"Steve had expressly told me it was totally top
secret. He said he was going to fire anyone who
tells the world.
"I was sweating bullets."
Tony Fadell was pondering just how he was
going to explain to Steve Jobs that he'd lost the
prototype of what would become the most
successful technology product of all time, the
Apple iPhone which launched 10 years ago on
Monday.
He'd just got off a plane, felt his pockets, and...
nothing.
"I was walking through every scenario thinking
about what could happen," he told me. None of
them ended well.
After two hours, relief - thanks to the efforts of a
search party that didn’t know what it was trying
to find.
"It fell out of my pocket and it was lodged in
between the seats!"
Within just a few months, the world would know
all about the little device - but for now, Fadell
was holding it tight.
60s future phone
Tony Fadell is sometimes referred to as the
"godfather" of the iPod. He left Apple in 2010, and
went on to found Nest, the smart home company
now owned by Alphabet, Google’s parent
company. He left that company last year*.
As far as Fadell is concerned, today is in fact the
12-and-a-half year anniversary of the first
iPhone.
That’s when he started working on the idea, born
out of an acceptance that the iPod, which was
turning around Apple’s fortunes, was a platform
that could be developed further.
By this point the iPod had got video capabilities,
even games.
"We were like, 'Wait a second, data networks are
coming'," he told the BBC.
"We should be looking at this as a general
purpose platform."
Starting this way was the magic ingredient that
meant the iPhone broke boundaries, Fadell said.
While competitors like Microsoft were trying to
shrink the PC into a phone, Apple was looking to
grow the iPod into something more sophisticated.
Indeed, one early iPhone concept design used the
iPod's distinctive click-wheel as its input method.
That was soon ditched.
"We were turning it into a rotary phone from the
sixties," Fadell remembered. "We were like, 'This
doesn’t work! It's too hard to use'."
It just so happened that in another part of Apple,
work had started on a touchscreen Macintosh
computer.
"They had been working on this in secret. It was
the size of a ping pong table. Steve showed it to
me and said, 'I want to take that and put it on an
iPod'."
Fadell warned Jobs that to make a touchscreen
device like the one he envisioned would take time,
money and new dedicated infrastructure. They
went for it.
"We needed thousands of people working on all of
this, at the same time, for it to land together for
the launch.
"And then we only had six months after that to
ship it. Obviously we pulled it off, but it was not
easy."
Malmo Mystery
Apple had many of the best brains in the
business, but until that point it hadn’t ever made
a phone of its own.
And so Fadell planned a fact-finding world tour
to meet experts and check out research labs of
telecoms experts.
It began with one manufacturer in Malmo,
Sweden - a trip which ended with all of their
bags, notes and equipment being stolen from their
cars while they were inside a restaurant having
dinner.
"They knew we were building a phone," Fadell
said.
"We asked our host where to get to dinner, we
were there all of 20 or 30 minutes because we
were tired.
"When we got back to the car, every single thing
in the car was gone. Every single bag. We swear
it was corporate espionage."
If it was, there were few secrets lost. The team
returned home without many of their belongings,
but heads full of ideas.
Meanwhile, one fiery debate was just getting
started.
Keyboard killed off
It was of course: Should the iPhone have a
keyboard or not?
"That fight raged on for around four months,"
Fadell said. "It was a very ugly situation."
Jobs, who had his heart set on a touchscreen,
became so incensed with people disagreeing with
his ideas that he enforced a blunt policy.
Looking back - BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones on the
launch
A Sunday newspaper columnist described me as
having clutched the phone as if it were "a
fragment of the true cross", and some viewers
complained that the BBC had given undue
prominence to a product launch.
I appeared on the Newswatch programme to
defend our reporting and said that some products
did merit coverage because they promised a step
change in the way we lived - and I mused on
whether the Model T Ford would have been a
story if we'd had a TV news bulletin back then.
Afterwards, I rather regretted saying that - who
knew whether the iPhone would really prove as
revolutionary as the arrival of mass car
ownership?
But today that comparison does not look so
outlandish.
Read Rory's blog post
"Until you can agree with us you can’t come back
in this room,"” Fadell recalled Jobs saying to pro-
keyboarders. "If you don’t want to be on the
team, don’t be on the team."
The disagreements soon stopped.
"One person got sent out of the room and
everybody got the message and fell in line."
But while the argument left the room, it didn’t
leave the iPhone team’s minds. Indeed, some
people still think it was the wrong decision not to
go for a Blackberry-style keyboard which, back
then at least, was the phone to beat.
"We laid out all the risks of using just a
touchscreen. We had to work around each one."
Secret Stylus Strategy
From the word go, Jobs was clear: the iPhone
didn’t need to work with a stylus because your
finger is all you should need.
But Fadell told the team working on the multi-
touch screen - arguably the greatest breakthrough
the iPhone heralded - to make sure it was
compatible with a stylus anyway.
"I thought, 'We must make this work with a
stylus'," Fadell remembered.
"Because we knew it was right, even though
Steve was making a philosophical point initially
saying you can just use your finger. We knew
there will come a day when you’re going to need
a stylus.
"We did it without his knowledge, it was behind
the scenes. He would've ripped my head off."
Doing things in secret was a common strategy for
stubborn engineers and designers who took the
view that what Jobs didn’t know couldn't hurt
him. And if you were eventually proven right, you
could accept the praise.
"It was the same thing that happened with the
iPod working on a PC," Fadell said.
"Steve wanted nothing to do with it, but when
iPod growth stalled, we said, 'Oh by the way
we've been working on this background'."
"I asked Steve how much a song on iTunes cost,
and he said, '99 cents'. I said, 'No, it’s the cost
of an iPod, plus the songs, plus a Mac! We only
have 1% market share, Steve!'
“He understood.”
Jobs may have relented on having Apple products
work on Windows, but he took his hatred of the
stylus to his grave, though his successor, Tim
Cook, introduced the Apple Pencil in 2015.
Steve Ballmer's laughter
And so to the 9th January 2007.
Hordes of fans and media shuffled into San
Francisco’s Moscone Center to see what Jobs
brought on as his "one more thing" at the end of
a keynote address at that year’s Macworld event.
The device on stage was "only half-baked", Fadell
recalled, but was quickly referred to as the
"Jesus phone".
The press mocked the cultish manner in which
iPhone was unveiled. Steve Ballmer, at the time
Microsoft's chief executive, famously laughed at
the device, calling it "not a very good email
machine" that wouldn't appeal to business users.
"We all laughed at him," Fadell remembered.
"We also laughed at Blackberry. Whenever I
create a new product , and I learned this with
Steve [Jobs], if the incumbents laugh at you and
the press laugh at you, you go, 'we’ve hit a
nerve'."
Since that day, more than a billion iPhones have
been sold, helping make Apple the richest
company in the world.
