'We didn't want cell phones to come eat our lunch, ok?' Tony Fadell busts the iPhone conception myths
Steve was pissed off, and wanted to show them how to do it right
Both, it turns out, and some more, too. Ex-Apple's Tony Fadell, who was in charge of the iPod franchise at the time, sat down for an interview, and explained that the reason there are so many conflicting rumors what lead to the first iPhone, is that there were simply competing teams set by Steve Jobs to bounce ideas off. "We were trying to do this because we didn't want cell phones to come eat our lunch, OK?"The pressure for iPod sales has been enormous, he mentions, as that's where the bulk of Apple's revenue came from at the time, but the advent of music download and streaming technologies was threatening the high-margin iPods with the largest storage amounts. That is why Steve Jobs tasked the teams with various ideas to improve and diversify, cell phones included:
..there were many projects that came together to make the final phone. There was a large screen iPod for video that had a touch interface. There was an iPod phone, which was basically an iPod Mini, perhaps a bit bigger, with a phone inside that had a wheel and a small screen. There was a touchscreen Macbook Pro being worked on, a multitouch Macbook Pro. That was what was going on from a hardware perspective. Then there were different software projects, too.
The touchscreen Mac is a new twist here, and, with regular iPad sales being cannibalized by larger iPhones, it might still happen at some point. That project was apparently in response to Microsoft's tablet efforts at the time: "Steve was pissed off, and wanted to show them how to do it right," explains Tony Fadell without mincing words. All of these problems that Apple was trying to tackle at once finally resulted into the technologies and software lessons learned converging to form the little soapy-shaped phone that could, and the rest is history. Last but not least, when asked if he knew about the LG Prada touchscreen phone, released in 2006, Tony Fadell takes the mythbusting road:
Yes, I knew about it. I had probably 100 different cell phones, 100 different competitor music players, consumer electronics of all sorts ripped apart and looked at. We looked at everything. They were all over my office in various pieces, just to look at them, to understand what they were, see how they were built and what their competitive value was.
source: Wired
FCC OKs Cingular\'s purchase of AT&T Wireless
Things that are NOT allowed: