The invention that turned Apple into a world-beating, billion-selling, society-changing colossus was not a laptop or a music player; it was the iPhone. It seemed to appear in 2007, fully formed, beautifully conceived, self-assured, and conceptually obvious.
But behind the scenes, the iPhone we know today was made possible by more than bold bets, fanatical attention to detail, brilliant design, and a vision for the future; there were also false starts, last-minute redesigns, and a few strokes of luck.
For starters, the product Apple set out to build first was not a phone. It was a tablet.
Interdisciplinary teams at Apple are always experimenting with fledgling technologies. “There’s hundreds of little startups that are just poking around, doing stuff,” says sensors VP Myra Haggerty. “Sometimes someone’s like, ‘Hey, come look at what we’re working on!’ Then you go into some random lab somewhere, and they’re doing this really cool thing. ‘What could we do with this?’”
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Take, for example, Duncan Kerr’s projector demo.
In 1999, Kerr, a British designer with a polymath design background—engineering, technology, industrial design, interface prototyping—had joined industrial design chief Jony Ive’s studio.
In early 2003, he began holding Tuesday meetings with interface designers and input engineers to explore new ways of interacting with computers; after all, the old “point mouse, click button” routine was 25 years old. Kerr’s team experimented with technologies like camera-driven systems, spatial audio, haptics (vibrating feedback), and 3D screens. “We’d invite research people in, or companies who had some curious technology. We did a lot of demos, tried stuff out,” he says.
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