The One Device Read online

  In fact, I spoke to every iPhone designer, engineer, and executive who was willing to do an interview. My goal is that by the end of this book, you’ll glance into the black mirror of your iPhone and see, not the face of Jobs, but a group picture of its myriad creators—and have a more nuanced, true, and, I think, compelling portrait of the one device that pulled us all into its future.

  A quick note on Apple: Investigating the iPhone is a paradoxical task. A parade of pundits, anonymous sources, and blog posts offer an endless stream of opinions about everything Apple does. A few flat cryptic words from an Apple press release often provides the “official” record. Apple grants next to no interviews with its staff, and the journalists who do get interviews are typically handpicked for their long-standing or friendly relationships with company. I am not one of those journalists—in fact, I’m not even much of a gadget geek. (While I’ve been on the science and tech beat for about a decade now, I’ve spent more time covering oil spills than product demos.) So, while I made Apple officials fully aware of this project from the outset and repeatedly spoke with and met their PR representatives, they declined my many requests to interview executives and employees. Tim Cook never answered my (very thoughtful) emails. To tell this story, I met current and former Apple employees in dank dive bars or spoke with them over encrypted communications, and I had to grant anonymity to some of those I interviewed. Many people from the iPhone team still working at Apple told me they would have loved to participate on the record—they wanted the world to know its incredible story—but declined for fear of violating Apple’s strict policy of secrecy. I’m confident that the dozens of interviews I did with iPhone innovators, the talks I had with journalists and historians who’ve studied it, and the documents I’ve obtained about the device all helped render a full and accurate portrait.

  That portrait will emerge on two tracks. The first puts you inside Apple to show how the iPhone was imagined, prototyped, and created by a host of unsung innovators—those who pioneered new ways of manipulating and interacting with information. These four sections start when you turn the page, and appear throughout the middle and at the end of the book—fitting, I think, as countless people gave rise to the one device, but Apple ultimately made the iPhone.

  The second will follow my efforts to uncover the iPhone’s raw source material, to meet with the minds and hands that made it possible around the globe. These chapters will start at Chapter 1, and proceed from examining the century-old origins of the idea of a “smartphone” to exploring the powerful technologies gathered under its hood, to investigating how all those parts are assembled in China, to visiting the black markets and e-waste pits where they ultimately wind up.

  With that, let’s make our first stop—Apple HQ in Cupertino, California, the heart of Silicon Valley.

  i: Exploring New Rich Interactions

  iPhone in embryo

  Apple’s user-testing lab at 2 Infinite Loop had been abandoned for years. Down the hall from the famed Industrial Design studio, the space was divided by a one-way mirror so hidden observers could see how ordinary people navigate new technologies. But Apple didn’t do user testing, not since Steve Jobs returned as CEO in 1997. Under Jobs, Apple would show consumers what they wanted, not solicit their feedback.

  But that deserted lab would make an ideal hideaway for a small group of Apple’s more restless minds, who had quietly embarked on an experimental new project. For months, the team had held unofficial meetings marked by freewheeling brainstorms. Their mission was vague but simple: “Explore new rich interactions.” The ENRI group, let’s call it, was tiny. It included a few of Apple’s young software designers, a key industrial designer, and a handful of adventurous input engineers. They were, essentially, trying to invent new ways of interfacing with machines.

  Since its inception, the personal computer had relied on a century-old framework that allowed humans to tell it what to do: A keyboard laid out like a typewriter, the same basic tool a nineteenth-century newspaperman used to write copy. The only major addition to the input arsenal had been the mouse. Throughout the information revolution of the second half of the twentieth century, that was how most people navigated its bounty—with a typewriter and a clicker. Near-infinite digital possibilities, dusty old user interface.

  By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the internet was mainstream and maturing. Online media was complex and interactive. Apple’s own iPod was moving digital music into people’s pockets, and the personal computer had become a hub for maps, movies, and images. The ENRI group predicted that typing and clicking would soon prove frustratingly cumbersome, and we’d need new ways to interact with all that rich media—especially on Apple’s storied computer. “There was a core little secret group,” says one member, Joshua Strickon, “with the goal of re-envisioning input on the Mac.”

  The team was experimenting with every stripe of bleeding-edge hardware—motion sensors, new kinds of mice, a burgeoning technology known as multitouch—in a quest to uncover a more direct way to manipulate information. The meetings were so discreet that not even Jobs knew they were taking place. The gestures, user controls, and design tendencies stitched together here would become the cybernetic vernacular for the new century—because the kernel of this clandestine collaboration would become the iPhone.

  Yet its pioneers’ achievements have largely been hidden from view, stranded on the other side of that one-way mirror, by an intensely secretive corporation and its late spotlight-commanding CEO. The story of the iPhone starts, in other words, not with Steve Jobs or a grand plan to revolutionize phones, but with a misfit crew of software designers and hardware hackers tinkering with the next evolutionary step in human-computer symbiosis.

  Assembling the Team

  “User-interface design is still unknown to most people, even now,” a member of the original iPhone team tells me. For one thing, the term user interface feels pulled right from a technical manual; the label itself seems uniquely designed to dull the senses. “There’s no rock-star UI designer,” he says. “There’s no Jony Ive of UI.” But if there were, they’d be Bas Ording and Imran Chaudhri. “They’re the Lennon-McCartney of UI.”

  Ording and Chaudhri met during some of Apple’s darkest days. Ording, a Dutch software designer with a flair for catchy, playful animations, was hired into the Human Interface group in 1998, the year after the company hemorrhaged a billion dollars in lost revenue and Jobs returned to stanch the bleeding. Chaudhri, a sharp British designer as influenced by MTV’s icons as Apple’s, had arrived a few years before and survived Jobs’s slash-and-burn layoffs. “I first met Imran at some point in the parking lot smoking cigarettes,” Ording says. “We were like, ‘Hey, dude!’” They make for an odd pair; Bas is lanky, easygoing, and almost preternaturally good-natured, while Imran is intense, fashionable, and broadcasts an austere cool. But they hit it off right away. Soon, Ording convinced Chaudhri to come over to the UI group.

  There, they joined Greg Christie, a New Yorker who’d come to Apple in 1995 for one reason: “To do Newton”—Apple’s personal digital assistant, an early stab at a mobile computer. “My family thought I was nuts moving to Apple,” he says, “working for this company that’s clearly going out of business.” The Newton didn’t sell well, so Jobs killed it, and Christie wound up in charge of the Human Interface group.

  As Jobs placed renewed focus on Apple’s flagship Macs, Bas and Imran cut their teeth updating the look and feel of its age-worn operating system. They worked on pulsating buttons, animated progress bars, and a glossy, transparent look that rejuvenated the appeal of the Mac. Their creative partnership bloomed. They helped prove that user interface design, long derided as dull—the province of grey user settings and drop-down menus; “knobs and dials” as Christie puts it—was ripe for innovation. As Bas and Imran’s stars rose inside Apple, they started casting around for new frontiers.

  Fortunately, they were about to find one.

  While training to be a civil e
ngineer in Massachusetts, Brian Huppi idly picked up Steven Levy’s Insanely Great. The book documents how in the early 1980s Steve Jobs separated key Apple players from the rest of the company, flew a pirate flag above their department, and drove them to build the pioneering Macintosh. Huppi couldn’t put it down. “I was like, ‘Wow, what would it be like to work at a place like Apple?’” At that, he quit his program and went back to school for mechanical engineering. Then he heard Jobs was back at the helm at Apple—serendipity. Huppi landed a job as an input engineer there in 1998.

  He was put to work on the iBook laptop, where he got to know the Industrial Design group, whose profile had already begun to rise under its head, Jonathan Ive. Jobs’s streamlining of the company had placed a renewed focus on design, and the ID group’s head-turning, color-splashed Bondi Blue iMac—a radical departure for the beige desktop-heavy industry—had helped turn Apple’s fortunes around at the end of the ’90s. The gig turned out to be a little less insane than Huppi might have imagined, though. His work consisted largely of shipping one laptop, then getting to work updating its successor. He hadn’t quit civil engineering to iterate laptop hardware; he was after something more in the pirate flag–flying, industry-shaking vein. So he turned to one industrial designer in particular—Duncan Kerr, who’d worked at the famed design firm IDEO before heading to Apple. “Duncan is the least ID guy of all the ID guys,” Chaudhri says—someone who was as interested in what was happening on the screen as what the screen was shaped like.

  “We’d been discussing how it’d be really cool to sit down and really focus on talking about a very user-centric approach to what we might do with input,” Huppi says. They wanted to reimagine how humans interacted with computing devices from the ground up, and to ask, what, exactly, they wanted those interactions to be. So Kerr approached Jony Ive to see if the ID group could support a small team that met regularly to investigate the topic. Ive was all for it, which was good news—if anyone hoped to embark on a wild, transformative project and actually hope to see it come to fruition, ID was the place to go.

  “I knew politically that it had to go through ID,” Huppi says, “because they had all the power, and they had Steve’s ear.”

  Huppi knew Greg Christie from a laptop project, and Ording and Chaudhri were already working with Kerr. The chip architecture expert and Newton veteran Mike Culbert, as well as Huppi’s boss Steve Hotelling, joined the talks. Then, there was the new recruit—they’d just hired Josh Strickon out of MIT’s Media Lab. There, Strickon had spent years enmeshed in experimental fusions of technology and music. For his master’s thesis, he concocted a laser range finder for hand-tracking that could sense multiple fingers. “He seemed like one of these guys that had lots of interaction experience,” Huppi says, “and I was like, he’d be perfect for this brainstorming group.”

  When Joshua Strickon arrived at Apple in 2003, the company was pocked by uncertainty all over again. The iMac had won accolades and steadied sales, but the tech bubble had burst; profits had fallen, and Apple was losing money for the first time since Jobs’s return. The iPod had yet to take off, and the rank and file were anxious. “When I got there,” Strickon says, “the stock price was like fourteen dollars and no one had had a raise in who knows how long.” Apple placed him in a windowless office with malfunctioning hardware. “They had given me a laptop and a desktop,” he says, “and the machines were crashing all the time.” Meanwhile, the Cupertino campus teemed with Apple “fanatics,” a number of whom made no secret of their Steve Jobs idolatry. “Apple is kind of a weird place,” he says. “You’ve got people dressing like Steve.” There were so many Steve look-alikes, in fact, that Strickon couldn’t pick out the real thing. He’d been on the lookout for Jobs since he got to Cupertino—his thesis adviser had worked for Apple years before, and Strickon wanted to say hello on his behalf. But when he found himself next to the CEO in line for a burrito at the cafeteria, he just assumed Jobs was an acolyte. “At the time I didn’t realize it was him,” Strickon says. “I thought it was just somebody who likes to dress like him.”

  Strickon was young—he’d finished his PhD and showed up at Apple in his mid-twenties, expecting to find other members of a freshmen class. “But the company was mostly middle-aged men, which was kind of a shocker,” he says. He found the atmosphere stifling and buttoned up, which he attributed to all the Jobs worship. “I had friends at Google, and [there it] was like kids running around with no parents.” But at Apple, “people didn’t feel empowered to have ideas and to follow through.… Everything was micromanaged by Steve,” Strickon says.

  Strickon’s skills—a unique knowledge of touch-based sensors and the software needed to control them, an intrepid musical sensibility, and a flair for experimentation—would translate well to the percolating project, Huppi thought. Even if they wouldn’t translate so well to negotiating Apple’s corporate culture.

  So, the key proto-iPhoners were European designers and East Coast engineers. They all arrived at Apple during its messy resurgent years, just before or just after the return of Jobs. They were in their twenties and thirties, ambitious, and keen to experiment with new technologies: Bas Ording, a user-interface wunderkind who took cues from typesetting and gaming; Imran Chaudhri, a hacker-influenced designer who could straddle the gap between SV and MTV; Joshua Strickon, an MIT-trained sensor savant with an ear for electronica and a feel for touchscreens; Brian Huppi, a jack-of-all-trades who could build just about anything; and Duncan Kerr, a decorated designer intent on marrying industrial design to digital interfaces. With support from industry vets like Steve Hotelling and PDA pioneers like Greg Christie, the ENRI meetings would lay out a blueprint for the next generation of mobile computing.

  New Rich Interactions

  The ENRI project started out with simple brainstorming, in Apple’s most hallowed sanctum. With a handful of young men around a conference table, laptops open; with whiteboard drawings and keynote presentations. With extensive note-taking and weekly meetings.

  “We almost always met over in the Industrial Design studio, you know, just kicking around ideas all over the map,” Huppi says. The central question was simple: “What are the new features that we want to have in our experiences?”

  The fact that they were having these conversations at all was a small step forward, as this brand of cross-pollination wasn’t common at the time. “What was weird was that you had the Industrial Design group, and mostly what they did was build physical mock-ups,” Strickon says. “Nonfunctioning mock-ups, like when you go into a cell phone store and see those plastic models; it’d be like that. They’d spend hours and hours looking at shapes and forms and building weighted versions of that stuff, and it seemed kind of counterproductive because they couldn’t see what these things felt like in actual use.”

  The ENRI meetings aimed to change that, to help infuse that celebrated design work with fully functional input technologies and user interfaces—and to tap into fresh ideas about how they all might work together. “We would just go into that ID studio and, you know, just talk,” Huppi says. “This went on for a good six months.”

  There were a lot of ideas. Some feasible, some boring, some outlandish and borderline sci-fi—some of those, Huppi says, he “probably can’t talk about,” because fifteen years later, they had yet to be developed, and “Apple still might want to do them someday.”

  “We were looking at all sorts of stuff,” Strickon says, “from camera-tracking and multitouch and new kinds of mice.” They studied depth-sensing time-of-flight cameras like the sort that would come to be used in the Xbox Kinect. They explored force-feedback controls that would allow users to interact directly with virtual objects with the touch of their hands.

  “Phones,” Strickon adds, “weren’t even on the table then. They weren’t even a topic of discussion.” But the ID group fabricated plenty of cell phones. Not smartphones, but flip phones. The husks of stylish phone bodies dotted the design studio. “There were many models of flip
phones of various sorts that Apple had been working on,” Huppi says. “I mean very Apple-ized, very gorgeous and beautiful, but they were they were basically various takes on cell phones with buttons.” (This might explain why Apple had by this point already registered the domain iPhone.org.)

  The talks began to gravitate toward a recurring source of the group’s frustration. “One of the themes that kept coming up over and over again was the theme of—I call it navigation,” Huppi says, “key things like scrolling and zooming.”

  Key things that people wanted to be able to do with their richer and more interactive media, now that the web was booming and computers were more powerful—things that tested the UI limits of the decades-old mouse-and-keyboard combo. “It really kind of started by listing things like, ‘I wish this would work better,’” Huppi says. In 2002, if you wanted to zoom in on an image, you had to drag your cursor to a menu, click, select the amount you wanted to enlarge it by, and click again or hit Enter. Scrolling and panning meant still more clicks; finding the tiny scroll-bar ball and dragging it around. Small things, maybe, but performing these actions dozens of times a day was a pain—especially for designers and engineers. Chaudhri, for one, was interested in directly interacting with the screen—streamlining receptive acts like closing windows. “What if you could just tap, tap, tap them and be done?” he says. That sort of direct manipulation could make navigating computers more efficient, expressive, more fun.