Battle of the Titans: How the Fight to the Death Between Apple and Google is Transforming our Lives
in the timetables of other projects. Had the iPhone been a dud or not gotten off the ground at all, Apple would have had no other big products ready to announce for a long time. Worse, its top engineers, frustrated by the failure, would have left Apple for other jobs, according to 2012 testimony by Scott Forstall, one of Apple’s top executives on the project and Apple’s head of iOS software until October 2012. He testified during the Apple v. Samsung patent trial.
Even Apple’s experience designing screens for iPods didn’t help the company design the iPhone screen. After much debate, Jobs decided the iPhone screen needed to be made of hard Plexiglas. He and his executives thought a glass screen would shatter when dropped—until Jobs saw how scratched a plastic prototype had gotten when he carried it around in his pocket with his keys. “Jobs goes, ‘Look at this. Look at this. What’s with the screen?’” said an executive who witnessed the exchange. “And the guy [a midlevel executive] takes the prototype and says, ‘Well, Steve, we have a glass prototype, but it fails the one-meter drop test one hundred out of one hundred times, and blah blah blah …’ Jobs cuts him off and says, ‘I just want to know if you are going to make the fucking thing work.’”
There was a good reason the executive argued with Jobs. This was September 2006. The iPhone would be unveiled in four months. And Jobs wanted to rethink the phone’s most prominent component.
Through his friend21 John Seely Brown, Jobs reached out to Wendell Weeks, the CEO of glassmaker Corning in upstate New York, invited him to Cupertino, and told him he needed the hardest glass ever made for the screen of the iPhone. Weeks told him about a process developed for fighter-jet cockpits in the 1960s. But Weeks said the Defense Department never ended up using the material, known as gorilla glass, so it had never found a market. He said Corning had stopped making it decades ago. Jobs wanted Weeks to start production immediately, convincing Weeks that he could in fact get Jobs the glass he needed in six months. Weeks told Jobs’s biographer Walter Isaacson that he remains amazed at what Jobs convinced him to do. Corning took a factory in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, that had been making LCD displays and converted it, getting Jobs the glass he needed on time. “We produced glass that had never been made. We put our best scientists and engineers on it and we just made it work,” Weeks said.
“I still remember PC Magazine doing a screen durability test once the phone came out in July 2007,” said Bob Borchers, Apple’s then head of iPhone marketing. “They put it in a bag of coins and shook it up. They put keys in the bag and shook it up. They dropped it a few times on a carpet. And then they went out on the street and dropped it on the concrete three times. It survived all of that. We all laughed, looked at each other, and said, ‘Right, we knew that.’”
On top of all that, Jobs’s obsession with secrecy meant that despite being exhausted from working eighty hours a week, the few hundred engineers and designers working on the project couldn’t talk about the project to anyone else. If Apple found out you’d told a friend in a bar, or even your spouse, you could be fired. Before a manager could ask you to join the project, you had to sign a nondisclosure agreement in his office. Then, after he told you what the project was, you had to sign another document confirming that you had indeed signed the NDA and would tell no one. “We put a sign on over the front door of the iPhone building that said FIGHT CLUB because the first rule of fight club is you don’t talk about fight club,” Forstall would explain in his court testimony. “Steve didn’t want22 to hire anyone from outside of Apple to work on the software, but he said I could hire anyone in the company I wanted,” Forstall said. “So I’d bring recruits into my office. Sit them down and tell them, ‘You are a superstar at Apple. Whatever you are doing now, you’ll do fine. But I have another project that I want you to consider. I can’t tell you what it is. All I can say is that you will have to give up untold nights and weekends and that you will work harder than you have ever worked in your life.”
“My favorite part,” said one of the early iPhone engineers, “was what all the vendors said the day after the unveiling.” Big companies such as Marvell Electronics, which made the Wi-Fi radio chip, and CSR, which provided the Bluetooth radio chip, hadn’t been told they were going to be in a new phone. They thought they were going to be in a new iPod. “We actually had fake schematics and fake industrial designs,” the engineer said. Grignon said that Apple even went as far as to impersonate employees of another company when they traveled, especially to Cingular (and, later, AT&T) in Texas. “The whole thing was you didn’t want the receptionist or whoever happens to be walking by to see all [preprinted Apple] badges lying out.”
On the other hand, Jobs wanted a handful of the top engineers on the iPhone project to use iPhone prototypes as their permanent phones. “It wasn’t ‘Carry an iPhone—and a Treo,’” Grignon said. “It was ‘Carry an iPhone and live on it,’ because that’s how we found bugs. If you can’t make a phone call because of a bug, you are going to be extra-motivated to start yelling to get that fixed. But it made for some awkward times where, if you were, say, in a club or an airport, you could spot an iPhone user a mile away because they were the person hunched over with their arms around their phone doing something mysterious. Snorting a line of coke—or using an iPhone?”
One of the most obvious manifestations of Jobs’s obsession with secrecy was the growth of lockdown areas all over campus—places that those not working on the iPhone could no longer go. “Each building is split in half, and there is this corridor that runs through the middle of them with common areas, and after one weekend they just put doors around the common areas so that if you were not on the project, and you were used to using that space, it was now off-limits,” Grignon said. “Steve loved this stuff. He loved to set up division. But it was a big ‘fuck you’ to the people who couldn’t get in. Everyone knows who the rock stars are in a company, and when you start to see them all slowly get plucked out of your area and put in a big room behind glass doors that you don’t have access to, it feels bad.”
Even people within the iPhone project itself couldn’t talk to one another. Engineers designing the iPhone’s electronics weren’t allowed to see the software it would run. When they needed software to test the electronics, they were given proxy code, not the real thing. If you were working on the software, you used a simulator to test hardware performance.
And no one outside Jobs’s inner circle was allowed into chief designer Jony Ive’s wing on the first floor of Building 2. The security surrounding Ive’s prototypes was so tight that employees believed the badge reader called security if you tried to badge in and weren’t authorized. “It was weird, because it wasn’t like you could avoid going by it. It was right off the lobby, behind a big metal door. Every now and then you’d see the door open and you’d try to look in and see, but you never tried to do more than that,” said an engineer whose first job out of college was working on the iPhone. Forstall said during his testimony that some labs required you to “badge in” four times.
The four months leading up to announcement day were particularly rough, Grignon said. Screaming matches broke out routinely in the hallways. Engineers, frazzled from all-night coding sessions, quit, only to rejoin days later after catching up on their sleep. Forstall’s chief of staff, Kim Vorath, slammed the door to her office so hard that the handle bent and locked her in; it took colleagues more than an hour and some well-placed whacks with an aluminum bat to free her. “We were all standing there watching it,” Grignon said. “Part of it was funny. But it was also one of those moments where you step back and realize how fucked-up it all is.”
To Grignon’s amazement23 and to that of many others in the audience, Jobs’s iPhone demo on January 9, 2007, was flawless. He started the show saying, “This is a day I have been waiting for two and a half years.” Then he regaled the audience with a myriad of tales about why consumers hated their cell phones. Then he solved all their problems—definitively. Virtually everyone in the audience had been expecting Jobs to announce a phone, yet they were still in awe.
He used the iPhone to play some music