Steve Jobs Initially Hated the iPhone Idea

Alan Trapulionis
7 min readMar 14, 2022
Steve Jobs with the iPhone at D5, image by David Geller

“It began because Steve hated this guy at Microsoft. That’s the actual origin of it,” said Forstall. “Any time Steve had any social interaction with this guy, he’d come back pissed off.”

It was the year 2005, and smartphones were all the rage.

Of course, they looked nothing like the ones we use today. Most of them weren’t that smart, and they looked somewhat like this:

Wikimedia commons image

Yes, this little email machine used to own the mobile phone market. It was the default choice for the savvy, premium crowd.

But it wasn’t the Blackberry that worried Apple’s co-founder, Steve Jobs. It was this:

Remember this guy? Wikimedia commons image

Phones like the Nokia 5310 were aggressively turning into portable music devices, and damn good ones too.

They were quickly redefining what a phone is, devouring the MP3 player market. Steve’s market.

Remember, the iPod accounted for more than half of Apple’s sales back in the day. It was the cornerstone product…

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