Michal Ždanský V the first part we learned how Steve Jobs came up with the idea of the iPhone and what steps he had to take to make the phone even possible. The story continues after Apple managed to get an exclusive contract with the American operator Cingular.
In the second half of 2005, eight months before the contract with Cingular was even signed, a very intense year began for Apple engineers. Work on the first Apple phone has begun. The initial question was the choice of operating system. Even though the chips at the time offered enough power to run a modified version of Mac OS, it was clear that the system would have to be completely rewritten and drastically slimmed down by as much as 90% to fit within the limit of a few hundred megabytes .
Apple engineers looked at Linux, which had already been modified for use in mobile phones at the time. However, Steve Jobs refused to use foreign software. Meanwhile, a prototype iPhone was created that was based on the iPod, including the original clickwheel. It was used as a number plate, but it could do nothing else. You definitely couldn't surf the internet with it. While software engineers were slowly completing the process of rewriting OS X for the Intel processors that Apple had switched from PowerPC to, another rewrite began, this time for mobile phone purposes.
However, rewriting the operating system was the tip of the iceberg. The production of a phone involves many other complications, with which Apple has had no previous experience. These included, for example, antenna design, radio frequency radiation or mobile network simulation. To ensure that the phone would not have a signal problem or produce excessive amounts of radiation, Apple had to acquire testing rooms and radio frequency simulators costing tens of millions of dollars. At the same time, due to the durability of the display, he was forced to switch from the plastic used in the iPod to glass. The development of the iPhone thus climbed to over 150 million dollars.
The entire project that carried the designation Purple 2, was kept in the utmost secrecy, Steve Jobs even separated individual teams into different branches of Apple. Hardware engineers worked with a fake operating system, while software engineers only had a circuit board embedded in a wooden box. Before Jobs announced the iPhone at Macworld in 2007, only about 30 top executives involved in the project had seen the finished product.
But Macworld was still a few months away, when a working iPhone prototype was ready. Over 200 people worked on the phone at that time. But the result has been disastrous so far. At the meeting, where the leadership team demonstrated their current product, it was clear that the device is still a long way from the final form. It kept dropping calls, had a lot of software bugs and the battery refused to charge to full. After the demo ended, Steve Jobs gave the workers a cold look with the words "We don't have the product yet".
The pressure was huge at that moment. The delay of the new version of Mac OS X Leopard has already been announced, and if the big event, which Steve Jobs has reserved for major product announcements since his return in 1997, does not show off a major device like the iPhone, surely Apple would triggered a wave of criticism and the stock could suffer as well. To top it all off, he had AT&T on his back, expecting a finished product for which he had signed an exclusive contract.
The next three months will be the roughest of their careers for those working on the iPhone. Screaming in the campus corridors. Engineers are grateful for at least a few hours of sleep a day. A product manager who angrily slams the door so that it gets stuck and then has to be freed from his office by his colleagues with the help of a few well-aimed blows to the doorknob with a baseball bat.
A few weeks before the fateful Macworld, Steve Jobs meets with AT&T executives to show them a prototype that will soon be seen by the whole world. A brilliant display, a great internet browser and a revolutionary touch interface leave everyone present breathless. Stan Sigman calls the iPhone the best phone he's ever seen in his life.
How the story goes on, you already know. The iPhone will probably cause the biggest revolution in the field of mobile phones. As Steve Jobs predicted, the iPhone is suddenly several light years ahead of the competition, which will not be able to catch up even years later. For AT&T, the iPhone was one of the best moves in the company's history, and despite the tithes it has to pay under the contract, it makes a lot of money on iPhone contracts and data plans thanks to the exclusivity of the sale. In 76 days, Apple manages to sell a then incredible million devices. Thanks to the opening of the App Store, the largest online store with applications will be created. The success of the iPhone eventually gives way to another very successful product, the iPad, a tablet that Apple has been trying hard to create for many years.
nice article - just a small detail: steve nerika is several LIGHT years ahead of the competition, but 5 years ahead.
I just wanted to point that out. People should finally remember that a light year is not a unit of time, but a distance :-/
A light year has two contexts – concretely, here it is an astronomical unit of distance calculated according to the formula s=vt where t is the time of one year in seconds and v or c is the speed of light. Then there is also the abstract content of the concept of light year, expressing in writing the philosophical essence of something very distant and very innovative or, on the contrary, very outdated.
This sentence is not from the video, but from the source article where it says, I quote: "light-years ahead of anything else"
In that case, someone should explain it to an Englishman too :D.
well, I would say that it can be taken from both ends, they can be "kilometers" ahead of the competition, right?
Not even 1 part has a functional link to the source article. Please correct if possible.
Unfortunately, this is not an error on our end, but on Wired.com's. Until recently, the article was available, now it somehow disappeared there for some unknown reason.
My heart has been yearning for exactly such a phone since 2002 - I remember that the Motorola A1000 from Q1 2004 (3G, A-GPS, mp3 , video playback, a large touch display, in addition an SD slot and a camera with an excellent 1280x960 resolution at the time :-)) ) but at the time almost 500GBP seemed like an absolutely absurd amount that I would never pay for a phone ;-)
So I would say that it wasn't a 'lightning out of the blue' at all and that Apple was at least ENOUGH INSPIRED by motorola, so to speak :-)