The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone by Brian Merchant

Author:Brian Merchant [Merchant, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781473542549
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2017-06-22T04:00:00+00:00

The Bod of an iPod

When Fadell heard that a phone project was taking shape, he grabbed his own skunkworks prototype design of the iPod phone before he headed into an executive meeting.

“There was a meeting where they were talking about the formation of the phone project on the team,” Grignon says. “Tony had [it] in his back pocket, a team already working on the hardware and the schematics, all the design for it. And once they got the approval for it from Steve, Tony was like, ‘Oh, hold on, as a matter of fact’—whoo-chaa! Like he whipped it out, ‘Here’s this prototype that we’ve been thinking about,’ and it was basically a fully baked design.”

On paper, the logic looks impeccable: The iPod was Apple’s most successful product, phones were going to eat the iPod’s lunch, so why not an iPod phone? “Take the best of the iPod and put a phone in it,” Fadell says. “So you could do mobile communications and have your music with you, and we didn’t lose all the brand awareness we’d built into the iPod, the half a billion dollars we were spending getting that known around the world.” It was that simple.

Remember that while it was becoming clear inside Apple that they were going to pursue a phone, it wasn’t clear at all what that phone should look or feel like. Or how it would work, on just about every level.

“Early 2005, around that time frame, Tony started saying there’s talk about them doing a phone,” says David Tupman, who was in charge of iPod hardware at the time. “And I said, ‘I really want to do a phone. I’d like to lead that.’ He said, ‘No.’” Tupman laughs. “‘You can’t do that.’ But they did a bunch of interviews, and I guess they couldn’t find anybody, so I was like, ‘Hello, I’m still here!’ Tony was like, ‘Okay, you’re it.’”

The iPod team wasn’t privy to what had been unfolding in the HI group.

“We were gonna build what everyone thought we should build at the time: Let’s bolt a phone onto an iPod,” says Andy Grignon. And that’s exactly what they started to do.

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