Colleague Fred Vogelstein has a great article on the creation of the iPhone in the new issue of Wired. It’s largely written based on anonymous sources (not a shock when dealing with Apple), but the narrative is quite compelling. I wish he got a bit more into just how much the iPhone has shaken up the wireless industry, but the article’s well-worth your time:
It was a late morning in the fall of 2006. Almost a year earlier, Steve Jobs had tasked about 200 of Apple’s top engineers with creating the iPhone. Yet here, in Apple’s boardroom, it was clear that the prototype was still a disaster. It wasn’t just buggy, it flat-out didn’t work. The phone dropped calls constantly, the battery stopped charging before it was full, data and applications routinely became corrupted and unusable. The list of problems seemed endless. At the end of the demo, Jobs fixed the dozen or so people in the room with a level stare and said, “We don’t have a product yet.”
That’s drama, folks.
2 responses to “The Untold Tale of the iPhone”
Stop. The iPhone is just a neat gadget on the old guard American phone network. I don’t understand why folks aren’t rising up to lobby their elected leaders in an attempt to allow the freedoms that non-American wireless systems enjoy. AT&T and their syrupy slow network is an unacceptable hindrance to this technology!