PALO ALTO, California — The first iPhone “prototype” was strung together using bits of wood, duct tape and some old Polaroid lenses.
Key members of the Apple team reminisced about those early DIY efforts Wednesday night during a discussion led by Brian Merchant, author of The One Device, a new book about the birth of the iPhone.
“This thing was really kludged together,” said Brian Huppi, a former Apple engineer who helped build the first system. “It was built out of wood, duct tape and old lenses from the ’60s.”
Alongside Huppi, the ex-Apple staffers included Greg Christie, the former head of Apple’s Human Interface Group, and Bas Ording, a UI designer who created the iPhone’s iconic “rubber band” effect.
They worked in a dusty abandoned user test lab in the Apple headquarters to design the device that would became one of the most popular gadgets of all time.
FingerWorks iGesture Pad is the iPhone’s starting point
The first experimental run at producing a multitouch interface — a broad exploration with no particular device in mind — centered on a FingerWorks iGesture Pad. The iGesture Pad was an alternative input device for RSI sufferers, which Apple acquired in early 2005.
Photo: Fingerworks
The projector was suspended above the table by pieces of wood. Since the projector wouldn’t focus properly on the table, Christie dug some old Polaroid closeup lens from the 1960s out of his garage and duct-taped them to the projector.
“That was my biggest contribution to this early effort,” Christie joked. He brought the lenses to the discussion and passed them around the audience, whose members handled them like religious relics.
Polaroid lenses enabled the first iPhone prototype
Photo: Lyle Kahney/Cult of Mac
To test if multitouch would work on a screen, Huppi remembered building a proof-of-concept out of a piece of glass. After his boss sketched out a basic idea on a whiteboard, he ran down to Radio Shack to pick up parts.
“It was a piece of glass with some copper electrodes taped to it,” Huppi said.
Despite the DIY nature of the system, it worked remarkably well. Ording and his colleague in the Human Interface Group, Imran Chaudhry, created demos of scrolling lists and pinch to zoom.
Steve Jobs saw the work during regular review meetings in which the team showed him their latest work. Ording’s rubber-band effect convinced Jobs that a phone could be built using the nascent technology.
“It felt like magic,” Christie said. “It was magic paper.”
Leander Kahney is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac.
Leander is a longtime technology reporter and the author of six acclaimed books about Apple, including two New York Times bestsellers: Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products and Inside Steve’s Brain, a biography of Steve Jobs.
He’s also written a top-selling biography of Apple CEO Tim Cook and authored Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, which both won prestigious design awards. Most recently, he was co-author of Cult of Mac, 2nd Edition.
Leander has been reporting about Apple and technology for nearly 30 years.
Before founding Cult of Mac as an independent publication, Leander was news editor at Wired.com, where he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the Wired.com website. He headed up a team of six section editors, a dozen reporters and a large pool of freelancers. Together the team produced a daily digest of stories about the impact of science and technology, and won several awards, including several Webby Awards, 2X Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism and the 2010 MIN (Magazine Industry Newsletter) award for best blog, among others.
Before being promoted to news editor, Leander was Wired.com’s senior reporter, primarily covering Apple. During that time, Leander published a ton of scoops, including the first in-depth report about the development of the iPod. Leander attended almost every keynote speech and special product launch presented by Steve Jobs, including the historic launches of the iPhone and iPad. He also reported from almost every Macworld Expo in the late ’90s and early ‘2000s, including, sadly, the last shows in Boston, San Francisco and Tokyo. His reporting for Wired.com formed the basis of the first Cult of Mac book, and subsequently this website.
Before joining Wired, Leander was a senior reporter at the legendary MacWeek, the storied and long-running weekly that documented Apple and its community in the 1980s and ’90s.
Leander has written for Wired magazine (including the Issue 16.04 cover story about Steve Jobs’ leadership at Apple, entitled Evil/Genius), Scientific American, The Guardian, The Observer, The San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications.
Leander is an expert on:
Apple and Apple history
Steve Jobs, Jony Ive, Tim Cook and Apple leadership
Apple community
iPhone and iOS
iPad and iPadOS
Mac and macOS
Apple Watch and watchOS
Apple TV and tvOS
AirPods
Leander has a postgrad diploma in artificial intelligence from the University of Aberdeen, and a BSc (Hons) in experimental psychology from the University of Sussex.
He has a diploma in journalism from the UK’s National Council for the Training of Journalists.
Leander lives in San Francisco, California, and is married with four children. He’s an avid biker and has ridden in many long-distance bike events, including California’s legendary Death Ride.
You can find out more about Leander on LinkedIn and Facebook. You can follow him on X at @lkahney or Instagram.
