The One Device by Brian Merchant

Author:Brian Merchant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Economics / Industries / Computers & Information Technology, Technology & Engineering / Electronics / Digital, Science / History
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2017-06-19T16:00:00+00:00

Calling All Pods

Andy Grignon was restless. The versatile engineer had been at Apple for a few years, working in different departments on various projects. He’s a gleefully imposing figure—shaved-head bald, cheerful, and built like a friendly bear. He had a hand in everything from creating the software that powered the iPod to working on the software for a videoconferencing program and iChat. He’d become friends with rising star Tony Fadell when they’d built the iSight camera together.

After wrapping up another major project—writing the Mac feature Dashboard, which Grignon affectionately calls “his baby” (it’s the widget-filled screen with the calculator and the calendar and so on)—he was looking for something fresh to do. “Fadell reached out and said, ‘Do you want to come join iPod? We’ve got some really cool shit. I’ve got this other project I really want to do but we need some time before we can convince Steve to do it, and I think you’d be great for it.’”

Grignon is boisterous and hardworking. He’s also got a mouth like a Silicon Valley sailor. “So I left,” Grignon says, “to work on this mystery thing. So we just kind of spun our wheels on some wireless speakers and shit like that, but then the project started to materialize. Of course what Fadell was talking about was the phone.” Fadell knew Jobs was beginning to come around to the idea, and he wanted to be prepared. “We had this idea: Wouldn’t it be great to put Wi-Fi in an iPod?” Grignon says. Throughout 2004, Fadell, Grignon, and the rest of the team worked on a number of early efforts to fuse iPod and internet communicator.

“That was one of the very first prototypes I showed Steve. We gutted an iPod, we had hardware add in a Wi-Fi part, so it was a big plastic piece of junk, and we modified the software.” There were click-wheel iPods that could clumsily surf the web as early as 2004. “You would click the wheel, you would scroll the web page, and if there was a link on the page, it would highlight it, and you could click on it and you could jump in,” Grignon says. “That was the very first time where we started experimenting with radios in the form factor.”

It was also the first time Steve Jobs had seen the internet running on an iPod. “And he was like, ‘This is bullshit.’ He called it right away.… ‘I don’t want this. I know it works, I got it, great, thanks, but this is a shitty experience,’” Grignon says.

Meanwhile, Grignon says, “The exec team was trying to convince Steve that building a phone was a great idea for Apple. He didn’t really see the path to success.”

One of those trying to do the convincing was Mike Bell. A veteran of Apple, where he’d worked for fifteen years, and of Motorola’s wireless division, Bell was positive that computers, music players, and cell phones were heading toward an inevitable convergence point. For months, he lobbied Jobs to do a phone, as did Steve Sakoman, a vice president who had worked on the ill-fated Newton.

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