📱 iPhone: The Device Steve Jobs Didn’t Want To Build
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Yetis, Nick and Jack here coming at you from the T-Boy studio. On our weekly show, The Best Idea Yet, we go deep on the most popular products of all time. And in the latest episode, we revealed the untold origin story of the iPhone, the most influential product of the last century. That's right. The thing you're most likely listening to us on right now? Yeah. You don't know how Apple actually invented it. Because, Jack, it didn't actually begin with Steve Jobs, did it, man? No. It started with a guy named Tony...

And it started with the iPod. Yeah, and a secret team called Project Purple. So, besties, today we whipped up a sample of our latest The Best Idea Yet episode all on the Apple iPhone. So enjoy this sample and then head over to The Best Idea Yet to hear the rest of the iPhone story. Because it is fantastic. Jack, let's hit it. ♪

So Johnny takes Steve down into the basement of Apple HQ. He flicks on the lights and reveals this strange new device. It looks like an air hockey table with a projector hanging above it.

The projector casts an enlarged image of a computer's home screen onto a giant trackpad. When Johnny taps one of the projected icons with his finger, it opens a file. He pinches his fingers together and pulls them apart, and the document zooms in and zooms out. This is basically a giant early mock-up of the iPhone home screen.

It's huge, it's ugly, and it took a heck of a lot of work to get it this far. It's important to note here, this isn't a touchscreen, it's a giant trackpad, like a crude version of the one you probably have on your laptop right now.

But Steve, he can see through the crudeness to the underlying beauty. They call this interface multi-touch, and it is light years ahead of the other touch interfaces. Remember Blackberry? They're like click-clacking away with 35 different buttons, and computers are still using mice.

Multi-touch might be the most important technology at Apple you've never heard of because those other interfaces only respond to one touch point. Your finger or stylus can basically only do one thing, click. But with multi-touch, you can use your fingers to do all sorts of subtle movements, a two-finger pinch to zoom in and out or a three-finger swipe to get back to your home screen.

Now, what few know is that this multi-touch interface was actually created by an overlooked team in Apple's basement called ENRI, which stands for Explore New Rich Interactions. They'd actually been tinkering with a new, more natural way to interact with desktop computers.

despite being relegated to a room with no windows literally below everybody else, like engineering moles, Steve immediately sees potential. What if they make this multi-touch interface work on a screen instead of a trackpad, and then shrink that screen down to fit on a phone? Then the phone won't need a keyboard at all. In fact, it won't need any keys. For this new Apple phone, Steve orders the touchscreen interface, which means the beloved click wheel of the iPod is out.

The most iconic element of Apple's best-selling product to date is basically sent upstate into retirement.

Meanwhile, Tony Fadell is losing his mind trying to turn the iPod into a phone. His bleached hair is turning gray with stress. He finally works up the courage to tell Steve this just isn't working. Oh boy. He braces himself for that famous Steve Jobs fire and brimstone. But instead, Steve just looks at him and smiles. It is time for Tony to now see the multi-touch prototype. So Steve brings him down to that windowless basement and turns on the lights.

Tony is in awe. But when Steve tells him that they've got to shrink this interface down and fit it in a really cool, really small, really thin phone, Tony's jaw hits the floor. Looks like Tony's going to be spending even more time in the purple dorm.

Current touchscreen tech just isn't up to the task of detecting all that pinching and swiping. Touchscreens of this era, they use something called resistive technology, which is very pressure sensitive. Picture when you go to your local ATM machine, you know, when you're like tapping away at it to put in your password and you're like, three,

I press three. Yeah, you have to like use your thumb to get it to react to your touch. Well, those ATMs are using that old school tech. The ones they have to jab three or four times until they register your choice. And then half the time they're getting them wrong. Fortunately for Tony, the Enry group who created the multi-touch interface, they have a new type of touchscreen known as capacitive.

Instead of using pressure, capacitive screens detect touch using the electrical conductivity of the human body. So when a finger comes into contact with the screen, it detects it no matter what. Your body's natural electric signal disturbs the screen's electrostatic field.

Even better, it can tell when more than one finger is touching the screen and where they are in relation to each other. This screen tech is perfect for multi-touch. If the resistive screen allows for the expressiveness of a chimpanzee with a paintbrush, then the capacitive touchscreen is for a Picasso with a Michael's Arts and Crafts expense account.

But making a phone that gets all this to work together is a mind-bogglingly complex challenge. They need thousands of people working on this all at the same time. And it's not just the screen and the multi-touch tech. The phone will basically be a computer. This thing's also going to need an operating system.

And that is going to require an incredible feat of miniaturizing as well. Plus, Steve is insisting on a glass screen instead of a plastic screen. So they have to source a new kind of scratch-resistant glass. And he doesn't want an antenna sticking out of his phone. So they have to find a way to put it in the body without dampening the signal.

So Tony's to-do list is longer than the user terms in an iTunes update, making for a powder keg of intense pressure. There is yelling, there is crying, there is exhaustion, all the things they warned him about before he signed the NDA. Tony Fidel is starting to look a little ragged. That gray hair is starting to take over more of his head. And to top it all off, Steve Jobs wants to announce the iPhone in January 2007. And he wants a launch date six months after that.

But as 2006 draws to an end, Tony and his team don't even have a working prototype.

Now, besties, go and enjoy the rest of the episode. And Jack and I will see you Monday with our usual Daily Tea Boy.