Steve Jobs by The Editors of New Word City

Author:The Editors of New Word City [The Editors of New Word City]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781612307138
Publisher: New Word City, LLC
Published: 2014-02-04T05:00:00+00:00

Hitting the Reset Button

Any other executive might have eased off a bit and just enjoyed 2005. The iPod was a runaway success, with sales quadrupling that year to 20 million; it made up 45 percent of Apple’s total sales. But that was exactly what bothered Steve Jobs: Something could come along and eat his lunch, and it probably would be a cell phone. After all, he worried, it would be easy enough to add a music player to a phone, and then the iPod would become as redundant as a separate camera already was for anyone but a professional photographer.

In any case, Jobs told Betsy Morris, he and all his friends hated the cell phones they had, plus the market was extraordinarily promising: “I mean, a billion phones get shipped every year, and that’s almost an order of magnitude greater than the number of music players. It’s four times the number of PCs that ship every year.”

The problem, as Jobs saw it, was that existing phones were far too complex and difficult to use. The breakthrough for Apple came when Jony Ive, working on a design for a tablet computer, came across the prototype of a multi-touch screen - a sensitive display that could respond to touches at different locations or even act as an on-screen keyboard. The engineering complications were scary, but Jobs bet big on using the display for the iPhone, and it made it possible to make the finished device stylish, simple, and intuitive.

Jobs was particularly obsessed with the materials to be used for the iPhone. By now, his gadgets had come in translucent plastic, titanium, and anodized aluminum, all specially produced for him. For the iPhone, he wanted glass that was especially strong and resistant to scratches. He consulted the glassmakers at Corning, and found they had developed a “gorilla glass” that was just what he wanted - but it would take the company months to get it into production. Jobs activated his reality-distortion field. “You can do it,” he told Corning CEO Wendell Weeks. “Get your mind around it. You can do it.” To his own amazement, Weeks did.

The iPhone’s glass touch screen, user-friendly features, and inviting feel had rivals scrambling to catch up. It is, of course, a telephone. But its owners can also use it to play music, check the weather, book dinner reservations, read a newspaper, get map directions, or play a video game.

One key to the iPhone’s success was its many apps - a controlled opportunity for outsiders to develop software and content for it. At first, Jobs resisted anything that could taint his product’s integrity or infect it with viruses. But as he had with the iPod and under heavy pressure from some employees and directors, he agreed to let outsiders make apps if they were tested and approved by Apple and sold only on iTunes. By 2013, there had been 40 billion downloads, and it’s safe to say that if Apple hadn’t tolerated them, its phone would be an also-ran.

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