How an iPod with a rotary dial eventually became the iPhone
Tony Fadell, currently the CEO of Nest, has had a crucial role in the design of both the iPod and the iPhone, and boy has he got some stories to tell.
In an interview at the SVForum in Palo Alto, California last week — fully transcribed by VentureBeat — Fadell shared a number of details on the early days of the iPod, the iPhone and Steve Jobs' legendary, dogged persistence when it comes to creating seemingly impossible gadgets.
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Fadell remembers the birth of the iPhone as an especially laborious one. He noted it took a total of two and a half to three years of research, design and development to create the device — which was then viewed as the iPod with a phone — and, at times, it seemed like an impossible task.
"We started out by making an iPod phone. It was an iPod with a phone module inside it. It looked like an iPod, but it had a phone, and you would select numbers through the same interface and so on. But if you wanted to dial a number it was like using a rotary dial. It sucked," he said.
"It looked like an iPod, but it had a phone, and you would select numbers through the same interface and so on. But if you wanted to dial a number it was like using a rotary dial. It sucked."
What seemed like a device destined to fail eventually turned into one of the most important gadgets ever, but it likely wouldn't happen without Steve Jobs' tenacity.
"We knew three months in that it wasn't going to work. Steve said, 'Keep trying!' We tried everything. We tried for seven or eight months to get that thing to work. Couldn't do it. We added more buttons and it just became this gangly thing," Fadell said.
It took many more iterations to actually get to the production version of iPhone, and it included a lot of rethinking, dropping everything and starting over.
According to Fadell, Apple first "created a touch screen company to build the multi-touch display. Then we needed a better operating system, so we brought a bunch of pieces of the Mac, a bunch of pieces of the iPod, and bolted them together. That was the first version. Then we threw that away and made the second version of the iPhone. That was the one that shipped."
Fadell also dismissed a common myth, which is that Apple is always planning everything years in advance. "There was no master plan. We were living day to day. We started with iTunes, so you can rip CDs and make mix CDs. Then people want something more than a CD, something convenient to put their music on. Then they’re ripping CDs to get their music, so there has to be a better way. That was when digital downloads and then iTunes Music Store happened," he explained.
Another interesting tidbit from the interview is Steve Jobs' insistence to hear then-Wall Street Journal tech journalist Walt Mossberg's opinion before shipping iTunes for the PC.
"We're going to build these and run it by Mossberg. And if Mossberg says it's good enough to ship, then we'll ship it," said Jobs, according to Fadell.
Read the entire interview here.
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Stan is a Senior Editor at Mashable, where he has worked since 2007. He's got more battery-powered gadgets and band t-shirts than you. He writes about the next groundbreaking thing. Typically, this is a phone, a coin, or a car. His ultimate goal is to know something about everything.
