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The Design
On many of his major projects, such as the first
Toy Story
and the Apple store, Jobs pressed
“pause” as they neared completion and decided to make major revisions. That happened with the
design of the iPhone as well. The initial design had the glass screen set into an aluminum case.
One Monday morning Jobs went over to see Ive. “I didn’t sleep last night,” he said, “because I
realized that I just don’t love it.” It was the most important product he had made since the first
Macintosh, and it just didn’t look right to him. Ive, to his dismay, instantly realized that Jobs was
right. “I remember feeling absolutely embarrassed that he had to make the observation.”
The problem was that the iPhone should have been all about the display, but in their current
design the case competed with the display instead of getting out of the way. The whole device felt
too masculine, task-driven, efficient. “Guys, you’ve killed yourselves over this design for the last
nine months, but we’re going to change it,” Jobs told Ive’s team. “We’re all going to have to work
nights and weekends, and if you want we can hand out some guns so you can kill us now.” Instead
of balking, the team agreed. “It was one of my proudest moments at Apple,” Jobs recalled.
The new design ended up with just a thin stainless steel bezel that allowed the gorilla glass
display to go right to the edge. Every part of the device seemed to defer to the screen. The new
look was austere, yet also friendly. You could fondle it. It meant they had to redo the circuit
boards, antenna, and processor placement inside, but Jobs ordered the change. “Other companies
may have shipped,” said Fadell, “but we pressed the reset button and started over.”
One aspect of the design, which reflected not only Jobs’s perfectionism but also his desire to
control, was that the device was tightly sealed. The case could not be opened, even to change the
battery. As with the original Macintosh in 1984, Jobs did not want people fiddling inside. In fact
when Apple discovered in 2011 that third-party repair shops were opening up the iPhone 4, it
replaced the tiny screws with a tamper-resistant Pentalobe screw that was impossible to open with
a commercially available screwdriver. By not having a replaceable battery, it was possible to make
the iPhone much thinner. For Jobs, thinner was always better. “He’s always believed that thin is
beautiful,” said Tim Cook. “You can see that in all of the work. We have the thinnest notebook,
the thinnest smartphone, and we made the iPad thin and then even thinner.”
The Launch
When it came time to launch the iPhone, Jobs decided, as usual, to grant a magazine a special
sneak preview. He called John Huey, the editor in chief of Time Inc., and began with his typical
superlative: “This is the best thing we’ve ever done.” He wanted to give
Time
the exclusive, “but
there’s nobody smart enough at
Time
to write it, so I’m going to give it to someone else.” Huey
introduced him to Lev Grossman, a savvy technology writer (and novelist) at
Time
. In his piece
Grossman correctly noted that the iPhone did not really invent many new features, it just made
these features a lot more usable. “But that’s important. When our tools don’t work, we tend to
blame ourselves, for being too stupid or not reading the manual or having too-fat fingers. . . .
When our tools are broken, we feel broken. And when somebody fixes one, we feel a tiny bit more
whole.”
For the unveiling at the January 2007 Macworld in San Francisco, Jobs invited back Andy
Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, Steve Wozniak, and the 1984 Macintosh team, as he had done when he
launched the iMac. In a career of dazzling product presentations, this may have been his best.
“Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything,” he began.
He referred to two earlier examples: the original Macintosh, which “changed the whole computer
industry,” and the first iPod, which “changed the entire music industry.” Then he carefully built up
to the product he was about to launch: “Today, we’re introducing three revolutionary products of
this class. The first one is a widescreen iPod with touch controls. The second is a revolutionary
mobile phone. And the third is a breakthrough Internet communications device.” He repeated the
list for emphasis, then asked, “Are you getting it? These are not three separate devices, this is one
device, and we are calling it iPhone.”
When the iPhone went on sale five months later, at the end of June 2007, Jobs and his wife
walked to the Apple store in Palo Alto to take in the excitement. Since he often did that on the day
new products went on sale, there were some fans hanging out in anticipation, and they greeted him
as they would have Moses if he had walked in to buy the Bible. Among the faithful were Hertzfeld
and Atkinson. “Bill stayed in line all night,” Hertzfeld said. Jobs waved his arms and started
laughing. “I sent him one,” he said. Hertzfeld replied, “He needs six.”
The iPhone was immediately dubbed “the Jesus Phone” by bloggers. But Apple’s competitors
emphasized that, at $500, it cost too much to be successful. “It’s the most expensive phone in the
world,” Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer said in a CNBC interview. “And it doesn’t appeal to business
customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard.” Once again Microsoft had underestimated Jobs’s
product. By the end of 2010, Apple had sold ninety million iPhones, and it reaped more than half
of the total profits generated in the global cell phone market.
“Steve understands desire,” said Alan Kay, the Xerox PARC pioneer who had envisioned a
“Dynabook” tablet computer forty years earlier. Kay was good at making prophetic assessments,
so Jobs asked him what he thought of the iPhone. “Make the screen five inches by eight inches,
and you’ll rule the world,” Kay said. He did not know that the design of the iPhone had started
with, and would someday lead to, ideas for a tablet computer that would fulfill—indeed exceed—
his vision for the Dynabook.
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