort of this self selection process of I you know I'm willing to work 80 hours a week kind of a thing that tends to select for a certain type of person oh absolutely I mean it comes from the kind of person who wants to work at Apple in the first place ya know within Apple the kind of want the kind of person that wants to really become that superstar not anybody wants to do that but I don't that necessarily indicates you know white male or any kind of agenda but there is it smelly based you know I think you know if you have people work really hard they kind of rise to the top and work on those projects yeah it's it this whole diversity question is real interesting because we you know back in in you know a decade ago it wasn't wasn't on the floor event but his mind but now it is and I think that's a recognition of the maturing industry and the sense of their how important is to the world at large it's just there's were different times do you think that you know the I need the idea of merit base itself and being a superstar and being in a highly high pressure possibly even competitive environment tends to select for male engineers see here's here's what here's what I would say about that I I don't want to use I'm not going to use a word like merit I'm not gonna use word like superstar I'm not even going to say well let's leave those those words out I think that what happened was there was a lot of stress Scott primarily first and foremost was given a responsibility and a time frame and a brief and he turned to people that he had experience with and success with in the past but more complicated in that and I will use bullying mode and superstar because you need those kind of people to execute a project like that but it goes back you know beyond outside Apple like just you look at the pipeline of people are going through computer science you know we didn't have that much diversity back then and we still don't have enough diversity so it's really it goes back to the kind of the education system and who has the appropriate skills to get into a role in technology well and so already the pool of potential candidates is kind of winnowed towards biased you know towards white males so that's changing but those one of the times that we lived in that and I'm not afraid to say that we won diverse you know we went to vote no I know I'm not afraid I'm not afraid to say it either we weren't we weren't I and I to me I I think it has it's as much of a of a personal trust issue as opposed to which i think is very subjective as opposed to objectively somebody is has merit or has skills so you mean like culture fit or something like yeah and again it's just a it's a matter you trusted me I trusted you I mean that I don't know about what what necessarily that I don't want to meet my rathole on this you know all day I think we probably could but I wouldn't call it culture fit because that implies a bias that's not related to the work yeah totally all about the work when you think cult cult fit important would I think what you mean by culture is a certain kind of work ethic rather than you know you like this kind of movie or that kind of work it's a work culture yeah but also what I mean what percentage the hires do you think we're people that were well-known to somebody else cuz I'm high often it just reflects okay if people's network is people like them then when they look for people they know I mean they choose people they know who are like them right so I mean was there a high percentage of just there weren't many people being recruited from who were not in the immediate circle of some of the principal I mean you take against somebody like we came early why was she brought in onto the iPhone but we worked our with her on Safari and WebKit and we knew she could do the job and that's and so there there you go I mean I'd say she got you know that she's got the opportunity doesn't much the same way that you did much the same the way that I did and she got that opportunity and so you know right we were in this network network that's just not it was very small but I think that that network is true even in a community where you do have diversity it's just something you need in terms of you know advancement in a queer you have to build a network whether you're a woman a white man or anybody else and where there are many I know there were some but it sounds like there weren't that many foreign-born people of any gender their background I'm telling boy yeah but you you I mean on my ass on Ross that's true attack yourself yeah I'd say a lot have foreign-born people at least first-generation find more more immigrants than non-immigrant I mean that that's pretty typical in fact look at Steve Jobs himself it's that term from what um let's move on to talking about the the keynotes so how much work you guys do for the keynotes or where do you guys working on the keynotes and at what point did you start working on it timeline questions yeah yeah I mean I was involved in the keynote to the extent of getting the software to perform perfectly through the script and all of the priorities became not prioritize except things that directly impacted the keynote so to that extent I think you know I was involved in most everybody was involved in in terms of knowledge about what had to be done for the keynote terms of actual you know helping Steve was rehearse you know that was not part of engineering teams role you know I was there to make sure that nothing went wrong on the technology side but yeah I mean maybe you know more about the timeline its they talked to me to say exactly when and how much we yeah I I don't have specific memories about that keynote I I mean generally speaking they they started maybe a little bit more than a month outside of the counting backwards from the day month to five weeks I maybe as much as six sometimes but that's you know I have some some memories of some things getting locked down starting to get locked down at the end of November 2006 for them the January 2007 release but like Richard said this is all about saw it was all about the software when I went to the hall Moscone that morning I had no idea what the presentation was going to be no idea whatsoever it was just all a matter of getting the software in order and and knowing that the keyboard was gonna get shown that like New York Times was it and get shone and Safari and other things certain little pieces like that so pretty much fabric II know there was a script it was mailed out but it wasn't generally mailed out so all of the senior managers had the script and you know we had to run through the script on our own devices and make sure it work and attract the bugs that were associated with the script but you know Steve's a lot of rehearsals with Phil and it feels like the consummate these to call Steve the talent and you know we had to make everything perfect for the talent and so that there was that whole kind of showmanship side of it that we weren't involved with other than making sure the software was flawless what was what was the actual day like for you wasn't the one I mean it was fantastic their their energy in the room was awesome but the thing that sticks in my mind the most was after the after the kina was over I was in the small gaggle of people around Steve and he reached down he shook my hand and said good job I mean there was yeah one two words but you know I just like all of this work all of this effort came to a culmination in that moment and you know if Steve had been my boss and hero for so long to have him give me that affirmation it felt pretty good yeah I was standing next to me so yeah Steve didn't know who I was that's it I I met him later and demoed for him a few times later on but throwing that iPhone so it's but he knew he knew I I saw him see Richard and he yeah made sure that he he recognized them and then they thanked him it was pretty you know it you know to even just be that close to Steve on really the you know the day of his that's kind of the best one isn't it the best best product the best keynote I thought that he couldn't have done better it was just a it was a it was a great it was a great day yeah yeah it's a great day it's one I think Steve public best talent is his ability to make technology so accessible and to make you want to use the technology I mean he and I think that's because it came you know from the heart he wasn't faking any of it he really was passionate about it and yeah he had that incredible charisma it kind of radiated it was great yeah it is it is true - I mean you you think that somehow you get up on stage to do this big keynote and that it's that it's a it's obviously it's marketing a a huge marketing opportunity to get that attention to talk about a product and to get then people to echo what you say you know but for Steve it was really true me you go back and go back now look on you to go and look on the search and the web and articles or whatever Steve talks about products it's what he talks about so what does Apple about apples about making great products that's what he says just over and over and over and over and that that mantra coming down from him that's that's why we were where we were because we felt that way too if you didn't feel that I don't know how you have lasted through the intensity and through the work through the pressure whatever so just all it all communicated down and then it all came back up on that day and came off just wonderfully yeah the other thing about Steve was always the lack of cynicism I mean he really wanted to make something great now you look at a lot of other technology leaders and there's an ulterior motive you know the one of money they want to do this or that but Steve is just about making the great products with no alternative and it was that was the core of his being and and and the belief that if you do that part right the other parts of the business are possible making money as possible and you know and and you know getting good people to come and work for you as possible and and and then you need to having nice food in the cafe as possible because the company's making enough money so you can afford all of these things stemmed from all tied back to making the great product so Steve would actually say that you know in town hall meetings he'd say people would ask questions what about the stock buy and he would say make great products everything else will follow and he literally said them so build it and they will come yeah it really is it's it's his own version of just that and so again that's why did we wind up in those in those in those positions to be working you know the small group of people working on this product was we that's what we believed so again this alignment it's just such a big part of why that product turned out the way that it did so then after the keynote there was still a bunch of stuff that you needed to finish right so let's see there was so we need to do the YouTube app and then technical approval what else what else you guys need to do or talk about the other things you tuber the approval process our YouTube was relatively straightforward we had a really good relationship with Google at that point and John Harding I think was my main point of contact and he was they just bent over backwards to help and we worked to client again just like the map app and they provided the service and you know I'm in a lot of several meetings with them on different topics kind of this is very technical detail but we were talking about HTTP streaming and a new technology that Apple was developing that we wanted them to push but that's you know they were accommodating and I spend a lot of time up in their offices they had a I remember they had bought a new bit we were squeezed for space so we had this point we were bursting at the seams in infinite loop and they just bought a huge building and they it was four storeys I think and they occupied one story and there was three empty stories so I remember going over there and you've got all this space we have to squeeze there two or three people into an office but it was pretty straightforward to get youtube finished they like I said at that point they were very helpful and you know Steve and Larry was still in good terms and it's cause approval testing I'm not sure what but there's to say about that yeah I don't know I mean my recollection of that period between January and June from the announcement to the release of the product was polishing getting the product working right in all of you know we you know the the the demo for at least for my part the demo on stage in January everything that was shown was real I mean there's very very little faking sorry approvals yes ATT okay now it's coming back to me this is horrendous this is a nightmare that's puck it out so we had these horrible meetings eighteen team you know the the cellular industry up until that point was you know coming from a very different background and they had these books of specifications and you know stuff that you had to comply with and it was 99% nonsense but you know you had to do it and this lot I fell on meat and shoulders I think and but it was a nightmare they and they just you know there were things that they wanted us to do for like SMS they were ridiculous and they said well you've got to do MMS if you do as a medicine you know and we were like SMS and MMS a ridiculous these are obsolete technologies you know having a character limit on messages is ridiculous you know having an alternate format for mediums ridiculous but we had to trudge through it and you know and then there's everything from what do they call it 99 approvals and for emergency calls and it was horrible and you know it was kind of a sign of a legacy industry you know what they what slows them down is all this burden from specifications that really don't make any sense if you think about what you want to do to build a great product so but my my key goal with ATT was to ensure that we had a clear pipe that there would be no transcoding and that was been in the contract and they kept wanting to say well we need to do this we can't keep persistent connections open we have to transcode the content so that it'll format correctly on the screen now you don't have to do any of that you know just give us the bits we'll take care of it so yeah the approval process was painful and blind Cassady I think was on board that pusher and he he was the main liaison with ATT and his life was hell having to deal with with these people because it was you know just completely from mindset in terms of technology development and you know we we didn't have books of specifications for the iPhone you know you couldn't go to a book and say well does this feature match the specification like that no 80 and you know everything had to you know meet exactly the specification even if a specification didn't make sense so there were a lot of fights and like I said needin I think probably before the punt of that along with Brian Cassidy but early on hadn't I think Scott first off talked about that him that they negotiated something where AT&T only controlled the lower level and they would meet the specs for that but not above perhaps yeah I'm well maybe that came after this I don't know yeah but we had to go through hell with these specification approvals and it may have been that you know once we got deep into it Scott just said no this is enough and I wasn't directly involved in those negotiations they can take I'd sat in on those meetings and both of my clear pipe and these were big meetings regularly big big meetings on their side they were typically bring more people in we bought we tried to minimize the impact on the team so you know Kim spent a lot of time in those meetings buying Cassidy neaten and me but as far as engineering teams you know we just I was never in any one of those yeah it's just I was working on the technology and they would come to you so there was a few meetings where they I didn't actually go I think it was in Virginia maybe that could be one there were few meetings off-site but they came to visit us a few times and they actually came through into the secret area but I remember we what was the confident called bedroom in between yes we had a conference room caught between and it was where we had most of the internal iPhone meetings and they would come and sit in between which was through the second yeah yeah but anytime they came to visit we made sure that you know everything was you know roped off and oh [Laughter] so I forgot which one of the meetings it was at but we showed Ralph was that his name - CEO the phone and was one of the first times yet you got to see it and touch it and it was a very early version that wasn't complete don't ask me the time like if to launch but it was before launch and everything on the phone was localized and the way locally localization worked is you have a key that keys looked up in a table and the actual string that you represent is is chosen using that key and one of our engineers who will remain nameless okay had used a foul word as a key oh and it was something like it was an fu word if he was in the phrase and Ralph was playing with the phone and he sees the string which is fu and he just he just flipped his lid and you know that came back to us and caused a huge thing of stir within the team and Scott yelled it's got yellow the engineer have to be on my team and so I got yelled at and you know I yelled at the engineer and we resolved it and it would never have made it to the public but the fact that the CEO of ATT saw this on the prototype phone was was pretty bad afterwards we all had to laugh about it but when it actually happened it was it was a top of all the other stress this was a stress that we didn't knew yeah so the CEO was coming to a lot of the meetings themselves no no no this wasn't was the inception oh yeah this was this was and I wasn't there when he saw this it was it came to mind as part of these pinky approvals but but who were the main people on the 80s I don t remember the names I mean that my memory capacity is limited washing washing your cash yeah okay but you said you don't remember the timing but do you know if it was before the keynote well so this yeah who's before the keynote okay yeah and I mean the talks of AT&T went way back to the beginning of the they were ongoing of course what did you mentioned having the phone very early on I mean what was that like to sort of walk around with the phone in the wild before anybody else knew about it made me feel special that was pretty cool but I you know I was spending I wasn't spending a lot of time outside of work so certainly not in social activities so it wasn't like I was so worried about showing it to people but I might my kids were very very young so you know I I didn't worry about them spilling the beans when I showed them but getting kamila and Ian to interact with the device was very very telling because when they could pick it up and just play with it and kind of intuitively know how to use it I knew that we'd done something right and so in a sense they were like beta testers and you know I think we got a lot of things like like the swipe to open gesture you know there was to do yeah so I've done luck and you know they when then when they picked up the device and so I did play with it that face would light up so you know that's the extent to which you know I really used it outside of the office was just with my kids and [Music] so it was you know you when you have something that you think everybody else is gonna want and you have it first you know that feels good yes how old were your kids updates again rough so Camila was born 2003 E and then 2005-2006 so yeah yeah so perfect for them yeah yeah so III recall right it was in January still must have been just a few days after the keynote that's when I got the my phone that I could start carrying around with me and there was a death in my family so I had to go back to the East Coast so I remember being on there and I took the phone with me I got permission to do that it's a make some phone calls you know check the network in New York so I remember being in like New York State with the only iPhone probably that was there at the time right and so you know making some phone calls using it but really keeping in my pocket you know trying to be pretty discreet about it and so I wound up in this family gathering because there were some people who I hadn't seen in many many years again because of the thing that the reason that I was there and and so you know so you know so I think I thought you know get like I think in a phone call put it back in some older relative comes over say hey what's that he grabs it out of my Oh which was just absolutely not supposed to do I never told you this as him he starts a hey what is this thing here show me this thing and I was like please just get back to me so I probably you know it's like I said I wouldn't have told anybody but yeah he's I got this thing and started cleaning a plane today what is this thing how does this work and I was just the company probably just was white as a sheet because there was just no way that we were supposed to be giving demos to people or in any way telling them about it but you know here's this old you know relative you know who I had to be at least you know moderately polite to and not shattered him see please get that back in terms of the phones outside of campus I remember having several meetings talking about how they could be transported for people that weren't carrying them and we we looked at these different Pelican cases and we thought about you know who how many securities should we have with the Pelican case transport their phones around and you got to that level of insanity for the security yeah but we were because there were a few few few that the barstool episode that's remember the who was it left the phone in the bar that was probably after way later yeah but yeah the day the stories around security crazy transporting phones you guys remember the last the last thing or the last bug you fixed or the last thing you worked on right before the phone ship the Latin feature you got it under the wire I don't I mean so much it's you know good software is the accumulation of thousands of small details and every one of those thousands of small details has to be perfect for themself to be really good yeah see you know my recollection is that it was this it was this process of working you were spending more and more time on less and less and so that by time it got to an hour job you know our job was not only an engineer the software to engineer that process so by the time that we got to the point where we were getting really really close yeah we're really so very very intense and spending uh you know tremendous amount of time just like always but it wasn't a matter of getting something to work that didn't work before right and the threshold for changes goes up yes every change is a potential bug to be introduced today so you you really want to ratchet up the level of you know what you will accept and Kim was very good at this yeah we used to have be Arby's non-stop bug review Boyd's and would there be daily or sometimes twice daily moving up towards the release into the launch and every single bug that was going to be fixed or every modification of the software would be scrutinized and you know it's it's a process you know they've got in the craft of making if you had if you had a bug you needed to go to this bug review board and defend it and it's there would be the devil's advocate so we just said no we're not gonna do the base assumption is you particularly the closer you get to release the base assumption is no we're not going to change this software it convinced me that we need to write and Kim wood was the know person but there were actually you know features I can't think of a specific feature that which I could but there were I remember on occasions there were things that would really bug fixes that we wanted to push through especially if it came from Steve and we had to convince the program office Kim that I was worth doing this and I wish I could think of something that we did a last minute maybe it'll come to me but that dad dad that plus has continued throughout all of you and I'm sure continues today throughout all of the releases of the phone it's typical I think of most often I think it's typical yeah that's how you do it what was it like for you guys the day of the phone I don't actually remember cuz I think we were probably working on the next thing I remember getting the box and thinking hey this is really cool yeah I don't remember the actual day it shipped actually I did we had champagne yeah we did yeah we had champagne in the office now get back to work see you guys stayed at work you didn't go out to see the lines or anything I didn't but then you could use your phone open layout change everything did that feel different yes I remember having a dinner with my my brother and his wife and and she had a friend Bill Gross who's he gone to Idealab which is a venture capital company down in Pasadena and you know he's a total technologist and actually my brother had been divorced and his wife ended up marrying bill to another story but he was at this dinner and he hadn't seen a phone yet and it just felt so good to show this technologist the iPhone and say I worked on it he's yeah he's done quite a bit and he's funded quite a few successful companies so that's all good and I think I would this was maybe the day after the launch the day after the phone shipped so it was very close to my other people had them well we're trying to get them but you know we most of the engineers ended up having draw Falls or phones you know you have so many I probably had another 20 or 30 different oh variations the phone at least yeah and so the appeal of getting another phone from his store lining up yeah you know so I I left Apple this past May so May of 2017 and when I cleaned out my drawers I had that I had an iPhone museum in my in my drawer I mean really just that I could probably have maybe maybe everyone I don't know but close to it an Apple wanted them back presumably oh there were all apples property oh I didn't keep any of them okay so and there was one you know one thing to say about that which is those were special phones in that they were made for developers there was a hardware change that we called them development fused devices dead right so there was actually a change in the hardware so I could plug in a thirty billion the old phone 30 pin connector and telling it right to the phone - yeah right so they were not hardened in the same way that a production fuse devices which just prevents that level of so that level of access to the phone so what this meant is that there was you could you could kind of get the phone right where you you know you know get in a headlock you could head top you could kill processes yeah everyone there's just like it just do whatever you want totally like a jailbroken phones yeah yeah yeah but purposefully built to get everything out of the way of the developers so that it was easy for us to work alone you know so everybody made have told bunch of scripts and who shall commands and and little development environment things because of course we back in the beginning we had very very little support from our tools as well so we kind of needed to build up a bit of of an environmental right no we need to copy over new versions of the uikit framework yeah well the little libraries and you know change everything on the system there's no way we could have done there without their devices so you're just basically treating it as like another hammock exactly well computer yeah well actually that's a pretty good segue to my next question which is sort of the you know going back we touched on this last time but the whole decision to open up the phone to developers to do the SDK sort of you maybe go into like the the process of that decision how that was made who was who was involved in that decision who was advocating for that or against that I think we talked quite a bit about this nice time but yeah so I would say leading up to the launch there wasn't a lot of thought put into it but we hadn't even got our own apps you know they were just getting baked so but obviously post 1.0 the issue came up immediately you know what what would be the appropriate path for developers and all of our apps would develop internally using UI kit and you know the other frameworks that shipped with the device so but that the API is hadn't really been sanitized for external consumption so there was some discussion internally about you know what could we do and the you know we'd look dashboard had been it's a relatively successful although maybe not approach the widgets on the desktop and they were all HTML based and used web technologies and we'd mented WebKit with some technologists to support dashboard and we thought you know possibly this is an approach in fact as we talked about there was some of the the early apps were developed in that way and so we there was that kind of debate was ongoing among the developers in a web-based but his native based and you know we had come to the conclusion internally apply it to the developer story that we could be much more efficient as developers using a native API then rather than doing development with with web technologies and that had been made fairly early on well it's actually pretty late but before we clarified with you guys before the launch and but after the keynote no no well no that's what's got good sensitives after the keynote and a four before the release of the customer shape so yeah we're talking about the decision to open up the phone and actually during the break we were talking about you know sort of the the difference between the p1 and p2 and the way that p2 you guys saw the phone as a general-purpose computer and p1 saw it as an appliance and I mean in a way that kind of leads to this sort of also this decision to open up the phone right because if you see the phone as a computer that sort of logically lends itself to the idea of opening up the phone to developers I mean I was wondering you know more specifically you know who was on what side of that debate yeah so I mean I have to launch you know there was a clamor for some kind of story to some kind of approach to support developers third-party developers and you know I and the the iPhones fire team had a pretty deep background in WebKit and web technologists and so I was in a position to try and advocate for that although I I had already come around to the idea that we should native development was far more efficient than web technologies because of the tools because of the fragility of web technologies and the if you look at the the objective-c frameworks they kind of guided towards good development guided towards how to build an app and HTML was never designed to do that this is you know continuous debate that we've had you know over time and but honestly I went was the announcement it was a WWE season W&C yeah which was prior to launch actually I remember was it but we but we didn't announce the developers still we planned launch that didn't come until after lunch so so it was it July then might have been the first W we see after after launch yeah I'm not you know yeah that's a lie I think that might have imply yeah so within I think I said this last time within the engineer organization there wasn't a final approach to say this is what we're going to do for developers in fact it was only a few days before announcement that Steve made the act up WC w MC that we heard that there was a great developer story and its really Scott and Steve huddled and I came up with this it wasn't vetted by me suddenly and I don't think then need no on me so we had to really scramble to try and you know figure out what that meant and I think it was pretty clear to the engineering team that it wasn't gonna be a great solution and in fact it wasn't well-received for all of the reasons that I've already stated within the team within the team and accidentally within the the outside the developer community so I look at it really is kind of a stopgap announcement and I think Steve said to Scott look we've got to do something about third-party developers what are we going to do and it was one of these snap things that Steve just you know wanted something and had to have something and Scott came up with the story so so you think that it was actually Scott who came up with the web scary I was totally his decision wasn't my decision no one I was not involved in it you know I don't think Don Melton was involved in it no that was on the under I Dino Africa Hall I do recall that and maybe this is skipping ahead but where are we gonna get to it eventually but I do recall that was like a Friday afternoon where some Safari and WebKit people from the outside team came to our iPhone hallway and we're looking around at offices allowing me to sit here I'm gonna sit here because they were actually gonna come and do this web development story and that was like Friday and then Monday it was like redone it was it it's like a very quick turnaround that we're gonna do this story we're going to do this story we're gonna do this story we're not going to do this story but I'm a BAFTA announcement I did spend time working with the Xcode team and we because there's no tools for HTML layout for you know like an effects builder in Xcode and so we we tried mightily to make it work but it was pretty clear that it was not an optimal solution and I got on board after the announcement but you know I think it was like I said a stopgap measure and wasn't well thought through and you know it's a footnote in history now yeah right because then we just went and did the objective-c API and just decided to go in you know it does actually bring to light some of the enhancements we made to wake that WebKit and the getting back to open source and WebKit and we we added touch events and a whole Touch system to HTML and WebKit was open source but we wanted to see what it we could do to keep these components proprietary and so we went through all kind of mash Nations to you know we released the table all of the WebKit sauce but we kept some of the components in a separate area and it was the lawyers were getting involved at this point and we were starting to patent everything and so we have a patent I think on touch events for WebKit and so yeah we will try to add things to the web technologies to make web apps more capable on touch devices but you know I'm personally not a big advocate for that approach I think there are certain kinds of applications that are great for web technologies but other kinds of applications are great for native technologies what would the user of No obviously speed could occasion at times be an issue but otherwise what would the user have noticed differently if WebKit had remained the primary so you can write a web application that works well and performs as well as a native application it just takes a lot longer and make maintenance of that application is more fragile so if you want to evolve an application you know you can it's very brittle things will play because you make changes the other thing is is deep integration into the system so things like text selection you know if you try and do text selection on webpage it's kind of wonky right and you know native widgets versus web widgets tableviews and these that you can emulate a lot of the native components with web technologies with enough work and it is possible to make a user facing application that is good that's that's not really the the argument here it's the amount of development effort that it takes to do that you know I mean to me it begs the question like how does the system behave so is the native code it's kind of the canonical set of behaviors you know and is would it then if so assuming that then is it the web technologies responsibility to emulate that bug for bug feature for feature detail for detail because they and that's impossible you're always going to get this little there's going to be this little bit of slippage it's going to be this uncanny valley no matter and what Richard said is true you can make HTML web technology work well in an app setting but it's not gonna work exactly the same yeah if you look you know we mentioned Francisco to malsky he was on our team really and very smart junior developer after he left Apple he decided I'm gonna make UI kit for the web and with JavaScript he came pretty close he wrote this whole framework that was called Oracle if it was called cappucino maybe and it's company was 20 north yeah and he wrote applications on top of his you like it framework and they look pretty darn good they look pretty much like native applications so you can go that path and certainly if you have a deep knowledge like Francisco did does of web technologies you can do it but that's not the point the point is no maintenance and development and you know counting those apps forward you know if there be anything a user would notice I mean are there certain things that are just you know would be so difficult to do in one or the other that it would change the nature of the user experience really yeah well you know I think it's just that you get down to the behaviors of the subtleties of the system I would just be different better I know they're just gonna be different yeah and so what I think users would notice is that the fit and finish of this whole phone I use one app and it kind of does this subtle thing in this way and I use this other app which seems like an app for 99% of the things but it does this 1% thing that's different and I can't quite figure that out plus from the standpoint of being a platform provider now you need to develop two systems and you need to make them compatible so you go and you or you will come up with a great idea and you add a feature over here now you're required to go and add that feature over I think originally it would have been maintaining native apps only for Apple news right and web WebKit for everything external but still we would have to do to say if you're a plant but it isn't a specific example maybe a trivial one but specific changing the text size you can go into the system and say okay make the text everywhere larger that's going to apply to native apps but doesn't apply to web apps unless you add that capability to all those web apps but those web apps would have to use a framework that had that capability which they wouldn't so it's it's you're not doing twice as much work essentially - yeah you end up doing twice as much work with these parallel systems if you wanted to maintain that which is untenable and how about things like shared shared access to say the address book or thing sure all those things yes privileges yeah yeah you could make them the same but it would be more work that's right and you know then you've kind of faced with having to go through w3c if you want to add extensions you know you do it just for it's a proprietary extension for Apple or you try and standardize it we touch events you know we came up with something that we thought was really great for Apple but then we went to big process to try and get extended ice yeah so you also you think about the the so then WebKit it would we would need to add to implement the feature that you suggest access to the address book we would need to add that feature to WebKit but then is that feature going to be available to some web page that you just download from the internet presuming that a web app would still be going through some kind of app approval an app distribution system that was under the control of Apple since it's the continues to be was then and continues to be the whole notion of the phone even if you're going to be shipping web apps the kind of the idea was that you'd be going through this walled garden kind of thing but now WebKit would have this feature they can you know access the address book it's a whole privacy any webpage in the Internet can go and read your address book if you want that it kind of gets back to you know one of the fundamental approaches at Apple in terms of AP is you know we we tried very hard not to duplicate things there's one path to do this particular thing not two or three like Microsoft you know this API is that duplicated all over the place to do the same kind of thing so having two completely parallel systems just would be horrendous to maintain so one way to do one thing means you know native networks I mean eight native frameworks it sure I mean the situation sounds a lot like what you actually had on OS 10 which was carbon and cocoa two completely parallel ways to do an applicant both native fully fully native which we like that and they didn't work exactly the same way that's right but WebKit apps you could have also theoretically poured it to different heart poured it to Mac OS more easily or something like that right I mean miss Rando so then running running in a space like this on on the Mac yeah in fact iPhone apps actually do run on Mac OS and the simulator so should put it another way what what were what did you lose by giving up there are some pros to to WebKit so I think if your concern is writing these applications on the user planet from user point of view if you if you're well from user point of view I'm not sure there's any benefit really but from a developer's point of view if you want to run on multiple platforms if you want to run a Windows on phones and on iOS 10 on Linux you know then WebP approach is probably a good approach and there's no just because it's the web doesn't mean you can create a link from within a WebKit app to the open web or anything like that I mean does it give more capabilities for cross sure I mean you could you can browse web content in a web based app there's no reason why you can't do that or vice versa thanks for to non sound on a web app more easily I guess there's nothing inherently yeah okay I mean I think ultimately it was pretty clear the right decision was to use native frameworks and but as I say this that doesn't mean there's no place for the web content web apps meets you know to me the web is about is an open document format that's primarily what it's about it's not it's not a system to emulate the native toolkit on a particular platform but I think that's not playing to its strengths what you can do that but I don't think that's plagued that's what the web originally was in a document format system but I think it's changed today now it is about applications but you go to amazon.com you know it's a sure but that's a vets it's a it's a web native application yeah probably it's probably the maybe the best one it's the one that I thought of just a moment ago radius so we were thinking of the same same way Amazon it's an app no doubt about it but it's an app based on documents it's it's a whole different it's criminal paradigm but it's kind of interesting if you look around if you look at the the amazon has a native app for the native app basically just a webview yeah I mean the web's gone back certainly the early Java interest was pushing it more in an application direction whereas it's gone back and forth over the years my Java could have been like the lingua franca for high-level frameworks you know they could have been implemented in Java and they would run in all platforms but it never really took off yeah so then I know you you're not good with timing again but I love yeses again so so then you know you mentioned the turnaround was really quick right and I've read that the decision to go to do a native SDK was was announced by October of 2007 so between if you know so between WDC which was July and October that's four months I mean that sounds about right to me because then we did it the next year right I did it in 2008 right so there was this incredible rush to get the native API yeah the beta version of the SDK was available in March which is yeah pretty quick it was it was I mean like I said did we had built our own apps using native the native frameworks and the API is one quite ready for public consumption but they were pretty darn close and you know they were tried and tested by what the dozen or so apps that we shipped through the system so you know I think we all felt pretty confident that there would be okay we've got a long-standing collection of development methodologies for making api's for developers so a lot of what we did was right so you have you I you know UI tableview dot h and so we had that let's say for the sake of argument we had that in our private API for our one dot l release so kind of what we did and me oversimplifying but it gets the spirit of it is we copy that whole API to UI tableview underscore private on H which would never ship out to developers and then we took those things and copied them over to make public API sometimes changing interfaces calling through the old interfaces from the new one so that the you know you could get this functionality that we had on the existing system but with a cleaned-up interface but it was really an extension of cocoa cocoa it had many many years of maturity on we tapped into so many of those methodologies and conventions of not only developing the frameworks but for a packaging them and delivering them cocoa goes back to next step so I mean it was very mature into human development we had naming conventions a lot of things were decided that yeah this is the way this the structure of things how they should be put together pretty clearly the right thing to do I think like I said the web development story was just a hiccup along the path how important do you think it was for you know especially those first wave of developers that UI kit was basically based on cocoa that you know was it a great did you think that the success of how much of the success of the apps were do you think was due to the fact that it was based on cocoa well I I mean the the Mac os10 app developer community is not huge so I I don't think any of us thought okay we're gonna tap into millions of developers because we have all these millions of apps on OS 10 so in that sense I don't think of we thought that was important but the fact that we all knew because we'd been using cocoa for so long some of us for decades that that it was going to be a very robust solution and you know with Xcode being the mature product to we you know it was pretty clear that apps could be when what were bust applications could be written with those technologies and it's far as the app store and the success of the app store I think we were all a little kind of taken aback at how rapidly that took off we also the App Store was a good idea but the fact that it caused an explosion development in third-party developers none of us really anticipated the scale of that and I think it's awesome you know that we created a new platform that has flourished so much and allowed for third-party development in a way that kind of it stalled on the desktops and so I think from a technology perspective it was pretty clear we had something robust but in terms of anticipating the scope of what happened you know I I just caught didn't think that I didn't think nobody nobody nobody anticipated that the decision to have the App Store apps added that was more from early on yeah so the key idea was security of the phone and it's it's something that we wanted to really differentiate the device and Scott was one of the main proponents of this and yes very early on we wanted to create sandbox for the apps to operate in and make security you know the most important aspect of third-party development and not it's unlike OS 10 right there were lessons to look for most 10 where that wasn't the case and rogue applications you know windows you know crazy so important differentiating feature but not just because it's differentiating but because it's fundamentally good for the platform it's it but not good for the pipework good from people using exactly yeah right good people don't want to be managing security patches and hot fixes and updates or whatever you you just want if you want a product that is sensible and it's not working against you without your knowledge I think maybe we Scott's most important technical contribution pushing for security so hard yeah I do remember that in the first few years of the App Store there was a lot of among the developer community there were a lot of complaints about the app the app review review process and and and also just the difficulty of going through getting your provisioning profile and all that stuff could you speak to that yeah I think that's a consequence of not anticipating the scale of everything and learning as we go along and I never sat on the review but I think on read it for a while and he hated it it was it's you know so I think you know I actually I should probably might come comments there I really wasn't intimately involved with it I mean it's a bottomless pit really I mean it's it's it's not I I don't think it's a it's a it's a job that is easy to address you have simple to you know just jaw we're just gonna approve these apps well if you're gonna really do it me until it's a big important job and particularly you know as Richard saying at the beginning the scope of the success of it made just it's seemingly you know this this that singularity so when I will say there is constant the extended we evolved is we were trying to help automate the process so it was close pretty clearly a problem and so things like API scans we could look for external linkage points to apply with API is and flag those applications we as Energon came help build that set of tools and a Calbert I think became really involved in this in the review process and trying to build more and more tools to automate the approval process I do remember also that there was some controversy over not just sort of the technical stuff like the bugs and and other things or you know use a private API but also that Apple was now involved in censoring content or choosing which kinds of apps should be allowed and which kinds shouldn't be allowed you know just from perspective of functionality and sort of dictating what kinds of apps developers can or cannot speak to that I don't know was involved in like that there was one one story that really somewhat relates it wasn't absolute about ebooks and you know we had we launched ebooks and you know the great fanfare and there were some text books and one of the text books that was gonna launch was a biology textbook that put creationism side by side with evolution oh oh and I did I'm normally don't get involved in you know politics especially within a company but I guess this was just totally runs against everything I believe so I you know I told Scott look this is totally not acceptable we need to do something about this and the issue came all the way up to the board and it turns out Bob Mansfield is a very religious guy and he he really wanted to include this textbook so there was a huge debate about it and the outcome ultimately was we didn't include the side-by-side comparison that's the only thing in terms of censorship that I've ever really come close to dealing with at Apple but for the most part I don't think there is I mean other than you know explicitly objectionable material that's pornographic say I don't think I ever heard much discussion about censoring things but explicitly pornographic is a good portion of the interview but Apple has like a Disney you know right no but I mean that's a very significant decision but I think that there was an outcry I think because I I do remember that you know there was a decision like like sort of vague like things like Maxim or you know things that were going in that direction we're sort of allowed at one point and then Apple made a decision like nothing none of this stuff is getting through but then they made an exception for Playboy and there was an outcry that somehow the big players were allowed to get through and all the other well Schiller ended up doing a lot of the he was the driving guy behind most of those decisions so it wasn't really engineering driven or marketing and you know Phil is done a bang-up job of you know being the guardian of apples image so you know I think you know it's it's his call to make so um let's move on to the other engineering work that you needed to do for 2.0 at what point did you you do cut copy and paste was that for 2.0 or later no I I don't recall that it was okay no I think it was two full years before we did cut copy paste so after the API release okay then we was or was it no would have been read that was it actually called iOS three there was it I think that might've been the first one where we called it iOS all right because of the iPad but what a cool the operating system yeah what does call the operating system yeah yeah but yeah cut copy and paste was like a third Rev thing first release then API could kind of remarkable when you think about it yeah pick a fundamental feature but yet we got two three leases without it uh-huh and it didn't really slow down the acceptance of the phone no I think it was a good choice yeah we were we were pretty busy and we prioritized but so what will I do it then why do it then because it seemed like it was pretty deliberate that you didn't want to do cut copy and paste no no no it's a 99 - it's just time cuz it sounded to me like you had made a design choice to not do it no just I'm slow I was working on the tech system and there simply wasn't time to do it and get it right hmm and then the second year was all about taking the current you know the car tech system and putting an API right let me say a little bit more about that so I think you know Chloe cut copy paste is a very important feature for modern UI but the challenge we had is the screen was really really small text selection is tough on a small screen with your big fat finger so I think one of the it wasn't just we didn't have enough of Ken's time to do it it's we didn't have a really good design for how to make make that text selection so what we ultimately did with the magnifying glass was you know it took a lot of iteration to get to that point yeah and we just didn't have a design at work yeah so the first couple of releases yeah but we thought that we didn't want to do it but had you been when you say couldn't it was hard to come up with a good design was anybody early on or people even thinking about it I was thinking about it all the time yeah I mean and to be it be clear the the the what I call the loop the magnifying glass was available in the first iPhone to place the interrupt but then using that as a means to make selection which then like the lollipops and then the the menu the call-out menu that appeared above selections and then I mean cut copy paste itself I mean there was you know we needed to implement the paste board which was the you know the underlying API that would go and and store the you know that you could put these data types on to the paste board and then later that was a lie to cutting a large low he existed from from from OS 10 and but but it was actually the the Whydah tree and the the user interaction model trying to figure out how to do this with touch and then how to present the menu option since there's no menu bar and there's no hardware keyboard for command equivalence so that was the that was the design problem that I remember a lot of time being spent on that we spent a lot of time that release it was huge you know I know iteration sure getting there there's a lotta a lot of iteration it's a because you know you ask yourself the question it's like well so I make a selection where are the commands well once you make a selection the menu will show up where does it show up what if that's what if the certain points on the the the top of the screen well can't show up above so it's got to show up below its gonna point to it where does it point to it what if it's over on the edge of the display I mean all of these questions to treat you know try to make a system that works and seems like oh well yes of course it works that way there was a tremendous amount of work I mean there was easily you have six or eight of Isuzu Me's you Scott unrig Gregg Christian Ron boss where the the people primarily involved in that and lots and lots of back and forth I'd go over to see boss and Imran all the time separate from the meetings to tossing around ideas and making demos and and it's actually it's kind of funny as I recall it boss and I came up with the idea for the menu and the behavior on the same day in the walk I walked out independently we were just kind of kind of converging on it and if I got you know but weren't quite there yet and I went like made a demo and you know brought it over hey boss I've got something sure he's okay I've got something to show you - and we demo to each other saying and so yeah we came up with so there were no significant like dead ends or totally different schemes for doing it or anything I mean there were there were ideas that didn't quite work I mean you know one of the things that didn't that that I remember Scott I should showing him and and and having him not like was that the lollipop handles the they're very very small but the active area for them is quite large so you get this little pinpoint but there's this really quite large circle right around that pinpoint where you could reach in and and grab the thing and move it and so one of my earlier versions was to actually show the whole active area with something that wound up looking kind of like big commas like two big commas sort of showing you that you can grab this whole area it's got hated it he thought it they looked like kidney beans he's like what are these what is what are these things is like these are ugly these are terrible and then it was boss who actually came up and said no no no we're just gonna have these lollipops we'll use Ken's active areas but here's how it should look so again you know this this idea of you know give you what you mean rather than what you did and giving you a target that looks looks very very small but is actually quite quite large and comfortable to use once you came up with the design though I guess was it fairly straightforward to implement keep in mind that those text fields and like little web views did little web views yeah so just going in and know it was a year of my life and and and a bunch of bunch of gray hair and then how we actually I actually wound up meeting help from Brad more to implement selection by actually in web pages so I did you know again you know at this time all of the text system was essentially web content but the the iOS side of that either single line text widgets or multi-line text views was this very compartmentalized custom web content but then the open web also needed a selection model and so I just got to be so difficult that I couldn't do both of them by myself so had some you know another another bright guy come in and help with the open website while I did just the iOS website let's go on to talking about the iPad so a lot of work you guys had to do a lot of work to support the iPad especially you on the keyboard side sure yeah one thing that came along the way in this same general time frame was a I reacted I wrote a language a computer language to describe keyboards rather than having them be kind of everyone was a custom one off so I made a system where you could just describe declaratively what a keyboard should look like and what keys it should have and what the dimensions of the keys are and what keys are next to other keys and all of that and so that then when the iPad came along I came up with more descriptions for how the iPad keyboard should look and what did you behave like and what were the key differences between that and the iPhone um there were no pop-ups on the keys the keys just lit up changed color rather than showing the paddle naturally the different layouts you know what keys are we going to show should we there was a big decision about whether we should use sort of a more standard laptop keyboard design and show a lot of keys or have something that was more like an iPhone where the keys were bigger and just kind of the top top you know QWERTY top row across the top to get something that might be a little bit more comfortable to touch type on particularly in landscape and so there's just a ton of iteration it's the same same thing as always we just did a ton of iteration and and so what one of the things this keyboard language make possible is made it very very quickly free to make changes you just very very quickly change the programming code and recompile it you could look at the new look at the new keyboard whereas the other way was very laborious to you know go in and design and make changes and hook up the behaviors appropriately and I assume that helped with internationalization as well that's it was part of the idea as well yeah is to is to make a system that could start you know just sir like keyboards and Japanese key with handwriting keyboards Android keyboards and handwriting input methods I like defining the active space for that defining the act of space but then it also did have keys for you know accepting or just deleted I remember was it this release or later that there was a version of the iPad keyboard that sort of was split and so that you could easily type with your thumb yes there was one fellow who did that primarily yeah right I mean at that point we were going out the keyboard team so the steeps whales manage that team and there was maybe six people working on keyboards at that point really by the iPad I stopped working on keyboards as my chief responsibility this this team took over but I came in with some of the design ideas for the iPad but I was no longer maintaining the code every day okay so where are you still working in Richards team where had you been had you split off I think by that point I started reporting to Andrey instead yeah yeah come over might say I think you've talked last swipe was never never wanted to support the swipe particular well so we had lots I don't if you have involved in these discussions but we had lots of meetings with swipe yeah I had I was in one in the in the conference the conference center there but yeah ultimately we decided not to do anything with them well why not they really ultimately we believe didn't have anything much beyond what we already supported and no the idea of actually glowing a graph to represent a word with technology that you know wasn't particularly innovative and in fact we kind of had that technology already with what Wayne had done so it just didn't make sense and we also at that point we're entertaining the ideas of opening up the system to third-party keyboards okay already dire okay yeah so what she did later many years later yes yeah so it was a debate internally you know Scott was ambivalent about it no I was busy building the qiblah team and you know thought that we should because ultimately there's many ideas that we're not gonna be able to implement ourselves so so that those discussions would happen part of that part of the discussion that I had I remember one time with Scott one-on-one was security security was an issue that if you have a third party keyboard running in process keylogging keylogging yeah and so then when third-party keyboards actually came out on the system many years later keyboards had been separated out into their own process which is true of plugins in general we know the security issue we focus there was a whole plugin architecture yeah by that point no only the station architecture it took view services this whole technology for giving an external process a rectangle in the space of another process and not letting that die potentially you know unvetted or you know not native not apple developed process not giving it any access to that content but early on you couldn't the keyboard ran in process it didn't it didn't even have its own thread it ran on the main oh wow I mean to some extent that speaks to sort of apples sort of long-term philosophy of incorporating features or opening things up is is that you know developers made clamor for some feature or some something but that Apple wants to make sure that there's an infrastructure in place before they they let developers do that and is that is that something that it's pretty clear in terms of when you're on the inside that oh yeah a pillow oh yeah yeah we tried never to just do things without thinking through what the implications might be one thing about delivering a framework in SDK Oh an API is once you put it out there it's very hard to take back so you know more and more apps to link against that API if you break it or change it all of those apps break so oh if you release something that's insecure all of those apps have that insecurity so I think the conservative approach is in in the genes of Apple in terms of releasing frameworks and API it used to be actually I'll take that back now the last couple years is like proliferation of frameworks it's like everything's a kid now every every WWC there's like three or four kits that are released you're not there anymore so you can talk all you want call me and we can leave the camera rolling I'm going to turn the camera off but you want no no it's not necessary but actually this idea what is a kit we actually debated you know we agreed there's a lot of considerations should is something justified being and its own kit or should it be part of UI kit well foundation or some other framework and our purchase to be this goes even back to cocoa to be very very conservative about introducing the whole new framework and that that's I think philosophy it has changed in the last few years at Apple yeah I mean how are we going going back even even before the iPhone when we were doing Safari WebKit we had the notion of web foundation where we're going to be doing URL loading and a separate framework and that actually wound up getting rolled into foundation proper there's a whole big long set of meetings about going and adding this whole new capability to foundation whole new set of api's well I had people who were xenos like get me mean looks in the hall for to you how dare you to go and add so many lines of code to foundation I mean it's just you know and part of it is in jest but part of it was real as this there's real like technical conservatism you added all of this to all of these lines of code to foundation and now we need to maintain it and I was this is on OS 10 OS 10 those are like the nsurl recognized well not Anasuya and it's irrelevant and I'm like nsurl was there connected by connection but in a serial connection okay as you are a request and response exactly and adding those things to Foundation was a big decision and ultimately we decided that it was the right thing but you know I'm I'm gonna kind of half in jest but just to be clear is that there was a strong technical argument against it because foundation is something everybody gets and when you kind of get that included so now you've gone and given people this larger API surface area that they need to work with once they go and include Foundation dot age but this is gets to the culture question you know this is a cultural thing to be resistant to introducing new API use and I think it's it's kind of unique in that Apple culture we carried that forward into iOS - yeah it's yeah it's just you better be sure that's that's all but it is it's just it it's not it's not a conservatism on from the perspective of what we want to make available to people where we want we want the platform to do it's just that we know that there's a responsibility to then support that thing you know way way out into the future and that sometimes you can't really see the full implications of what this API might mean and so err on the side of giving away less it's much harder to replicate an API than to introduce an API or you know to give developers a little bit of a taste of an API and have them go out and use and say darn it why doesn't it do this and this and this and then you can say okay well yeah maybe two out of those three things we might want to support and that third one is maybe just all too specialized they're a little too you know that will be left as an exercise for maybe an independent developer to go and add that as a you know private thing for themselves yeah I remember that too I my recollection was that a lot of that culture had been set by people like patron yes or later patron I think by he was he was the king of the API review list until he started taking more management jobs Ben yeah I mean I had a discussion with him once about the the the interface for nsdictionary I had lunch with him and he's talking about it it's just like getting removed that's it that's the API for a dictionary you put something in you know I or I say I this three yeah you put something in you check something's in you or take something out I mean that's it that's that's all that it is I mean count how many things you know you don't even actually need that that was made as a kind of an additional API you know but it's just like you know the active core access is just the only things that are in the core API it's kind of sense in a sense it's it's just like Apple is provides simplicity of the user level that the development level that same concept applies just what's enough but no Morris what's enough no need to try to only have one way to do things yes one way to do things but you get on the phone now he's like three ways to do things but along those lines I mean that there was a real decision in the iPhone not to do more conventional kind of files/folders being able to share documents between applications easily it's too hard okay so hard for users but I'm thinking like the kind of the other extreme was the Newton was had what the supe concept you're something where everything could be used in multiple athlete almost you had no application for plugins that could modify parts of it everything's mixed together whereas the iPhone is almost the opposite kind of very much compartmentalized so what's the thinking behind you as you said so users is that well to me you know there's there's a bunch of things to unpack there so I mean you can start by saying you know the filesystem is a detail that's unnecessary a lot of the time and that people keep most people who are normal in that they're not computer scientists or app developers right you know 99.9 how many nines percent of the people I just want to be able to use an app and not have to worry about this whole abstraction of a hierarchical file system right it's just not necessary it's it's a thing that we thought we needed from older paradigms of computing and you know that I you know with the iPhone we got a clean slate and we said you know we're just we're gonna do without it we're gonna see if we can make a system that is more people centric and just get rid of this whole big complicated thing that maybe is more trouble than it's worth for people and you know and and the thing is you know I don't want to give the wrong impression it's not it's not the way that we do we don't think that people are dumb people aren't dumb you know they're buying iPhones all right we think they're actually pretty smart right you know it's just that most people aren't interested in the compute in in the device as a computer they're interested in the device as a message sending system or a photo viewing system or I'm navigating system and what do you need file system in order to help me show my photos of my vacation it's just unnecessary but because it I've never quite it seems like there's two approaches that you know both have a lot of resins for those of the iPhone both saying it's a general-purpose computer not a you know as opposed to say the iPod phone that this is a real general-purpose computer but also one that is very kind of honed for particular uses it's not a general-purpose computer in the sense we've come to experience that for a PC personal computer for the better right but I mean it's how do you see it then as a kind of new sort of general-purpose computer or a user centric general I mean it seems like it's almost you were pushing toward a new kind of animal but I think there was tension here right I think the primary uses of the phone are for relatively small number of applications that don't require documents but then once you kind of move over into content creation necessarily you need to start thinking about documents a little bit but what we did on the phone is air towards the other side where it's not about content creation it's not about documents it's about simplicity of use that doesn't mean you don't still fundamentally have a general purpose computer underneath that that could at some point in time provide a notion of documents in a file system as we're seeing now evolved with with the iPad but primarily on a small screen like that like we have with the iPhone it's not about Photoshop it's not about content creation it's not about writing essays it's really about consuming content this is the way we used to talk about it and you know I can he's completely right about that but I think it's it's not clear-cut I think at some point we do have to migrate towards the notion of having files or documents because when you're creating or editing a photograph you've won perhaps export that somewhere so there's tension it's not clear-cut but I think we add in the right direction with the iPhone and for the first many releases it's just simple to use it's just dirt simple you don't have to worry about complex concepts like a file system and you know that's for 99% of the people less Ken says that's the right thing to do but now we're starting to you know increase the the vernacular of touch interaction and the complexity of applications is starting to increase so I think we're gonna have to pull those notions back very carefully but yeah I mean yeah I mean this is I mean you mentioned the iPad you know specifically and you know the iPad is one of those things where it does make more sense as a content creation device and yet in the you know first couple versions the iPad that wasn't so straightforward right and so of course we're now seeing the concept of files come back but it's many many many years later what why did that take so long do you think well like I said I think on a small screen content creation is and what you're primarily doing so the iPads not on the specialist yeah it's pretty small you know anyway you're bigger than the first 20 years of peace yeah well we didn't have an external keyboard intact back for a long time Thanks so you know you're not gonna write a dissertation on it you know clamped keyboard that's virtual you hear stories about you people rush to novels on their iPhone yeah oh yeah that's that's the exception not the rule the exception of the rule so the iPad have gone bigger and I think I've gotten bigger you can actually now think about you know multiple apps and whatnot but it's it's you know an evolutionary approach to get there and I think we definitely like I said ad on the right side with the smaller screen devices trying to really simplify the user experience and you know like we said cut copy and paste didn't come out with three releases and it didn't hinder the explosive growth of the iPhone so but did you see the presumably the early iPhones you saw the average user would have a computer I mean this was gonna be an accessory of some sort it was not going to be there only computer in the world but how many people were as though as its developed that's becoming more and more of the case the I mean iOS may be the only operating system people use for their whole computing expert sure yeah but how many people you think buy an iPhone with the attentive quit writing a book on it or what but that's what I'm saying were you consciously thinking at the beginning this may be a general-purpose computer but it's still gonna be an accessory to probably the computer people would do that creation on them so maybe this is a question of definitions what a general-purpose computer is when I think of a general-purpose computer I think of a device that's capable of running a multitude of applications not necessarily something that looks like a PC so the operating system on the iPhone is a general purpose operating system that allows multiple apps that doesn't mean that the interface has to replicate what you see on a desktop PC so I think it's it's maybe a matter of semantics when you say general-purpose computer you think it's got to replicate know know what a PC does but I mean technically a your dumbest feature phone as a general purpose computer it's just well yeah but this gets back to the discussion of what an iPod was versus Warren in the we imagine 30 so a general you know feature phone doesn't run a general purpose operating system that's capable of running any apps typically that's firmware in that is dedicated to the specific functionality of that flip phone with iPhone that's not the case as we all know you can pretty much write anything so nice on the UNIX here UNIX is all graphics package on top and whole bunch of frameworks so they so there's two levels of wonder general-purpose computer it's at the interface and then the underlying operating system and just because we think well I think that the phone is a general-purpose computer doesn't imply necessarily have the same UI ensure the same future but I mean now that the evolution does seem to be that in some ways you know iOS and Android and parallel are kind of taking over the functions that used to be piece personal computers I mean did you guys first see that or was that thing uh Sara Lee and I wouldn't I think is not the right word but I think explicitly thinking about what the functionality is of the two devices what is the gap between a PC and an iPhone or an iPad and you know where do they meet clearly it's a spectrum from you know device that you want to be super simple to a device that's you know kind of complicated to maintain and use but it has all this super rich content creation application technology so it's you know I don't there's a clear line and a clear set of answers you know Microsoft is going one approach you know they're trying to combine a PC and a tablet into one thing and with Apple we've always add towards you know dumbing things down for the end user for the majority of the cases not dumbing down but simplifying is a better word there's a much better yeah and but you know now we I mean you know personally I'm a little concerned about the direction things are going now with the bigger iPod more and more towards a PC you know I think great Christy you know scarred me and other you know senior people on the iPhone team we didn't want to replicate that ever you know desktop PC so this tension I think you can do the vast majority of computing tasks is tasks without a file system and without everything you expect on a desktop PC but you know you sometimes you want to pull out Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator sometimes you pull out Xcode obviously Xcode isn't going to run on a iPhone so this tension and there's no clear answer but but the philosophy we had was towards simplicity and single application at a time single window at a time and yeah and I think it's it's actually obviously proven to be successful it's what you know 600 million plus iPhones out there yeah so great great Christy as was the the manager day-to-day manager of the human interface team so the team of designers working on software he would sometimes use the word computer II to describe to consider it something that isn't good it's it seems like too much like a geek would love it rather than a person right you know yeah and we tried to design these systems you know both the Mac but as you know especially the the iPhone and even the iPad for people who don't care about the thing as a computer they in fact I think yes 99m Sens people and you're asking me I throw in a computer and say no no they wouldn't that wouldn't make any sense it just kind of does photos and plays music social yeah messy good but clearly over time as iOS has progressed more and more computer II things have gone in right like you cut down cut copy and paste that's one thing multi to you know multiple applications that you know came what I was for was it and then you know more and then extension architectures and you know now there's the iCloud Drive like the more and more there's a progression towards more and more PC computer II things well you know say if you're asking me if these these things are good I mean you you know you're saying that those things are there and it's it's undeniable that those things are there right IIIi don't think there's a clear answer and I think the you know some people say oh it's ten and Iowa should merge and it should be one operating system and things should scale from a phone to you know high in PC but I'm not sure that's true you know I think again for the underlying operating system yes as much as possible should be shared across the platforms but in terms of the user experience I think they're fundamentally different I think it touch first interface is different than a keyboard mouse first interface and what that implies in terms of how you interact is is huge in a mic so great for multiple windows and selecting large blocks of text and keyboards a great for a task fast text entry touch especially on a small screen radically different so you know I I'm not sure I like the trend either of moving towards putting more PC features into iOS but back then you were certainly not predicting it or considering it desirable to go that way that wasn't and I think most of our minds no not at all we didn't so if you did think about the future you were thinking that it would remain a parallel track of something and easier to use communication device social device that wouldn't necessarily merge with normal personal computer functions as you think about well I think it's kind of limiting to say a communication device I mean the way I think about the phone is that it's an extension of intellect and it's capable of doing radical things you know not just what we've what we did at launch but what we can do today and what we can do beyond and certainly it's not about emulating a PC but having a device that's connected all the time to all of the world's information is game-changing and that's kind of what we'd focus on the advice that knows where it is in space know and a model where we know about what's in space and a way of interacting in that space that's what the phone is about it's not about you know managing file systems and that it's really about kind of augmenting our intelligence and how can you leave creation out of that you're saying that a downplays the creation well you don't have to have one device that does it all right you can I think that you could certainly I still have a desktop that I use all the time you can still have a desktop as well as something like an iPhone but I have my iPhone with me all the time I don't have my desktop with me all the time I'm not I'm not writing novels or code all the time but in terms of what something can do to help me every second of the day that's what the phone is you know and I do think that probably a lot of people for a lot of people the majority of their digital creations social networks and they're creating it on their phones and it's you know with meat so they are creating all the - all day every day but a tweet a selfies not really well you know but but the thing is you know the the the the services and the human activities and the capability of the devices have merged you know it's like people people are you know our culture is evolving I mean there's absolutely no doubt about about it has evolved to meet what the phone delivers to them you know I just today it was going for a casual you know walk in it was beautiful morning and I just happened to notice this guy who had a chainsaw down in the sidewalk next to him and heard a conversation in the background and there he is looking at his phone I guess he's waiting I didn't have to have somebody come and describe to him what branch they want cut off the tree and while that's going on he's just going to be standing there by himself looking at his phone 10 years ago 15 years ago certainly that wouldn't have happened he probably would have just been standing there whether the hands in his pockets maybe you'd admiring the weather now you can we can debate whether this is good or better otherwise right but the fact remains that right the device has become this element in our culture and that yeah a lot of people are spending a lot of their time not only consuming but creating in that space and it isn't a traditional PC task you know but kind of grading it on that scale I mean the natural extension of the iPhone is you know chip in the head with you know some kind of projection display and the connection to the world and you know maybe when we have holographic displays and you can manipulate thing in space that's going to be a new creation system but I think that's we're a long way off from that but the idea of something that's always connected is that's fundamental to the iPhone it's different than a PC and you know if Kent says everybody now it's connected all time even guy chuckling down branches on a tree you know it's you've got it in your hip pocket and it's probably stays there all the time so do you and so do I so it's that that's that's the fundamental thing that's that's changed the world with the iPhone is something connected to you all the times it's connected to the Internet and the Internet means the rest of humanity and the rest of humanity's information well let's let's talk about you know the whole let's start with maybe the whole decision to to get off of Google okay and then and then that whole I'll you know go through that and I'll and then the rollout until I guess you know with until your departure I guess would be a good place so 2009 a relationship Oh apples relationship with Google started to sour and you know Steve was getting more and more concerns that Google was going to be you know a direct competitor and was leveraging a lot of the work we've done in their own designs and it became clear to me and Scott that you know knowledge about the world was fundamental to a mobile device and knowledge about the world meant a mapping system understanding places in the world and understanding your place in the world and what's around you and your Maps was fundamental to that and so realizing that we had a very thin layer on top of Google services and that we were very much dependent on Google at the same time that they were developing Android became a concern and so in 2009 we started to think about what we could do to replace maps and there was a lot of concern about the magnitude of this task which is you know how do you map the planet and how do you understand everything in the world that's out there and Google has spent a decade working on it so but Steve said you know let's go ahead and put the kind of a plan so in 2009 I visited a company called place base in LA and kind of like we did with WebKit where we started with a small kernel I thought we could use the kernel of place base was developing as a basis for a mapping system and we acquired place base and Jen Waldman came on as part of that acquisition then in 2010 Steve kind of created you know a wall with Google he called Google Inc an evil empire and I remember the town famous town hall meeting he said you know Google is evil and and then he gave us to go ahead taking a full steam ahead with this plan to build a mapping service in three years or less and you know this I I look at you know what I've done in my career you know there's kind of four big things it was next step and in this fine WebKit and the iPhone and then this mapping platform it's as big as building the the software for the first iPhone huge and but a different set of challenges and that we wanted to not just meet what Google was doing we wanted to surpass it kind of look ahead of what what we could deliver you know in a couple of years and there are a few things that were important one is that we wanted a global scope so everywhere we shipped an iPhone we wanted to have this service available we wanted to have much more sophisticated rendering of the map tenth so duel up until this point had been developing raster tiles that were pre-rendered and we wanted to create an environment that was based on GL that would let us you know have dynamic zooming so you could have smooth zooming we wanted to be able to render 3d objects in the space and and then it had to be you know kind of novel in terms of its feature set so we could be comparable to Google so it wasn't clear how we could do this in a small number of years but what we ended up building was something that stitched together datasets from 21 different companies we relied on an axiom 4py database a point of interest database and we ended by ended up buying c3 which is a company based off some work that Saab had done to do fly over the fly of a future third the fly of a feature we had to build a basically a fleet of contractors to fly planes and helicopters around the planet goes a huge endeavor and its lot we can drill down in many different areas in this but for me the the upsetting thing about all this is how it was received and you know there were just a few flaws that were very visible but ultimately the technology was incredibly good and the day was was you know less than perfect kind of quickly getting to the QI thing is the the QA team the ran QA for the the iPhone was very similar to the Korea team for OS 10 and that team is it's the way you you qualify an operating system is very different than the way you qualify huge datasets so we had and also the the QA team was outside of the engineering organization so it didn't report into engineering at all the so a dataset that spans you know 81 countries you know it requires that you look at some of this data in there's 81 countries we had 8 people reporting it to Kim around the world that qualified the data and said that it was good so this kind of gets into this tension of you know now I'm talking about things a little personal and close to the core because it you know I was fired by Eddy Cue for failing to you know deliver great mapping platform but the the fundamental flaws that we had we had flyover issues where there was kind of at the edges of flyover there was kind of a poor blending effect so we had things like the Brooklyn Bridge melting and you know that's something we fixed we you know very quick with a technical solution didn't require learn large data kind of field analysis and then routing routing was actually really good but based on poor data so we didn't have anybody in the Australian outback kind of looking to make sure our routes to the Australian outback were correct and py data was just out of date and we used an aggregator like I said axiom to do that and we had basically no QA when we shipped and the QA that we had Josh Williams yeah gave us the green light they said yeah it's good and my team we tested around California and we tested you know when we were on vacation but we couldn't test beyond that so huge huge press backlash after we launched and you know to this day I'm still so about it because it's it's I think it was an Herculean achievement to build this and you know basically two and a half years and you know it's gone on to be a great success and you know that all the foundational technology were built is really good and as I said I think understanding the world around us is fundamentally important for a mobile device and when we think now about things like driverless cars all of that infrastructure and technology is fundamental to supporting you know driverless cars which also needs they're basically a mobile device right that needs to know about the world around them so that's my 10 minutes elapsed mic I did a little bit of work with with with maps but you know I was largely you know outside the effort the thing that of course I was there and of course I'm still meeting with seeing Richard regularly the thing that that surprised me at the time was comparing it to the experience of Safari but Safari in some ways has when we disap are in WebKit has the same problem is it you've got the web this huge data set that you're trying to QA right and you're gonna you have this app which is gonna give you a view on this data set which is totally out of our control right the thing is when Safari was released as a beta mm-hmm we didn't say none of your other web browsers will work anymore those will you try to you know double-click you know internet explorer or you know I cab or a Netscape or whatever it is that you still have you know the operating system would go work and wouldn't work and so it was kind of a soft launch and and Safari what it was released initially was beta the beta was on it and I was a chef I focused and not value it but so how was it decided to do the maps different I was absolutely not involved in decisions so it was a difficult decision and I was involved Phil was involved and Kim was involved too Josh and we had a number of different proposals and the proposal I was advocating was we keep Google and we have Apple Maps on the store like several of the other apps the weird shipped and you could download that and then as it matured we could replace them another was to actually mark it as beta but that was a little weird to have both Google Maps of a the land and Apple Maps is a beta two apps doing the same thing so ultimately you know I gave a great demo at top 100 you know everybody's there and everybody loved it and there was a lot of excitement around that and you know Phil was very excited about it and Scott was super excited because he was using it all around Cupertino and it worked perfectly and but ultimately you know the QA team which you know has folks internationally said it's good but good to go and so based on that we decided to launch and I think you're exactly right if we had a different kind of launch path the the outcome would have been very different but I think for Apple it's hugely important to have this platform to have ownership of it and needed to get out there just the way got out there was yeah horrible and it led to you know stop being fired me being fired and you know kind of the collapse of you know this culture that we we built so it was an igneous end to you know a long long too long careers how did you how worried you tap to leave that project Steve said do it and I run the Maps client and I was very interested in doing it and I'd also been running Siri so so there was this you know Syria has a bunch of back-end services and I had kind of saved that from disaster and Scott said ok you know why don't you take a look at this too and I wanted to do it so there's a whole set of stories around services in that accuser organization versus what we were building in the under Scott's or under me and you know it's gonna take a long time to talk about that but the and it's a lot of internal politics but a lot of good results coming out of that so no I didn't realize yeah a little bit more about shows so silly was you know we acquired a small team you know Adam running the team and the basic what there was a demo and but Tom Gruber was already come goober yeah he was already within Apple no no no he came over with serious dog that's right that's right okay let's try a homegroup yeah the three founders is no and I know the three of them yeah so Adam who put it into me and the you know what we acquired was it was a demo would work great for a couple of people that wouldn't scale to our user base so we had this challenge of taking you know was there was a lot of smoke and mirrors behind the original Siri implementation you know this notion of AI you know it wasn't AI it was more like you know remember Eliza it's true I'd I've heard Tom's story but I some reason I associate him with Apple now I guess just because he stayed in the other yeah yeah the other films today guys left it viv and Samsung was quite big right yeah yeah tom was of that acquisition he was probably the best guy that we got honestly it was it was pretty trouble from the beginning but we you know the the you know the concept is brilliant and we all obviously think that assistance and voice input and voice interaction is fundamentally important to these devices and you know Scott made the acquisition with silly with very little bedding and based on the demos and but we had to take that and make it scale and that's an engineering problem it wasn't really you know beyond that is how do we get the service to be you know how do we scale them how do you make this software not crash you know it was it was a hot mess and so I helped you know get that in order and you know as far as the the fundamental features you know Tom and Adam you know totally it's that thing and you know I tried to build out the team too and you know getting back to sequency this was an issue with the Civic team is that we clearly needed more AI expertise because what they had was simple keyword matching limited domains no NLP really and so we needed to augment that team with some real expertise and a lot of the folks that we were interviewing wouldn't come to Apple because they wanted to be part of the research community they wanted to publish papers yeah and we didn't you know that wasn't part of you know our policies so it was a challenge to try and get people and also a lot of people want to be based out of Boston and we didn't have a development office in Boston so so it was a real challenge but but eventually you know say we got to the point where it was had faster response times it didn't crash we actually got answers and we started to think about within the limitations of what the code system service system was how could we expand the domains and maybe even think about doing things across domains you want some what I mean by domains right so domains of expertise for domains of knowledge yeah like it knows about movies sports but you ask your movie about a sports figure in a movie doesn't know anything at all about how to do this you know so yeah so you know an example I actually even ran into an example just the other day there's a there's a movie called score which is about movie scores so I actually asked Siri on my Apple TV score and it said what games what sports what does not word that word got siloed into the sports domain it didn't know that there was a movie it did they didn't even think I didn't even think about that okay super serious it's there's no NLP there's no contextualization of words it's just keyword matching and keyword matching takes you down one path one domain or down another domain and so you we actually pull Kenan to for project didn't really go very far but in terms of how could we make Siri not necessarily understand cost domain information but more domains and maybe I opened up domains to the third party developers which I guess now Apple is done but we were working on that you know when I was still at Apple yeah I mean that's that's a whole other story and that of that project for me here's a year of my life but lambda a meeting sort of the similar fate to Richard's projects so there was always the plan to open it up to third parties but it just took a whole ways yeah well I was I worked on off 2012 from the start of 2012 January 2012 so that was pretty early on after it Siri was available they were thinking about it again this kind of Moore's cross domains but then also opening up domains to third parties you know how can you how can you take this utterance and fan it out ask the total knowledge base that Siri had get some answers back and figure out what was the best solution not just you know take this word and send it down one path and then that's good but it's part of this effort in one of the things that we did is look at the data center infrastructure the the iTunes team had used for the stories and you know it was eye-opening the kind of the ad hoc nature what they had built to scale up the iTunes App Store and they had a data center in Newark which in and of itself is kind of finding because it's built below sea level and in an earthquake zone and it's cheap rent though but the it was you know hot mess yeah Bay Area teachers no no no calendar yeah so we we we built up inside the Newark Data Center at the time alternate racks there you know we actually had managed infrastructure and like I said it worked out pretty well ultimately based on this you know we thought that we could scale up the infrastructure necessary to build Maps so I just sort of the last two minutes let's finish with you Richard you know just sort of looking back on on things and I mean I guess there's you know obviously difficult circumstances with your departure you know how would you just summarize your your time at Apple and and also you know briefly talk about the work that you've done since sure so Apple next pretty much with my life you know I you know I died I didn't have a lot of work-life balance you know work was my life and I'm really proud of the things I accomplished and I got to work with some brilliant people and I think in waves changed the world that you know undeniable so I I love the culture that Apple had on the Steve I love Steve as a leader and there's a technologist and I feel fortunate that I had the opportunity to work for him it was it was a great time and I was I had some a happiest moment in my life working for Apple also some of the most horrific the addenda so yeah I have so much respect for so many people at Apple and what what what Apple did I have concerns about Apple moving forward I think with the departure of a lot of all of the old guide and a lot of new people coming in there has been some cultural shift and you can see it in and and how the iPhone is evolving so I can't I I you know it's in my blood so much you know that it's it's I don't think most people think about that work life like that yeah times what I've been doing I work for Facebook for a couple years I helped them with the mobile app I helped them do location tracking to better optimize advertising and I also helped them build their py database nothing really radical game-changing but I was fortunate to be there at the right time given you know the stock market so but towards the end of the my tenure at Apple my wife had started to exhibit you know attic symptoms that we found out was brain tumor and so I was fired by Eddie my wife was diagnosed with brain to him it was a horrible time but you know I took a job at Facebook and was there for a short while but then quit to take care of my wife full-time and then she passed away and since then I've been taking care of my kids okay okay so I guess moving on so can you continued actually you know while we're on that that that topic of you know Richard being fired like how did you feel about that whole awful about it and you know what part of the organization were you in at that point parallel I was doing little projects I mean I did some work on maps and I did a year on Siri so at the time that all of this Scott and Richard I'm getting fired from Apple I was working on Siri I wasn't reporting to to Richard I was reporting to you know to his boss which was still well he was reporting to Scott so I was in a pretty pretty close organization you know and I'm seeing him frequently so yeah it was pretty it was pretty rough so I mean Richard mentions that he got fired by Eddy Cue but he reported to Scott who got fired by I guess Tim I I can only speculate on that I don't know Tim presumably I mean he was the CEO and Scott was the senior vice president so presumably it would take the CEO to fire him right but I don't know I have no knowledge about it I mean I only read so then it was because I find it curious that that even though Richard didn't report to Eddie that well wound up happening after Richard excuse me after Scott left there was some period that Richard was still at Apple and in that period well I can tell you what happened to me I gave a lengthy presentation on the cirrie work that I had done for a year after Scott was fired and he was there quite federighi was there was a room full of people but they primarily were the two people I was presenting to to describe to the moon what the work that I had done on Siri because I was the DRI for this you know domain and third-party work and they heard what I said and you know they decided to cancel the project but I got to keep my job and from what I know from what Richard told me although you would really need to talk to him to hear the details they had a similar and somewhat longer and more drawn-out process and at the end of that they decided to keep the project but far the guy you know what kind of the exact opposite you know as you know from mine they decided to Ken the project and keep the guy and for reasons that'd you know you would need to talk to Eddie q why why that was i I have no idea now this is something that we haven't really gotten into with anybody but the whole thing with Scott like what was your view of Lake Lee from your where you were what did so I know there's from my point of view I loved working with Scott Scott gave me the opportunities that changed my life the work that I'm proudest of the work that I think has been had you know the biggest impact on the on technology and the world those are opportunities that I got because Scott gave them to me so I love the guy you know is he perfect no as any of us know and so I you know for me you know and one of the you know the Scot had a very big personality and he was very demanding me was fine I had very I I was always always happy to meet the demands that Scott gave me because I wanted to do the best work that I could and he was very demanding and in a way that I thought was very positive so I interacted with him in a relationship of him being my manager or in my management organization and me being an individual contributor trying to get work done and even though I never directly reported to Scott he gave me all my projects from very very early on I would have meetings with him and he would give me the work that I was going to do and so that's how I interacted with him I don't really know how he interacted with the other executives because I was in the room only very infrequently when he was talking to them and well we can assume that even get along with them very well right but you know the number of times you know it's a small it's a handful of times that I was you know in the room with executives other than Steve and we call them exact reviews we would have these big sort of project milestone reviews and whatever and you know those those were never acrimonious but you know so you know I I can only speculate I I know what you know about what Scott's relationships I can speculate and I can go on hearsay but I would I don't want to speak that into a camera because it's it's not anything that I can substantiate all right let's move on to going back to the engineering work so one of the things he worked on in iOS 5 was multitasking gestures the iPad about that sure yeah so one day yet I Scott I had a conversation with Scott and he said Steve had this idea to do multitasking gestures for the iPad you know one of the things about the multi-touch system on the iPhone is that it can handle lots of touches you know as many as 11 and touches well obviously we never used that many on the iPhone you know parent primarily another small screen area was a limiting factor there and just also the vocabulary of gestures that we you know we thought initially on the iPhone that we're gonna have this you know this huge repertoire of gestures to do all these different sorts of things but when it came down to it there was you know touching and and you know panning and swiping and pinching and rotating and you know that's about it so once for the iPhone because they we really do we just couldn't really think of other really useful things to do given they again the limited screen real estate and the number of interesting interactions that we could think of to to add to the system so for the iPad once that came around with the larger screen space Scott said well you know Steve wanted to figure out if there were any gestures that we could add to make multitasking work more smoothly or if you just add this gestural interface to it and so he asked me to start looking into it I can pause there or just continue I don't know if that's if that's going in the direction that you want is there any more detail even I died spending year my life on it I should talk to you about it for not quite a year but I could spend a long time talk about the details you know I mean you know basically you know this is this is you know it's one of the interesting things that I'll pull out to talk about I think it's interesting is when you have you know multiple touches coming down onto a surface to recognize those touches as a hand so what's the difference between something that looks like this with five fingers and something looks like that and so actually worked with Wayne Westerman to help me he really was the the guy to crack the problem to how to figure out some code to determine whether five touches look like a like a hand or not and to you know to have something like that not you know be rejected you know but something like that be accepted and so these gestures required wound up requiring either four or all five fingers to work so you know so we had a scrunch to go back to the home screen and a swipe to go between apps and then a kind of a push up to bring up the multitasking bar and that's pretty much what we wound up with you know adding this repertoire on top of all other apps there's just one more thing that I would add on top of that then which is the the decision to when touches are made on the screen to answer the question of whether those touches should go to the app that's frontmost or whether the system should process it because going from the app back to the home screen is actually done by springboard is actually done by the home screen by the icon app and so figuring out event routing wound up needy we needed to make a really quick determination once these touches came in whether it was a system gesture I called it or whether those touches should get plumbed through the app and that actually turns out to be something that makes the iPhone 10 work because those that same system of determining whether a gesture is but something that belongs to the system belongs to the app is fundamental to making a gestural interface to control the apps on the system as well as interact with the content in an app thank you let's move on to iOS 7 so iOS 7 represented a major design change my had gone before sure what motivated these changes and and what was your involvement with so I was caught left and there was a decision I just don't know where it came from to really do a radical redesign of the whole operating system coming from a chai or from oh yeah coming from a chai I mean I think coming from Johnny mostly Oh this was after H I had had been moved under no no not yet yeah so Greg was still there Greg was still there okay so I was just coming off of the experience with Siri and so I you know my project was cancelled and so I needed something to do and it's just right around that time that iOS 7 started getting cranked up so I was you know essentially a project leader for the year on Syria and I just decided to jump back into programming and so so for iOS 7 I did blurs worked with one of the smartest people I ever worked with in my career John Harper who did the graphics level implementation for blurs in core animation and once he figured that out then I did the whole higher-level part of it making it work in apps figuring out what a kind of a blur recipe should be you know styles light styles dark styles what the you know kind of giving this frosting look to the way blurs looked and basically did that for a year then the other part that I did in in iOS 7 was text legibility a lot of drop shadows were taken away from text so figuring out how to make text legible without shadows which basically meant adding shadows back in but selectively and so it was basically doing those two things really graphics related programming and really making trying to make the user interface look good for a year and then providing api's for those things working a lot with designers working a lot with the app teams to get those api's adopted one last and Syria question that you're so I had heard afterward that the the Siri folks felt Apple I mean viv was partly because they felt Apple didn't let them do some part of what they wanted to do with Siri what would what were those parts and what's the well make sense I mean you'd have to ask them really my take on that was there was a just a a I think a difference in overall approach in you know what what the goal of technology was you know it's for Apple it's always to make things easy for people whereas I think they had some ideas that were much more tied directly to technology that's really fair to say I think they wanted to I remember having you know you know multiple discussions with you know people like you know Adam who you know he wanted to make it possible for people to order airline tickets with Siri you know and my argument was people are not going to talk to their phone and make a hundred down multi hundred dollar transaction until we can prove to them that system they can trust until they you know let's do that maybe I mean I I didn't really ever think that that was something that people were gonna want to do but Mauryan was okay let's actually get a couple of wins first get people so that they really really love this system and trust it and then we'll see what maybe we can do next year or the year after that you know then one of the things one of the approaches of Apple that I think it's done very very a very good job of over the years and I don't know if I mentioned this difference it sounds just a brief idea of this this idea of picking a point over there over the horizon you know that you can't see it now it's over the curvature of the planet right I mean your key but you know that point that that's what you're headed for even though you can't see it right now but you start heading in that direction you know and then eventually you know you you kind of you know you know you might wind up you know going heading right toward it or going a little bit you know to a different direction you know and you know but that point is that you have these goals that are outside that exceed the reach of your current grasp but that's what you're headed for and to me that's the argument that I wanted you know I tried to make to Adam and others you know on the cirrie team at the time about ordering airline tickets that's a so that's maybe that's a that's it that's a maybe a year or two year you know over the it's over the horizon right now okay can you talk a little bit about your work on the watch yeah how did you get how did you end up working on that and how much did you know about it even all I knew about it because it was disclosed on a lot so I basically just volunteered to work on it and so yeah I just a little bit by you know little by little I wound up contributing more and more to doing much faces so just actually making making the watch faces work making that API and infrastructure work with other people who were involved doing that and I just wound up taking on responsibilities I mean again it's this kind of this very you know sort of you know you know Richard said the you know the phrase kind of old loin Apple that's kind of what it was you see something that needs to get done and you kind of just go over and you know I'm not on that on that team but I'm gonna be sitting here now and be working on this thing and so that's what I did and I end up taking some responsibility for a couple of watch faces and some elements of the infrastructure and little bits of layout and you know contributing with you know some really are they're pretty terrific people but helping out get the thing done so I wound up doing a couple of watch faces and helping out I mean the watch in a way was at least for a time was touted as like the next big platform right also I mean how do you compare that experience to working on the original iPhone it's really different I mean there's a lot more people working on the watch a lot more people three four times as many people engineers was it just a secretive or less no no not really not really I mean some of it you know it's you know still the you know the culture changes you know when the people change yeah but there's still the same same basic you know there is a you know a same thread that runs through it but mmm it was different and I think that you just the potential of the the watch as a product is different you know personally I was you know I in favor you know I wasn't really in volunteer and so I was doing sir you know app level work you know even though it was you know kind of a fundamental fundamental app on the stone on the system but you weren't core to that team the way you work or to the iPhone correct join much later was not in it from the beginning at all and you know just really started pitching in because you know try to try to get the schedule done sooner and try to make the product good and so it seems like you had sort of gone up into a management position no I don't know at least a Project Lead I was a project lead on Siri okay but but then you went back to being an individual contributor yeah I guess yeah I guess the project me you're still an internal contributor yeah okay so there was never like a more you decided that you didn't want to go into management you didn't want to like come down from it well I like I like making things like working on projects yeah I like doing so yeah it needs never know it things just didn't involve that way I just kept getting you know interesting interesting technical problems to solve so I just kept solving them I guess let's can you talk about like the most recent stuff you did at Apple iOS 9 and 10 or is that too recent yeah I'd rather not talk about that okay so then are able to talk about your decision to leave well there comes a time I worked at Apple for almost 16 years and when you know I'm I'm not a you know I'm not trying I'm not a trained computer scientist I'm not I'm not a programmer you know I I I wrote programs but I'm not a programmer and so I don't see myself in that way and so you know it you know I you know I I started looking around and seeing that a lot of the people that I worked with in the past who I had my my happiest times with we're no longer there and you don't Steve so you start looking around inside where are all my friends no it's not why you didn't have new friends or new people that I did or didn't like collaborating with of course I did you know but in other ways it wasn't the same you know and something happens when you do a project like Safari WebKit or the iPhone or the iPad even you know but really those first two for me so far any web kid in the iPad excuse me sorry web kid in the iPhone is that when you have these you know experiences with people something changes about the relationship right I mean it's I tried to get it before you know this this this notion of trusting people and Trust is something that is earned over time right and and is is built up it's kind of its brick by brick these experiences so many that you know we've talked about so many over the time that I've you know been here speaking to you and there's just so many more that you know keep coming to me as as I think back on those times they're just just not time for but you know I looked around and it's just there weren't so many of those people around anymore and so you know I asked myself the question it's like well you know I'm you know over 50 now you know how many more new things might there be in my life how many more things in my career and I thought that maybe well one more big one that might take me you know 10 or 15 years to figure out just like you know the computers took me that long so I'm busy figuring that out now and I couldn't do that in Apple so I had to leave that oh that speaks to I mean the you just spoke to like it you know the the fact that a lot of people are not there anymore the could you talk more about like just how much Apple has changed in this whole time well you know it really is just it's people right you know it's called the the culture around what we did was essential to what we did we made the culture we made the things the culture made the things you know the culture affects us right you know and there's this this whole sort of mutually dependent swirl of things that go between people and culture and projects companies and things like that but people are really the essential element right so when the people change everything else changes with it one of the things you know they're they you know the iPhone project was very very small projects aren't that small anymore well it's just one thing that's changed about the decision making that goes into how to structure projects I I work best when you know people just carved me off something and say here go do it and that BK became less you know less possible over time to really do that things that used to be done just by me we're now done by teams of people you know and it is an individual contributor I mean at that I found it difficult for to really find enough not enough enough elbow room sometimes so a lot of the change is to do a scale yeah your scale and part of the head collar that is just look I mean this is done you know I don't mean to depict this somehow as being some sort of evil nefarious plan I mean some some ways it's just you know active you know apples are you know a victim of its own success just wind up all the you know these these these huge platforms and and these many more products and so that's just the way that it turned out and do you think Apple is headed in a direction that it won't be able to replicate its well looks S is just about now virtually Apple stock is in an all-time high iPhone 10 has come out and people seem to be liking it I just you know was a Horace did you just said that the Apple watch soon will eclipse the highest quarterly sales for the iPod which was obviously a pretty pretty influential product in the history of Apple and judged a huge success by everyone if you go to somebody and say the iPod wasn't successful they'd look at you like you know you're crazy middle of day time and you're saying that it's night and so obviously these you know these products have a lot of potential you know though with the watch and as they add more health features to it I mean this is its products be saving people's lives so you know I you know it's just you know for you know for you know for me I hope they keep making great products for a long long time you know even if you know like Richard said you know there's there's you know there's a certain feeling about you know that's part melancholy part ego right that you want things to be like the way that they were but they never are so you know I mean but there's just this strong feeling to how things were in the past that I wish could somehow still be retained but that's not the way the world works did we do we want to talk about ezel last time I thought we were gonna discuss diesel last time I don't know cuz well what do you want to know about ezel is cuz I thought we're dirty no but which what so is Richard we wanted to go back to yeah okay if we did talk about them that's fine yeah yeah I could give you a 60 seconds on ezel yeah uh as a company that I wound up doing a couple of startups that failed and I was in Sausalito I decided to move down to Silicon Valley proper and I found this company just by searching on the web founded by Andy Hertzfeld and and and Mike boy and Bud Tribble and one of Andy's friends barred the creme and make Linux on the desktop easy to use I thought that sounded great and I thought it'd be a great opportunity to meet these people who are my heroes and so I did I went you know went and walked in and filled a couple of whiteboards up with some code and they hired me and I started working on their services you know the whole premise of ezel was you know a GPL version you know GPL file browser some proprietary network services get those two apps working together software catalog you know you know web file storage and there you go but it failed we didn't get the software done very well Nautilus finished the services really never did the integration was pretty much non-existent and so and you know this company ran out of money right in the dot-com bust so that shut down I don't want a pool so yeah I guess well the less I guess we're wrapping up then actually there's one more thing um what what do you talk a bit about you know I guess we touched on this a little bit earlier but like your interactions with Steve Jobs and and also when he passed away how what was that light for you well I I demoed to Steve probably at six or eight times that was the limit of my personal interaction with him but the and so I never spent much time with him I didn't have a personal relationship with him but these these times that I did spend with him showing him work were amazing he surely taught me more in a shorter amount of time than any other person I ever met he was just so clear about what he wanted and he asked great questions he was always open to different ideas there were a couple of times that I changed his mind in a demo and he said he wanted something and I showed him a demo for something different he said yeah okay that's better that's better than I was thinking and you already got it and that you know that that kind of just just turned on a dime willingness to change his mind that you hear about and yeah it's real I saw it he had no reason to take my word for anything do you really know me right but but was about the work and I you know I could show him that I was thinking about the work in a way that was the same way that he thought about it so when he died well that's apples soul he's not replaceable I mean you know you can't read you typically replace founders right I mean they're dudes you know but he was special you know and that's that's no reflection on anybody who comes afterwards he's special so yeah I remember right when I heard about it so yeah I mean it's you know it's it's you know you know I don't you know I you know I was always proud to work at the company that he founded and that was guided by his principles that bore his imprint and those were the best years of my career so looking back on your time at Apple what would you say was your legacy and just to summarize that whole legacy I don't know that I have a legacy I mean that's that's that's maybe a bit pretentious sounding I can tell you what I I did the best I could and as fate turned out I got an opportunity to work on a project a couple of projects that got very very wide distribution to a lot of people in the world more people than I then then can be counted and so I feel fortunate and if you know if there is a legacy right it would be that gosh when you get a chance like that do the best you can and if you know if things turn out right in your you know you work hard and you make some you know some decent choices and you're with a whole bunch of other smart people yeah you can change the world

Channel: Computer History Museum

Views: 3,632

Rating: 4.939394 out of 5

Keywords: Apple, Eazel, iPhone, iOS, iPad, WebKit, App Store, Keyboard, Maps, Siri, Steve Jobs, Oral History, Computer History Museum

Id: ukTAAz5TfnY

Length: 187min 23sec (11243 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 25 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/katze_sonne]

Very wise words. They really thought ahead a long time. It’s "not just a map". It’s so much more important for a mobile device such as the iPhone. Even though the launch was less than ideal, it finally turned out to be the right decision. Back at that time I imagine, many people wouldn’t have understood how important the maps business was going to be eventually.

[u/HeartyBeast]

I remember when it came out and everyone was 'how did this get past QA'. Now we know the answer, there were 8 people doing QA for the data on the whole world, and they felt uncomfortable labelling it a beta. It's the people who made those two decisions that should have carried the can.

[u/heyyoudvd]

Very interesting.

I’ve always firmly believed that Forstall was right and Tim was wrong. Forstall refused to apologize for Maps and he refused to sign the apology letter Tim put out, which is apparently what made Tim take that final step to firing him.

Apple should NOT have apologized for Maps. Even with its problems, the apology letter itself did more damage to the reputation of Apple Maps than the app itself did.

After the poor launch, Apple should have simply said “We’re making it better, it’s in beta, and here are some alternatives you can try as things continue to improve”. But it should NOT have included an apology. Tim thought that apologizing would somehow lessen the blow by making Apple seem humble, but in the end, it just ended up turning Apple Maps into a houseful meme which lasted for years and years, even after it got a whole lot better.

Forstall and Williamson were right; Cook and Cue were wrong.