In his fresh bookThe One twist : The Secret History of the iPhone , Brian Merchant give us a rarefied smell inside Apple , chronicle the development of the iPhone with details about everything from the selection of raw materials to the production ’s famous launch event .
In the past , we ’ve try a few scraps of information from the development story of the iPhone . Like that it almostran on Linux . Or that Appledidn’t invent the Multitouch technologythat allows for pinch - and - zoom . Or even Steve Jobs ’ demand that the sound ’s screen be made of glass or else of plastic cameone calendar month before its launch . Here are five thing you might not know about the development of the iPhone , straight from Merchant ’s book .
1) Before there was the iPhone, there was an Apple flip phone prototype
Today , touchscreen phones are everywhere , but in 2003 , not so much . While there weresome former attempts in the LXXX , others were developed closer to the iPhone ’s launching . Industrial Design ( ID ) Engineer Brian Huppi , who worked at Apple from 2012 to 2016 explain Apple ’s first raid into phones .
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[ T]he ID grouping fabricated good deal of cell phones . Not smartphones , but snotty-nosed phones . “ There were many models of flip phones of various sorts that Apple had been work on , ” Huppi enjoin . “ I mean very Apple - ized , very gorgeous and beautiful , but they were various takes on cell phones with buttons . ” ( This might explain why Apple had by this point already show the domain iPhone.org . )
2) The first iPhone user interface was designed in Photoshop
And not even Adobe could believe it . Apple ’s Director of Design from 1995 to 2016 , Imran Chaudhri , describes the process by which he and designer Bas Ording built the iPhone ’s substance abuser interface ( UI ) .
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Ording ’s figure animations , embedded since the earliest days sharpen by Chaudhri ’s good sense of style , might be one reason we ’re all so drug-addicted on smartphones . And they did it all on basic Adobe software . “ We construct the entire UI using Photoshop and Director , ” Chaudhri says , express mirth . “ It was like building a Frank Gehry piece out of Al foil . It was the biggest hack of all time . ” year after , they tell Adobe — “ They were fucking dump . ”
3) The phone was almost just an iPod with a “steampunk dial”
How would this even mould ? older Apple Engineer Andy Gringon endeavor to explain an other iPhone design .
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“ We prototyped a unexampled way , ” Gringon says of the former machine . “ It was this interesting material … it still had this touch raw click wheel , right , and the Play / Pause / Next / former button in blue backlighting . And when you put it into phone fashion through the UI , all that light variety of fade out and evanesce back in as orange . Like , zero to nine in the click wheel in an old rotary telephone set , you know ABCDEGF around the edges . ” … The trouble was that they were difficult to use as phone … “ It was just obvious that we were overloading the click bike with too much , ” Gringon read . “ And texting and phone figure — it was a fucking passel . ”
4) There was also an impossible keyboard design
At one time , Apple considered entirely revamp how keyboards were laid out . Director of software program engineering Richard Williamson list a few idea that were being kvetch around .
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ultra rethinkings of schoolbook input were floated … “ We tried all kind of stuff to come in up with all sort of variate to make the key come along fully grown or have a multitap that you could use to motorcycle through letter . The chord keyboards were credibly the most dotty , ” Willamson says . One of them was like a piano keyboard , and you could kind of play letters on the keyboard . ”
5) Apple’s Exposé feature is right out of the Pre-Crime Department
Ording talks about how the feature that allow iPhone user to search at all of their windows at once was inspired bya motion - based touchscreen computerfrom the Steven Spielberg sci - fi classic .
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“ You know that Exposé feature ? … I was staring at my screen with a whole pile of windows , and I ’m like , ‘ I wish I could somehow , just like they do in the movie , go through in between those windows and somehow get through all your material . ’ That became the Exposé matter , but it was inspired by Minority Report . ”
playfulness fact , the sound gist the telephone madewhen an iPhone is plugged into into a chargeruntil iOS 7 is also from in Minority Report .
Read more about the crazy history of the iPhone in Brian Merchant’sThe One gimmick .
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