History

Jean-Louis Gassée, Monday Note:

Much has been said about the original iPhone’s success factors: an innovative multi-touch interface, a never-seen-before combination of cell phone, iPod and Internet “navigator”. All good, but missing one crucial element: removing the carrier’s control on the iPhone’s features and content.

Steve Jobs did what only he could do, get AT&T to give up control:

Before the iPhone, handsets received the same treatment as containers of yogurt in a supermarket chain. The central purchasing office told the yogurt makers which flavors to ship, when, where, at what price, with payment at some point in the future after we’re sure there are no more returns. And don’t forget to send your people to make sure the labels line up on the shelves.

And:

This was anathema to Jobs, himself notoriously control-hungry. He wasn’t going to allow mere carriers to control what the iPhone did and contained.

Read the post. As usual, Jean-Louis delivers the goods.

Somewhat buried in Jason Snell’s iPhone 10th birthday celebration writeup was this wonderful picture.

There’s the incredibly intense look on Steve’s face. And the fact that this is one of the last such events where none of the pictures was taken using an iPhone.

From a blog post that ran on the BBC News site, ten years ago today:

As the hype piled up Jobs told us we were witnessing history and he was going to reinvent the telephone – some doubts crept in.

And:

It is going to be expensive – $499 for the 4gb, $599 for 8gb – when it arrives in US stores in June.

And:

Apple is entering a market where giants like Nokia, Motorola and Samsung are making pretty smart phones. A bit of a contrast to the easier landscape which the ipod entered. Still – as Jobs pointed out – there’s a big market to aim at, with a billion mobile phones sold last year.

Fun looking back. After all, who knew what was coming? Well, Steve did.

BBC News correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones, recalling that day, ten years ago, when the iPhone was first unveiled:

Ten years ago I was running from San Francisco’s Moscone Centre to a nearby hotel to edit a piece for the Ten O’Clock News when my phone rang.

“Have you got your hands on this new Apple phone for a piece to camera?” shouted a producer in London. “If not, why not?”

This appeared to be an impossible demand.

And:

Then I remembered that we had been offered – and turned down for lack of time – an interview with Apple’s marketing chief Phil Schiller. I turned around and headed back to the Moscone Centre. Having located Mr Schiller I asked whether before our interview I might just have a look at the iPhone.

He graciously handed his over – and rather than trying to ring Jony Ive or order 5,000 lattes as Steve Jobs had on stage, I brandished it at the camera for my Ten O’Clock News piece.

And:

The following weekend 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.

Undue prominence? As it turns out, no amount of coverage could fairly have been labeled undue.

Internet History Podcast:

Stop for a minute and imagine how momentous a change the iPod engendered within Apple itself. This was a company that, for nearly 30 years, had been a personal computer company. The blue sky thinking that allowed Apple to make a stand-alone MP3 player—to enter a mature market as an outsider and believe it could dominate—also engendered the sort of fearlessness that made it possible to break with other long-standing Apple shibboleths. The iPod eventually worked with Windows machines, even at the risk of cannibalizing Mac sales. iTunes eventually worked with Windows machines. Apple (gasp) made a Windows app! As Phil Schiller told Walter Isaacson in his Steve Jobs biography: “We felt we should be in the music player business, not just in the Mac business.” It was this conceptual leap, this strategic bravery (just as much as a penchant for good design and reliable manufacturing) that would be responsible for Apple’s success in the 2000s.

Apple was no longer just a computer company. It could be whatever it wanted to be.

And:

“I was actually pushing to do two sizes—to have a regular iPhone and an iPhone mini like we had with the iPod,” Apple’s chief hardware executive Jon Rubenstein says in Dogfight. “I thought one could be a smartphone and one could be a dumber phone. But we never got a lot of traction on the small one, and in order to do one of these projects you really need to put all your wood behind one arrow.”

And:

Jobs himself approved the list of people who could participate in the preparations, and more than a dozen security guards were on post 24 hours a day. Jobs originally decreed that all outside contractors hired to staff the event would have to sleep in the building the night before so that no details could leak out. Cooler heads eventually talked him out of it.

And:

Jobs rehearsed his presentation for six solid days, but at the final hour, the team still couldn’t get the phone to behave through an entire run through. Sometimes it lost internet connection. Sometimes the calls wouldn’t go through. Sometimes the phone just shut down.”It quickly got very uncomfortable,” Andy Grignon, the senior radio engineer for the iPhone remembered in Dogfight. “Very rarely did I see him become completely unglued. It happened. But mostly he just looked at you and very directly said in a very loud and stern voice, ‘You are fucking up my company,’ or, ‘If we fail, it will be because of you.’”

This is a great, great read.