Steve Jobs really didn't want Apple to make a phone. Not only was the Apple CEO wary of dealing with mobile carriers, he was worried smartphones would only ever be popular with the "pocket protector crowd." After increasing pressure from employees, Jobs finally agreed Apple could make a phone, and, well, you know how that turned out. But you may not know how it started. On this, the 10-year anniversary of the iPhone, the Verge has an excerpt from a soon-to-be-released book titled The One Device: The secret history of the iPhone. The excerpt takes readers from the sudden disappearance of Apple's best engineers from their normal jobs and an intentionally terrible partnership with Motorola to touch-screen tests and a battle between OS X and Linux teams.
Speaking of those missing engineers: They were being recruited to a super-secret project at Apple, told "their personal lives would disappear, and they wouldn't be able to talk about what they were working on." Those who agreed to sign on to the mystery project became "one of the great, unheralded creative forces on the 21st century." But it wasn't easy. It took more than two years of working nights and weekends. "The iPhone is the reason I'm divorced," one engineer says. "The iPhone ruined more than a few marriages," agrees another. The reward for their sacrifice: the "most influential piece of consumer technology" of its generation. Read the full piece here for more, including why your iPhone's screen "bumps" when it gets to the end of a webpage. (More Longform stories.)
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