Ondrej Holzman Daily The Wall Street Journal prepared a hilarious short documentary for the tenth anniversary of the release of the first iPhone with former Apple vice presidents Scott Forstall, Tony Fadel and Greg Christie, who recall how the revolutionary device was created in Apple's laboratories more than a decade ago. The ten-minute video contains several funny incidents from the development…
He talks about what obstacles the team had to overcome and what demands Steve Jobs had during development Scott Forstall, former VP of iOS, Greg christie, former vice president of human (user) interface, and Tony Fadell, former senior vice president of the iPod division. All of them are credited with the first iPhone, but none of them are working at Apple anymore.
Their memories of how the product that changed the world overnight was created is still fascinating to listen to ten years later. Below is a text excerpt from the ten-minute documentary, which we recommend watching in its entirety (attached below).
Scott Forstall and Greg Christie, among others, recall how challenging and exhausting the development was at times.
Scott Forstall: It was 2005 when we were creating a lot of designs, but it still wasn't the same. Then Steve came to one of our design meetings and said, “This isn't good enough. You have to come up with something much better, this is not enough.'
Greg Christie: Steve said, "Start showing me something good soon, or I'll assign the project to another team."
Scott Forstall: And he said we have two weeks. So we came back and Greg assigned different pieces of design to different people and the team then worked 168 hour weeks for two weeks. They never stopped. And if they did, Greg got them a hotel room across the street so they wouldn't have to drive home. I remember how after two weeks we looked at the result and thought, "this is phenomenal, this is it".
Greg Christie: He was completely silent when he first saw it. He didn't say a word, didn't make a gesture. He didn't ask a question. He stepped back and said "show me one more time". So we went through the whole thing one more time and Steve was blown away by the demonstration. Our reward for doing well during this demo was that we had to cut ourselves apart over the next two and a half years.
