The Vergecast - Bonus: Brian Merchant, author of The One Device

Episode Date: June 15, 2017

We’re doing two episodes of The Vergecast this week — the usual one on Friday, and this very special edition with Brian Merchant, author of The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone. We ran a big excerpt of the book this week, and we got deep on talking about the book, where it came from, and Merchant’s feeling that we should know more about the technology products in our lives — and know more about the hundreds of people who make them, from the unsung engineers at tech companies to the extremely unsung miners who dig the raw materials out of the ground. And, of course, we talk about the quotes from Tony Fadell and Bill Bilbrey in the excerpt we just published, in which Fadell tells a story about Phil Schiller arguing the iPhone should have a hardware keyboard. Schiller has said the story isn’t true, and Fadell has tried to walk it back as well. “So I wasn't in the room at Apple 10, 15 years ago when this would have happened,” says Merchant, who has the exchange on tape. “But this is a quote verbatim as Tony Fadell who was in the room told it to me. He told me this quote in such detail and he gave such a vivid account and I had no reason to believe it was untrue.” Merchant says the controversy has “blown him away.” “It certainly wasn't intended to make Phil Schiller look dumb. It was an opposing viewpoint... I think that it's totally fine to be a dissenting voice and want to contextualize this emergent technology and even be opposed to it. Why would you not have someone in the room who is forcing people to think critically about this potentiality?” There’s a lot more on the podcast, including a deep dive into the early research projects at Apple exploring touch interfaces. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, and welcome to The Vergecast. There's usually like a whole little bit I do at the beginning of our show here, but this is a very special edition of the Vergecast. It's just me, Neelai Patel at Interchief the Verge. And I'm joined for the full hour here by Brian Merchant, who is author of The One Device, a new book about how the first iPhone was made. Hey, Brian. Hey, Neil.

Wait, wait a minute. I don't get the scissor vodka treatment? Oh, man. One day someone's going to write a book about that. So I want to start with just a little story about how you and I came to meet and how we ended up running a big excerpt from your book on The Verge, which has caused some controversy that I want to talk about. But I have said on The Vergecast many times, I don't think anyone's ever told the story of how anyone made the iPhone. Like the real story isn't out there. And Brian, as you may have surmised by this is a rocket joke, is a Vergecast listener.

And he emailed me and said, I'm writing this book. So several months ago, he came by the verge of office and we hung out and I was like, I cannot wait to read this book. And when it comes time, I want to run a chunk of it. So we did. But it's amazing to me. I love it when little things happened because of the podcast. Yeah, absolutely. I just couldn't help myself.

I heard you say that. And I just was like, I think I may have like literally like put my hand up in the air doing dishes or whatever. I'm like, I did. I did. I know the answer. Yeah, I just had to reach out. And, yeah, everything's been great. Yeah.

Anyhow, like I said, there's a little bit of controversy. We will definitely talk about it. But let's start at the start so people know what's going on with this book. So just tell me about your book. Yeah. So the one device is, it's the secret history of the iPhone. That's the billing. It's sort of about all of the human stories, which are often invisible,

that go beyond sort of the narrative that we all kind of, Lamont, too, about, you know, Steve Jobs and presenting this thing, which is a big part of the story. But, you know, I just kind of woke up one day, and it was actually, I left my phone in a cab. I think everybody has, like, this moment where you are without your phone for an extended period of time, and you feel a little uncomfortable. And I was fortunate enough to go years without ever having that, but I did eventually leave it in the back of a cab, and the, you know, the cab driver turned it into the police nicely enough. So, I mean, there are just so few things where you're like, okay, you know, that's my day.

I'm taking the day off work to go down to the police department, get my phone back. Like, everything else can wait. So I'm sitting there in line just, and I was just kind of musing on it. And I was just thinking about this thing that has so much power over us. And I really kind of quickly arrived at the conclusion that I had very little idea of how it works. or what goes into making each one, or how it became so ubiquitous, how it became the most popular device on the planet, how it became the one device. So from there, I just started peeling away at it. And as I detail in the book, I really pretty early on went to the folks that I fix it, just curious about what was under the hood of this thing.

And then that's when it really kind of sunk in. When they were explaining piece by piece, this whole like sea of components and materials, and concepts that they were talking about. So I really sort of saw an opportunity to kind of create, you know, something of like an atlas of our moment. Like this is, it's invention, it's technology, it's labor, it's marketing, it's culture, it's, you know, everything kind of has been poured into this thing very, very successfully.

So the book is about homing in on all of those layers and, you know, going piece by piece. Like, how did this happen inside Apple? I think as I was reading it and listeners, if you read it, which I recommend you do, because it's great. It's almost every other chapter is there's the inside narrative of Apple in the, you know, sort of mid-late 2000s when they're making the thing. And then there's extreme present day. You're in a tin mine. You're in, you know, lithium mines, literally, where the battery components are being made, talking about how they physically have to make it.

What kind of prompted that part of it? Yeah. So the goal was really to kind of obtain sort of as comprehensive and understanding of how we arrived at this moment as possible. And that means, just as you said, on the one hand, understanding how it was built as a product. But on the other hand, it means trying to understand the nature of a device, of a thing, of something that is comprised of minerals, that have to come from somewhere, of parts that have to be put together somewhere, and this massive spiraling supply chain that sort of binds them all together. So I really kind of did my best to condense, you know,

what makes the iPhone the iPhone into a series of chapters, and then I explore them one by one. So you have the concept of a smartphone in the very beginning. Like what, why do we even want this thing, this audiovisual communicator that puts us in constant touch with anybody that we've ever met in, you know, hundreds and thousands of people that we never have or never will? Why do we want this? And so you look at, I look at the history of where that sort of idea evolved from and how it was inspired by both fiction and technology. And then I move on to, you know, the basic mineral parts like this thing is made of silicon and tin. and tungsten and, you know, so many different elements that have to be mined and pulled out of the earth by real people

that we wouldn't have this thing in our hands if there weren't minors, sometimes child miners, for instance, in Bolivia, pulling this stuff out of the earth so we can get this final product. So, like, to me, like the iPhone is really an amalgam of all of these threads, and it was really just pretty incredible to get the opportunity to pull out of each of them. Yeah, I think in talking to you and talking to your publishers, we're figuring out what excerpt we're going to run. It is interesting to me how much you focused on the labor side of what's happening here and how important that is to you as part of the book. Yeah, because I think it's one of the most overlooked and most invisible parts. You know, from time to time there will be attention given to manufacturing, for instance, in China, in the megafactories.

operated by Foxcon. And you went out there too, right? I did. You know, I really was interested from the very beginning. It's actually one of the first things I did for the book is I flew out to Shanghai and I went over to Shenzhen, which is home to Longhua, which is probably the most famous Foxcon factory where the iPhone used to be made almost exclusively. And now it's the iPhone so big that it's made in other plants.

But yeah, so I, one of the. things I was fortunate enough to be able to do was to get inside this famous factory that had a suicide epidemic years ago and to discover by talking to a lot of the workers, the former workers, the people who live right next to this behemoth factory and the people who work within it, that it's still ongoing, that this thing that we kind of marveled over and was very tragic. and struck us and caused a media stir five or six years ago. It's still ongoing. It's still this, it permeates the culture there.

It's still very, very difficult to manufacture technology products. It's still, you know, its conditions are a little bit better. They're getting paid a little bit more. But it's, you know, every single device that we use that feels so seamless, that feels like this beautiful, you know, responsive artifact, is, goes through, you know, dozens and dozens of hands, and these people see hundreds, sometimes thousands of iPhones go through their stations and they have to do this very difficult, repetitive work. And there haven't been massive correctives to that work culture. It remains

long hours on your feet, brutal management style, you know, people last a year. And there are still, sadly, still some suicides. One of the people, we interviewed was a line worker who had just quit because he couldn't take it anymore. And he knew somebody who had just had enough and had committed suicide by jumping off the buildings and one of the places where there are not nets, the CEO of Foxcon famously installed nets to catch the bodies falling down. Yeah. And didn't really, yeah. So long story short is that there's still there's a lot there I hope people pay attention to that chapter that chapter may be coming out in an excerpt as well but I I think that that's it's important to really connect those two

parts of the process how something goes from an invention and an idea and a bona fide innovation and then you know we kind of outsource its realization we outsource collecting the hard materials and putting it together and, you know, oftentimes there are exceptions. But so it's, we really feel like, would could, I think we would do well to internalize and to combine all of the factors that, that, you know, make possible this incredible device. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we're, we're going to talk about sort of the inside Apple part of it for the rest of this

podcast. I'm sure that's the section that we ran, which was one of the most fascinating decision points inside of Apple. But as I read the book, I was struck by there's as much emphasis on that part. And I think on the labor and resource part, and I think it's very few authors have decided to focus on that as much as the other thing. And, you know, the drama inside of the company making the innovation. I thought it was very smart. So I wanted to make sure we talked about it right off the bat. But having done that now, let's do some drama. Uh-huh.

Let's get into it. So who'd you talk to? Because one of your big theses in the very beginning is there's the myth of the sole engineer, right, Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, and they're rightly lionized because it takes a lot of effort and will and dedication to bring innovations to market in the way that those people did. But then there's these huge branching chains of people working below them to actually realize the stuff. So you talk to a lot of people who don't get the credit, basically.

Right, yeah. Yeah, no, that's exactly the point I'm trying to make. And, like, yeah, like name one person who worked in Edison's lab who, like, you know, helped perfect that bamboo filament that made the light bulb work. We can't. They're totally lost to history that we glom onto these figureheads. And for a wide range of reasons, and sometimes parts of that's just. justified. I talked to anyone and everyone that was willing to talk, basically. I just reached out to

current, former, and affiliated Apple employees, people who all worked on the iPhone project or who had inside knowledge of it. I spoke to, you know, in a book like this, you know, like, that's unauthorized by Apple and given Apple secrecy. and its sort of nondisclosure policies, which I also touch on in the book. I didn't do a lot of on-the-record interviews with current members. I did do a number of anonymous interviews with current employees, but this was more people who've left Apple for whatever reason.

So I think some figures that come to mind are like boss-ording, who is one of the great unheralded sort of user interface geniuses, and his partner, Imran Chowdrey, who together have probably done more to, you know, under the leadership of their boss, Greg Christie, this human interface team is really one of the unheralded sort of design forces in all of technology over the last 20 years. I really believe that, that sort of they took ideas that had been, you know, lying around that were kind of, Maybe there was a, you know, this, a patent or a paper here or there for a little, you know, pinch to zoom or multi-touch. But these guys really took the software and using like Adobe Macromedia, like, built the entire user interface that is like, it's like, it's like water.

It is. It's everywhere. We touch, we expect things to sort of move like paper, like a tactile object. when we touched them. And that's because of the work that these guys did, really sort of perfecting this interactivity paradigm. So that crew is really important. And then I highlight a bunch of the early engineers who really were sort of cut from this like OG Apple sort of cloth from the Mac days where they're just like gung-ho, like crazy. Like let's let's like throw together these prototypes. Let's make a rig. Let's do whatever it takes to sort of make, you know, these sort of like abstract ideas.

turn into like functional technologies. So yeah, and I, you know, and I went up, I went on up the chain, and I talked to Tony Fidel, who was an executive at the time. I talked to people who would become VPs, like Henri Lamarou, who was just fascinating, just an interview, just a really, really, really had interesting things to say. Richard Williamson, who was sort of the brains behind Safari, and then subsequently the brain, brains behind squeezing Safari and a bunch of these other maps down from Mac size to iPhone size. Richard is a really fascinating, really brilliant person.

So there's all of these people. And then under them, you know, Evan Dahl, who was at the time, sort of, and in the trenches, sort of Jack of All Trades, engineer helping out on the iPhone and went on to found Flipboard and is now, I think, a bigger wig at Apple. But it really took this huge sort of concerted effort. Neaton Ganatra did mail. They knew that was going to be a big thing. So, yeah, there's dozens of interviews.

So you talk to Fidel. You point out in the book, right, there's three people. There's Fidel who is sort of in charge of hardware bring up. There is Scott Forstall, who's famously in charge of the software. And there's Johnny I, who's in charge of the design. and there's a line in your book that by the end of it, these three people would not even speak to each other. Right.

So you got Fidel. Did you talk to the other two? I actually did. I did not talk to Johnny. I have, again, no sitting Apple people participated on the record. And I did not talk to Scott Forstall on the record. We drew from the existing sort of his, he did court testimony, fortunately, which was lengthy.

pulled from that. He did sit for a profile with Bloomberg Business Week, and he worked very, very, very closely with Henri, Richard Williamson, and Neaton Ganatra, who were kind of his core sort of managers underneath him. And, you know, a lot of the, I mean, these guys spent every day together in and out of meetings, bouncing ideas back and forth, you know, and perfecting things in this crazy hurricane that was the iPhone development process. Yeah. It seems like Apple just wasn't, like they were not very responsive to you. Did you reach out to them? What was that like? So Apple was made aware of this book. I reached out to them as soon as I inked the deal. I just wanted to be completely above board. And I would have loved to interview their, you know, entire staff. And everybody who was involved with the iPhone project would have interesting things to say about it. And people who are, you know, working with it today. Obviously, it would have been great to hear from Tim Cook, but I, yeah,

no, you know, I made it very clear. I was very transparent about everything that I was doing. I gave them outlines. I gave them lists of people that I was hoping to speak to. I gave, I gave them many, many, many opportunities to comment, and we've kind of played a year-long game of email tag. I met with one of their reps in, in Cupertino and we had this chat where he's like, you know, Apple might be opening up. And it turns out they never did. They did and they did. I mean, they did and they did.

But I, that's like a, yeah, there was a time when Apple was like, we're opening up. Those of us in the press sort of watched it happen and not happen in different ways. But that I'm sure every journalist has an anecdote of some Apple person saying they're, their Apple's opening up now. So I want to start at the very beginning, sort of the proto history. We kind of have a sense of what the book is about. who you were talking to. There is,

I've never heard this before, and I found this fascinating. The origins of like touch computing at Apple started with this group, ENRI, and they were doing, like the first, it was like a projector over a Mac.

Can you tell me about that? Yeah. So there was a period, you know, at Apple where things kind of seemed, uh, sort of a little more informal and looser. And just this sort of this,

sort of this, collection of guys from different departments had slowly sort of met one of, met one another over the years. There were, beginning in the late 90s to early 2000s, there were a boss in Emron, who we mentioned earlier, were on the human interface team. And they'd been doing a bunch of stuff with a Mac, trying to update its, it's, its OS and doing and sort of pulling it out of the the gray black and white knobs and dial stuff. So they kind of built their renown, sort of making the little icons sort of bounce around and be more playful and look more stylish.

And so their star kind of rose and they got a little more freedom to do what they wanted. Meanwhile, there's a couple guys on the input engineering team, Brian Huppie and then Josh Strickon, who just wanted to, they were kind of kind of, they'd come to Apple to innovate, to do, to build crazy stuff, and they didn't want it to do more than just build laptops. And then there was, they both knew Duncan Care, who was this kind of, this guy who was on the industrial design group, but a little less siloed there. Like, he was interested in software too. So this group just started kind of like informally meeting every week, and they called the meetings, explore new, rich interactions. The idea was that

they, that sort of the way that we interface with computers, which around the time was all, you know, mouse keyboard, was getting too cumbersome. Media was getting richer. The internet was getting faster.

Processing power was improving. We were going to want to be able to do more stuff. And they sort of focused around this concept of direct manipulation, where if, you know, if you have a mouse, it's still indirect manipulation. There's still an intermediary between you and the computer and what you wanted to do. So they kind of really, they looked at a bunch of sort of technologies. Some of them, you know,

a little more mundane, like just like, you know, force feedback mice and stuff that was way more out there, like iterations of sort of like the connect style, you know, hand sensing, field sensing stuff. And they kind of like gravitated around this technology that had just gotten a boost called multi-touch, which now is sort of like the computer language we all speak with our hands. But at the time, it was very niche, and it had been developed by another one of the great unsung heroes of the iPhone development process, Wayne Westerman, who Wayne just has this incredible story. Like, again, I couldn't speak to him because he still works at Apple. I was able to get in touch with his sister and learn his story.

And he has a hand disability where he has kind of severe tendonitis. And while he was writing his dissertation on AI, he realized he just couldn't write. So he had to build himself a system that was less hard on his hand. So he kind of looked at multi-touch, which was kind of this experimental technology, and had been bubbling up for a while but never got much traction. and he built a pad for fingerworks. And it had just so happened that an intern had brought one of these hand disability.

This was a, like, a chording keyboard. And I'm sure not, like half of the Vergecast listeners know what I'm talking about and half don't. But it was, they used to advertise it in like print Macworld, this fingerworks cording keyboard where you would put your hands on it and you would push literally like piano chords to make letters. And so someone at Apple, an intern at Apple,

had purchased one of these. Right, exactly. And Wayne had played piano all his life. And so that was kind of part of the inspiration. And yeah, with the intern, or actually, I take that back. She was described to me in an interview as an intern, but she was not. I think she was a junior engineer who had just been hired. But she had brought one in, and they had noticed it, and they just said, okay, what can we do with this thing? And as the discussions progressed, they really kind of got the sense that this thing was going to, this had the kernel of. of being the future. So, like, what you were talking about is, like,

and they sort of pulled this thing, like, onto a table, brought in a projector screen, put a piece of paper over the keyboard, over the fingerworks pad, rather, which was this black opaque pad, and that piece of paper was going to be the screen. So they were like, what if we just, like, shine down, like, basically a Mac,

like home screen onto this and then we just kind of like tweak it so tweak the software so we can make it register touch and like we can see what this would look like like it was it was a totally slip shot like they totally just kind of like hack this thing together there was like Greg Christie the head of H.I. told me that he just like went home and like fished a camera lens

out of his garage and like screwed it onto the top so they could focus it up well enough and meanwhile like it's just funny that So they were doing this all in this abandoned user testing lab that it was down the hall from the ID, ID studio. Because like before, while after Jobs had been ousted, they had built this user testing lab where you'd bring people in to see how they respond to, you know, like, your focus group technology, basically. And when Steve Jobs came back, it was like, nope, like, we're not doing that anymore. We're going to tell them what they want. So this place had sat idle.

So there's all these cameras and this like weird. there's like VHS tapes. Like this all this kind of like this like sound mixing studio in a one-way mirror. And anyways, that was where they got to work because no one would bug them in there. So Boss and Amron and Josh Strickon and Brian Huppie all sort of really started trying to hack this thing together to see if they could, you know, make a demo that they could show to Johnny and then to Steve as maybe some, as a, as a, way to the future doing this direct manipulation stuff. Because at this point, Steve Jobs had no idea this was going on, both because, well, mostly because they didn't want him to say, what the hell are you doing in here and then just kill

the project, you know? Walking on this crazy projector rig with a piece of paper. If someone, if I caught somebody here like doing that, I think, what are you doing? Please get back to work. Oh, I would side with him. Totally. Sounds like just like a crazy, crazy mess. And the funny stuff about this process was that they were really sort of going about it.

Like old school DIY. They were looking at videos on the internet. Josh Strickon was reading the available literature. Sony had done something sort of similar with a giant table size touch screen called SmartStrecht. skin, so they looked at that and they... I love the story. They, like, read the research paper and copied it, right? Or something like that? And they got in trouble? Well, so I don't know. They don't know that they actually got in trouble, but they got, so,

you know, they're basically... Not in trouble with Sony, but like internal management trouble. Internally, right. So, like, they're just doing this freewheeling. Josh Strickon was just like this guy right out of MIT, so it was like, anything goes. You, you take, you pull from research. You, like, you know, you incorporate other ideas. You copy when necessary. So, yeah, so he built, you know, like they, I guess they were still, they had some trouble with the fingerwork stuff for technical reasons that they had just done it a different way because it was opaque. And they could layer the sensors and the chips inside it differently, but they needed a glass screen that you could interact with directly. So the Sony smart skin stuff was closer to that. So he was like, he was like, oh yeah, we did it this way.

And then when they, when, you know, periodically you have to check in with the, with the legal team. And they're like, oh, yeah, we just, we just did this like, because Sony did it. And they were like, wait, wait a minute. Like, no, stop looking at other stuff. We're doing it ourselves. This is our invention. Like, yeah. That's great.

So we've got this weird research project happening. A bunch of people in a projector with this fingerworks keyboard. The sort of canonical story of how the iPhone happened, Steve Jobs actually told to Walt Mossberg at the de-conference. He said, at first I had them make a tablet because I wanted a tablet, and then we couldn't figure out what to do with it. So I put it on the shelf, and then later I wanted to do a phone, and we took the tablet off the shelf and made the phone.

That's the, you know, 30,000-foot Steve Jobs version of the story. How do you go from a bunch of crazies in a room to tablet to iPhone? Well, so, yeah. So I think, like, the second half of that is actually. accurate and we'll probably get to that in a second. But yeah, these, the engineers all took issue with with the first part of that statement and that Steve Jobs asked for this when it was really kind of them that came up with with it. So what happened? I think they were imagining it first as sort of a new like sort of input paradigm for the Mac. But then once they realized they could do it with

the clear screen, they sort of naturally started gravitating around a tablet and doing a, doing a, you know, kind of prototyping something that would look closer to the iPad. And that, and when they showed something like that, that would be sort of in the trajectory towards tablet to Johnny Ive, that's when he says that he loved it. And he, in turn, showed it to Steve Jobs, who initially did not. But then, you know, it was, and then Steve Jobs came around to it because he, you know, he thought about it and he's a smart guy, obviously, and he sees sort of the potential there. And he's got, meanwhile, like, a couple of his best user interface guys, like, who are just in love with this project. I mean, the way that these guys talk about this project, it's just like, they were down there experimenting. The days would, like, turn into night. There were no windows. So, like, they'd forget to eat. And they were just, I mean, it's like, it talks about. They talk about it like, you know, like a painter who, like painting is breakthrough masterpiece or something. Like, it really is something that they is near and dear to them. So, so there's clearly a lot of passion motivating the project.

And it, you know, Steve Jobs signed on to it. And there's this funny quote from Greg Christie where after he does kind of give it the green light where like he comes back and, you know, the team's kind of all gathered around a table and they're like, oh, so you've been talking to Steve? Like, what did he say? And Greg Christie's like, well, we're going to have to change our notebooks guys, because it turns out Steve Jobs invented multi-touch or something like that. Just because he got so excited about the idea then that he owned it, you know. Yeah. Which is like a very classic job story, right? Classic jobs. And that's part of what like made him such a great leader too is that he like absorbed

all that passion and said, you know, like, this is, this is what we're doing and he would channel that again later. And people, he really did inspire people. But, but, but yeah, so the rig, the challenge was then turning the rig into a prototype tablet, and the input engineering team sort of doubled down on that effort and went through a bunch of hurdles that, you know, they're going to Radio Shack. They're like, scavenging parts. They had to buy a Windows computer to run some of the firmware,

and they just kind of like managed to like hack this thing together that looks like a big fat kind of ugly iPad. And that was called the Q79 project. It was codenamed. It got more resources, got a little more visibility. But it still had its share of hurdles, mostly that it was looking like the thing was going to be expensive, like just as much as a laptop, maybe more, because you didn't have all these parts to scale.

No one was making multi-touch-capable touch screens or sensors at the time. So, like, you had to work out supply issues and you needed new chips, you know, you needed pretty much, you know, to invent a lot of stuff. And that's what these guys were doing. They were perfecting a lot of stuff that was out there. They were making big innovation leaps on their own, you know, just strict. on has a patent for sort of integrating the smart skin-esque technology into a more like aptly tablet and eliminating sort of the grid work that would otherwise appear on the screen.

So there's a lot of, you know, a lot of innovation had to go into, you know, even getting it that far. So now we shift into the drama, the real drama, the controversy that is a rupt at for he published this thing. So at the same time, the job says, we're going to make a phone. It was not clear. I was talking to Dieter, who usually hosts the Verchcastle me just before I came on, his note to me was, remind everyone that at the time Apple was deciding between the thing that we now know is the iPhone and an iPod phone, which was the other concept, the idea of an iPod phone made total and complete sense because of the way that carriers controlled the market, the idea that they were dumb phones, they had limited functionality, the idea that you could just glue in. iPod and a cell phone together and call that a spell phone was totally legitimate given the state

of the market at that time. So they're pursuing both tracks. Right. And totally, and not only that, but like iPod is one of the most powerful brands in the world at this time. It's like the coolest device. So like iPod phone, like, okay, you can, you can see that leap being made easy enough. And it would just be, it wouldn't have been that difficult from a technological standpoint to just, you know, get a radio in there and allow it to take calls, which they did, in fact. They did, and they, you know, hacked in, you know, a modem. They hacked in a radio.

And they, there were working callable iPod phones. So, yeah, just to back up a quick second. And this part has been told a little bit before, but Apple was really kind of like feeling the heat from smarter handsets, smarter cell phones. in that, like, they were going to encroach on iPod territory pretty soon. iPod was their big cash cow. When the Henri guys started experimenting with this new stuff, it wasn't. The iPod was just a blip.

It was this kind of weird accessory that Apple was making. But come, you know, 2004, 2005, the iPod is a hit. And, you know, it really looks like, you know, computers are going to be getting small and powerful enough to fit an entire, little operating system onto a phone. It's easy to squeeze like songs onto phones. Like people like their iPod. They, you know, stomach their cell phones just fine. Like, let's put them together.

That makes sense. So it was really kind of like motivated by this business imperative. And yeah, and then so when they started casting around and say, okay, what do we have? We have this hit product, this incredible, like, you know, proven technology with an iconic click wheel, iconic look, iconic brand. And what else? Well, we have this like, experimental, like,

like touchscreen-based rate, like, it's tethered. Like, the battery lasts for, like, 45 seconds if you unplug it. And it's like, it heats up. And it's like, there's this thing. And early on, you know, according to everybody, like,

Jobs did, like, you know, that's when that lines up. He was like, this would be great for that. Like, this would be, it would eliminate some of our issues because we can have kids. carriers subsidize it. It would be a little easier to manage the technology because by virtue of its size, it would sort of, you know, it would be easier to get the touch to register. There'd be less

like awkward. You'd have to deal with fewer sensors, that kind of stuff. So, subsidize the expense, right? Because the initial problem with the touch stuff was it's going to be so expensive. And Jobs is looking at the business model of the carriers and saying, well, they pay for most of this anyway, which I think is fascinating. Yeah, that's what, that's what a couple of these guys who are familiar with the dealing said. So, I mean, meanwhile, like, as kind of a stop gap, the, you know, there's the, the, the Motorola rocker is this thing that Apple. I don't want to spend one second talking about the Motorola.

Done. Yeah, it was just like. It's not deserving of any attention in this world. Yeah. It's like, it has to be one of the most, whenever I would bring it up in interviews, it's just like one of those universally reviled products, I think. But it was important for one reason, and that's that it got Apple and got jobs into the meetings with the telecom folks.

There was a great comment on the excerpt. There's a comment for somebody, which we obviously can't verify as a commenter, but a great comment, it's like, Motorola deserves credit here because Ed Zander told all the engineers to just be as open as possible with Apple because he thought he would get paid by jobs, and Jobs told his engineers to just steal everything and learn as much as they could and walk away. And that guy apparently worked at Motorola at the time.

Anyway, so now we're on to, okay, Tony Fidel, you're in charge of, I think he was in charge of P1, which is iPod phone, a code name is P. Purple 1. Scott Forstall is in charge of software for P2, and they're basically in a bake-off. Yeah, exactly. So there basically wasn't any hardware for P2. It was really just like perfecting this interaction paradigm. So it was, and it wasn't like, they were both sort of like, it was like, It was like, okay, you two, you know, like one of you is going to be the winner, you know,

Tony do your best, Scott do your best, and, you know, whoever has a shiniest product wins. It kind of worked out that way, like, you know, effectively, but not, but it wasn't like the imperative from the beginning. They just both had these two sort of tracks that were going, going. And Tony, to his credit, saw early on that there was movement towards a phone, and he got a team doing a skunk works early to get this iPod phone ready, so they just, you could just show jobs and say like, oh, you want one? Like, here's what it looks like. Unfortunately, like, it just kind of boiled down to the fact that you can't make calls with a,

with, like, a rotary dial wheel. It just... Well, you can, but, like, the world moved beyond that fairly quickly when the advent of digital, right? Right. So you had it... So there's a third element. There's, like, there's Tony doing the iPod phone. There's Forstall and Williamson and those guys sort of working on this soft.

software side, and then there's the human interface team, which is working on both. So like Boss and Imron went over to see if after the rocker failed, jobs apparently called like in all hands and said, okay, like we need to do a phone, we need to do it better, and we need to do it fast. And since Tony's project was the closest one to realization, he's like, okay, H.I., boss, Imron, H.I. team, see if you can like make this thing work. So they built like predictive text analysis. They built, like, this, they tried to mess with the UI to make it more amenable. They did all these things.

And it just, you know, I think after months and months and months of trying and in Tony's version of the story, Jobs is egging them on to try to get it to work. It's just not bearing any fruit. Meanwhile, like the touch paradigm, the scrolling stuff, like the, the, the, the, the demos that they're working up with the multi-touch is looking more and more compelling. Like you can, boss has whipped up like a really good sort of scrolling through the address book demo, for example. Like, and that's one of your key things.

If you have a phone, you want to be able to like flip through your address book in a way that's not cumbersome, like typing through names or like jamming on a hard down button. Yeah. So they were working on stuff like that and they knew they could do richer media stuff, like pinching and zooming and sort of. swiping around. So that, you know, became the next focus.

And there's a great story from Greg Christie, who was also, you know, trying and failing to meet Steve's expectations with this thing where they had all these, like, little demos and shards, and Christie calls them top us. But Jobs is like, I don't, I don't, like, this isn't what I want. Like, I don't want this, like, these abstractions. Like, show me something that looks in. feels like a phone or something we can relate to a phone. Otherwise, I'm going to give it to another crew. And then Christy Goat says they went on what he calls a two-week death march,

where people were just sleeping in there, crashing at his house, just the place stinks. It's, you know, and they're hacking up out, you know, this really sort of rudimentary thing that he says at the end of that two-week stretch was sort of like the basic sort of foundation and layout of what we would recognize as the iPhone today. That's wild. So let's get into it. So the excerpt you published, there's a moment where they're arguing about what's going to happen. And you have a story from Tony Fidel that says, in the middle of all this, Phil Schiller,

who is still head of marketing at Apple, is insistent that they do a hardware keyboard. We published the excerpt. There's another quote in there for a guy named Bill Bilbrie who says, Phil is not like, smart, like jobs kept him around because he sees the technology like grandpa and grandpa. Grandma and grandpa. So obviously, I think this surprised you. It was less surprising to me. Everyone seized on this moment in the excerpt.

Tony tweeted today, this is not true, which is incredible because it's just a quote from Tony. Is it true? Like, what's going on here? Yeah. I mean, so here's what I can say about it. So, like, I wasn't in the room. I wasn't in the room at Apple, you know, 10, 15 years ago when this would have happened. But I, you know, this is the quote verbatim as Tony Fidel, who was in the room, told it to me.

And he told me this quote in such detail. And he gave this such a vivid account. And I had no reason not to believe it was untrue. So I went ahead. And you presumably, you. presumably you were like in a restaurant with him, right? You presumably like taped it, right? And then you transcribed it. Yeah. I'm just like, like this is the basics, right? I mean, like his claim is this isn't true, but it's a quote. And I was saying to you earlier, I know Tony. I like Tony.

Tony is a very colorful person and a huge personality. But you just quoted him, right? I did. I just, I just quoted him. So this whole thing, and not only that, but I have a source who wanted to stay anonymous. corroborate the whole thing, but corroborate the fact that Phil had been against multi-touch technology. So I felt comfortable in including this direct quote from an interview that was, you know, this quote was given on the record.

So I 100% stand by that, and the whole thing is a little perplexing to me. You know, I know that there's professional relationships and whatever that, that, you know, people get concerned about. But yeah, this controversy has kind of blown me away. It was, there's, there was very little controversial about it to me before, before I saw any of the fallout.

So you, you haven't been a part of the Apple media circus, I guess, in the past. Because to me, this is a train that I just saw coming. But it's a quote, I mean, it's a direct quote with his name by it. So I figured, you got quotes with their names. It's a direct, it's a direct quote. You know, I've verified the quotes, you know, as soon as this dust started kicking up. And, you know, it's, I mean, it's unfortunate that he feels uncomfortable about it now. But, like, yeah, it's, again, it's a very straightforward situation, you know, an interview in-person quote was given.

You know, it's very, very straightforward. word. And I also wanted to comment on the Brillbray stuff because it's I think like he everybody's taking it as this like sort of vicious insult which I can see how it's it kind of is but it's also like you want somebody like that at the higher echelons who's not who's not going to be like so deep in

the weeds that like he only understands what power users are going to be able to do with this thing. So I think this is Apple's great strength, actually. Right. So I think what Brett was trying to say was that, and maybe it stems from some frustration with Schiller or something, but it didn't seem like it. It seemed like he's just saying, like, look, like, like Phil, you know, has this strength. He interprets technology. He can say, like, okay, this is going to play well with an older generation or folks who are not, you know, just early adopters or beta testers or whatever, you know. So I think that that's part of it.

Can I just interrupt you for one second? Yeah. So like I said, I know Tony. I know Tony's PR person. I asked Tony and his PR person what's going on here. And I just got an email back from her that says, Tony stands by his tweet and has nothing more to say about this. So that's where he's landed.

Like I said, I like Tony a lot. I hope one day he tries to explain what is going on in his mind with these quotes. Well, he did. So, yeah, I mean, if that's what he's saying, he stands by his tweet tweets and he says it's not true. I don't, you know, I don't know what else to, you know, what else to say about this. He did, I mean, he did write me and say, I told you a lot of funny hyperbolic stories when we met. I did not mean for you to take the iPhone keyboard story, literally. I don't know what that means.

I don't... Like I said, I really enjoyed our interview together. I really thought that it was pretty straightforward. I think that it's a case of somebody, you know, maybe regretting saying something after the fact and wanting to preserve a professional relationship. Or I don't know, I shouldn't really speculate. I don't know.

Because... Yeah. Well, here's what I'll say. I think the two quotes together are, they work interestingly together, right? So there is the extreme hindsight of knowing that physical keyboards weren't the right answer, which we have a decade of hindsight. Exactly. But at that moment, the BlackBerry was so popular at the time.

And everyone thought the iPhone was stupid because it didn't have this keyboard. So when they launched, that was the primary criticism of the iPhone was there's no physical keyboard. So to have someone in the room saying we're screwing this up without having this keyboard is actually fine and appropriate. But then there's this other. And so in that context of Fidel's story is fine, right? Like it's just a moment that happened that it would have been honestly pretty weird if it hadn't happened based on the market at the time. Then there's the other quote that's like Phil is, Phil is not a technology guy, which is a quote, right? And I think those two paint this picture of Phil that is, I will say this.

I've seen Phil, I've talked to Phil, I've had nerdy conversations about cameras with Phil. Walt has had many, many more conversations with Phil than I have over the years. And he assures me, Phil is just as geeky as it gets with some of this technology stuff. But, and this is Walt saying this to me, he says a lot of times his engineers have contempt for people who aren't engineers. And Phil, not an engineer, as a marketing person. And that you can see how that can filter up and down.

So I don't doubt that Phil, if, you know, Phil was on this show, or Phil's, he goes on John Gruber's show all the time. When they get into the weeds about the details of consumer technology, I'm sure he's there. And he knows what he's talking about. I think it's this other level of, here's what I'm actually doing

way down in the nitty-gritty of engineering. And that's, there's this disconnect there. And I think it's like, but I think that conversation around should this thing have a keyboard in 2005, 2006, 2007, right before this thing comes out, that is like a, that is the, the conversation to be having in mobile technology at that time. Yeah. Exactly. And I think that like that, that quote, it wasn't, it certainly wasn't intended to make Phil Schiller look dumb. It was, it was an opposing viewpoint. I think, like you're saying, in hindsight, like, now that.

that now that it is like water, to quote Imran Chowdhury, it does look, how could you be against this thing? But so it was like somebody with the interests of like the current echelon of technology users in mind and somebody that, you know, knew very well the marketing power of something like Blackberry or a hard keyboard was making this argument. The reason that I paired them together is that I do have other sources who have said things to this effect. And I think primarily it has to do with this multi-touch moment and the opposition to multi-touch and maybe not understanding fully at the time what the guys that were trying to convince people like the marketing department to take this on. as a product, you know, to give this more resources, I think it was like there was some frustration that he wasn't on the same page with them. I don't, you know, I don't know anything beyond the quotes that I'm given, the stories that people tell me, and the, you know, the research that I've done about what it was like to be an apple at the time through, you know, you know,

documents. Phil Schiller gave his own court testimony. and there's been plenty of Apple reporting over the years. So, you know, I think that this whole thing is maybe just a little blown out of proportion, I think. I think that it's totally fine to be a dissenting voice and to, you know, want to contextualize this emergent technology and even be opposed to it. Like you said, why would you not have someone in the room who was forcing people to think critically about this potentiality? So I think that there's, you know, a lot of people who don't, you know, like to see that kind of, who interpret it negatively. And I don't think it necessarily is. Yeah.

Well, the Apple media, the Mac media, they used to call it the Mac web way back ago. But it's not like the iPhone web. But the Apple Web, if you will, is a unique force in the tech media. It's funny. Right before I started the show, I was like, well, welcome to this. because sometimes they take things at necessary extremes, I think, in order to make sure Apple looks good in the end. Yeah, I mean, I'm getting that sense, too. And I don't, you know, I can't really speculate on the machinations behind sort of the efforts to, you know, discredit or if they even exist or what's going on at all behind some of this blowback.

But, you know, I will say that I was, I'm sure that it was destined to happen. You know, people, there is a culture of appreciation for Apple that in many ways is well deserved. Like it's this crazy, they've created this incredible run of products that people love. So, you know, I don't begrudge anyone for, for, you know, having a stake in it. I do think that it's, you know, it's interesting to see some of the pre-coiled backlash from from some of the people who just, you know, don't, who have an image of Apple that they, that, that's, that they want to, you know, hold up themselves and, and promote, especially some, some of these

bloggers and, and, and, and commentators. So, maybe this, maybe this narrative, and maybe some of the stories in this book will violate some of the Apple myths that are more deeply held. But I think that's a healthy thing. I think that the truth is, is that, like, a lot of these ideas, like percolate and spring up from the ground. And I think that a lot of people who really make Apple, Apple, a lot of the people in the trenches, the engineers, the designers, quality assurance people, people who like are tasked with like really sort of hacking together these crazy, these crazy products and doing the grunt work, you know, elude a lot of, a lot of credit. And I'd like to focus on everything that they did too.

And, you know, honestly, I'd like to focus more on that than, you know, a war of words between executives. Yeah. But sometimes it's like unavoidable. You're in it. Yeah, it's part of the culture, too, for sure. So there's one thing that I want to ask about. And it was interesting. You know, I read it, I read the book.

I read the excerpt again when we put it up. And I noticed that in our comments, a lot of people picked up on this that the iPhone had broken up marriages, like multiple marriages. And there was a little bit of a debate on, is that, you know, is that a product of the culture? Is that good? Is that how it is now? What's your sense of that? Were you expecting so many people to focus on that little detail? Was that a pervasive thing that you heard about? Give me some more on that. Yeah, absolutely. It was. It was pervasive, that is. It was, and I don't necessarily think that it is endemic to Apple's culture alone. You know, Apple's demanding sort of work culture may have played a role in amplifying it during this project.

But I think that we should look at this more as sort of a relationship between people, really, really brilliant, smart, hardworking people who are sensing that they have an opportunity to work on something. revolutionary, so to speak, something that is going to be big. You know, you can sense a bigness and wanting to tap into it and to, you know, really sort of dedicate themselves to it. So I think it's more of a comment on the toll that they paid, you know, they had choices, of course. I've seen some of those comments, too, that, you know, like it's, you know, they could have gone home earlier. they could have, you know, who know, maybe they, maybe that wouldn't have been tolerated under, under the, the, the, the management during the time. But nobody really spoke of it in those terms. I wanted to, like, communicate the terms that people spoke in it, which spoke of that particular element, which is, like, this is what it took. There wasn't much of a question about it. And I think Greg Christie, like, put it, put it the best. Like, in hindsight, you know, like, you know, we could have done things differently. But, But at the moment, we couldn't have. We just really, we really were so absorbed in the task at hand.

The pressures were so great that we did never really think about, you know, abdicating work. And, you know, it was so stressful. It was stressful for some more than others, depending on which department you were in and what your tasks were and what you were responsible for. But I think it's worth examining. that this sort of lionization of work, especially in Silicon Valley. You know, I was just, I just was randomly pulled into like a Twitter thread a week or so ago where this VC was saying, like, you have to, you know, like we only found people who, you know,

work weekends, work all the time, work everything. And, you know, and there's something that's a little bit toxic about that, I think, in making those demands and perpetuating this culture of, you know, round-the-clock work as a norm or as mandatory for success. But, you know, and in this book, you know, I did a lot of interviews with people who had lived the consequences of that. And some said, you know, like, I would do it all over again the same way. And some are much more ambivalent. And some, you know, are still sort of coming to terms with what even that sort of investment of time and resources at the expense of family meant. Some feel like they have to sort of pay penance to like make up for it, which is

interesting. Yeah, the other thing I'll say, we've talked now for just over an hour, and you've mentioned a lot of names. We've talked to a lot of people. Not one female name so far, right? This is like a male-dominated team. I think there's only one. You pay attention to this in the book. there's only one woman on the core iPhone. Yeah, there's, and in the beginning there, you know, from the design phase on up, there were none, which is sort of like a, well, you know, it's a problem, obviously, and it's something that's been true of Silicon Valley for a long time. And it's, it's something that, you know,

A lot of the guys that I interviewed didn't quite know what to make of it when it would come up in interviews. And some, you know, straight up lamented it. And it was, you know, it's is. It's crazy. It's crazy. This device that is in, you know, has a billion sold. It's inspired, you know, its design paradigms and its software have inspired knockoffs that have many more billions sold. Android phones and, you know, many of the design flourishes and the design architecture has been

changed. But it's incredible to think that this, it was designed, you know, by men, ostensibly for men, mostly white men. You know, it's in the human interface design team, which came up with a lot of the interaction design that was a little more diverse, there were, there were, there were you know, two non-white members as opposed to less than that, and others. But yeah, it's, it is. It's a snapshot of this industry 10 years ago, which was doing even less about diversity then than it is now. And, you know, I don't really know what the biggest,

you know, result of the, of sort of like the way it was designed and the software. But, you know, it is, you know, a lot of, a lot of smart writers have pointed out that it's like these products are designed with men in mind. And that sort of, you know, like Rose Eveleth, for instance, has done a lot of interesting work looking at, you know, the implications of design. And when you have a room full of men designing a product, it's going to come out more tailored for men's hands and men's usage. So that's a real thing that we should be thinking about. And not only that, but the culture was very masculine. You know, there's stories of people looking at pornography in the hallways of the place. You know, there's a lot of testosterone.

And, you know, I can't imagine, you know, what it must have been like for a woman working on that team. And the woman who was there, Kim Vorath, is a polarizing figure as a result of these interviews. people call her, you know, derogatory terms and that could be just because she, you know, collided with them on a personal level, but you have to think about it. You have to think about what this, what this means for the product at large. So what's your last kind of big thought about this? Obviously, when people read the book, tell them when it comes out, what to buy it, how much costs all that. But after they're done reading the book, what do you want people to think about? Yeah, I want people to think about,

Technology products, especially one that's become as ubiquitous as the iPhone, which means and it means, you know, this smartphone sort of staple, this iconic black rectangle. I want people to think about the whole immense sort of tapestry of work, of invention, of ideas, of innovation that all has to be threaded together. I really hope people come away from this book, you know, looking at the iPhone and being queued to say, oh, okay, there's the work of a Bolivian minor in there. Oh, okay, there's the work of Imran Chowdry, the great UI designer in there. Oh, there's the work of Wayne Westerman who had, you know, who built multi-touch and brought it to fruition because of his hand injuries. Oh, there's Sophie Wilson, the brilliant, you know, transgender

architecture designer. There's just so many different people and personalities and centuries-long ideas stewing that all bubbled up to make this thing possible. So I really want everybody to be able to look at it and kind of recognize what it takes to create something so ubiquitous. And think about how that reflects back on us too. So now you've got to pitch the book. When can you buy it? How How much is it cost? It's on sale June 20th. How much to cost? If you pre-order it, you get a special deal.

It's 18 bucks and 50 cents. So pre-order it on Amazon, on iBooks, but it'll be out. There's something really special at buying the book on iBooks, I think. Yeah. It feels like closing the loop. Yeah, exactly. Complete the experience. And then read it on your iPhone, you know.

Exactly. Yeah. Great, man. Well, thank you so much for coming out on the show. Thank you for diving deep in the weeds of the controversy. Thank you for experiencing the Apple Press with me, because very few people know what that's like on the other side. And thank you so much for writing this book and doing the work. Again, I've read it. I think it's outstanding. I was proud to publish a big chunk of it on The Verge. And I hope everybody else reads it, too. All right, man. Well, thanks so much for having me on. It was a pleasure to talk about some of this stuff. And I'm just thrilled with the excerpt. And Vergecast, man. This was fun.

Cut through the night. Thank you. See everybody. All right.