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Steve Jobs Initially Hated the iPhone Idea
“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:
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:
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 Steve Jobs could not allow to fail.
But the reality was clear: a phone + music player was better than just music player.
According to Tony Fadell, the guy who designed the first three iPhones, the feeling of impending doom was real:
“We had the music player doing video and audio and photo. We had iTunes. Then futurephones came out. They started playing MP3. This is a holy shit moment. Phones could steal everything we were doing. What could we do to counter this?”
Something had to be done.
The beef
The solution was obvious: Apple had to build a futurephone of its own to compete.
If the music players were a thing of the past, so was the iPod-based Apple.
Engineers within Apple had been pushing this idea since early 2000s. And yet, Steve remained adamant. Apple would not build a…
