17 ms·

On the Origin of the iPhone

178 points by tambourine_man 5y ago

temac 5y ago
> to scale the iPod’s embedded Linux OS up to serve as a phone OS The OS of the iPod was Linux-based? edit: hm I should have read all of the article before commenting, although the way it is written at the start is quite misleading, I find
- withinboredom 5y ago
  One of the first jailbreaks gave you a shell to the file system IIRC
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- LeoPanthera 5y ago
  > The OS of the iPod was Linux-based? It wasn't. For those who didn't read the article: Apple was considering (not very seriously) replacing the iPod OS with one based on Linux, as the existing OS codebase was such a mess it was bordering on unmaintainable. Obviously, the idea was not implemented, but it was this proposed OS that would have been "scaled up" to the iPhone.
  - vlovich123 5y ago
    Jobs if I recall correctly had tried to hire Linus to work on Darwin. I don’t believe the Linux on iPhone/iPad project had any meaningful realistic traction beyond engineering proposing it as a path forward and building the prototypes on it. My impression was that it was a nonstarter politically.
nhojb 5y ago
- ninkendo 5y ago
  It's perfect on mobile. You can zoom, there's no cookie popups, there's no prompt asking you to sign up for a mailing list, and the whole article loads at once without needing to click a "continue" button. There's no ads. It's just a clean site that you can zoom in on to read. All sites should be this good.
  - quitit 5y ago
    Don’t all mobile browser support double tapping to zoom into logical segments? Or is that just mobile Safari? Because that’s all I do for it.
  - cyral 5y ago
    I think it could be much better. You have to manually zoom into the article area on every page, and every time I scroll down it tends to scroll side to one side a bit since there is space to either side of the article. (I know mobile browsers tend to stop any horizontal scroll if it senses you are scrolling vertically, but not every swipe is perfect enough for it to do this.) Considering the desktop version and mobile version are identical, I suspect there was no effort to make it mobile friendly.
- rubyist5eva 5y ago
  I just use Reader Mode
  - notreallyserio 5y ago
    Double-tapping the text is also a decent solution as it zooms the text out enough to fit the screen.
- perardi 5y ago
  I recall some comment he made about wanting to do a “final site redesign” to make it responsive at some point, but then never got around to it. Still, it’s a bit of an odd oversight, because this is the most simplest of 1-column-with-a-sidebar layouts, and it’s just a matter of getting that sidebar nav out of the way.
MichaelZuo 5y ago
That 2004-2007 period is really quite incredible from the perspective of Steve Jobs. To have that many balls up in the air simultaneously and getting every decision, even in hindsight, correct while raising children and recovering from his pancreatic cancer diagnosis scare. On top of that he was under undoubtedly intense pressure from internal feuds, external competitors (Motorola), buyout negotiations (Disney), suppliers (Foxconn) and the telecom industry (AT&T). This was a man at the peak of his life.
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  > "recovering from his pancreatic cancer diagnosis scare" I feel it's important to say here -- for all those with pancreatic cancer or who have lost loved ones to a shockingly awful cancer and who keep hearing about Steve Jobs beating the odds for all that time, that he didn't have a scare. He had actual pancreatic cancer. It's just that he was (a tiny bit) luckier with one of the rare diagnoses that has a very high degree of treatability, and as a result vastly better five year survival odds. But he didn't so much recover as delay treatment unnecessarily for alternative therapies, and nutrition. (Having lost a relative to less treatable pancreatic cancer, learning of this gamble made me furious at him at the time and still really does) The treatment he might possibly have avoided with earlier targeted intervention but ultimately received (the Whipple procedure) is effective but brutal, and the long term knock-on effects of that procedure affected him as they do almost everyone; needing a liver transplant as he did has a very high probability among Whipple patients. (He actually misled investors about the seriousness of his illness when people surmised that he was experiencing the longer-term side effects of his procedure.) An aside: as much as people like to claim Tim Cook doesn't have Jobs's guts or heart or bravery, he literally offered his boss a part of his own (compatible) liver to save his life. Tim Cook is brave and honourable.
  - MichaelZuo 5y ago
    Well he rolled the dice, because from what I understand the treatment at the time still had some % of serious complications. If he elected to do so and unluckily suffered some complication after the procedure in 2004, very little, if any, of the subsequent events would have occurred.
perardi 5y ago
I have no idea why this sticks in my head, but way way way back when, I remember Leo Laporte being adamant, on MacBreak Weekly, that he was sure the iPhone wasn’t really running a version of OS X, because it was impossible to do so. And mind you, as someone who has been using a Mac since System 7, and OS X as a daily driver since 10.2—yeah, at the time, it seemed wild beyond belief that a phone could run what amounts to OS X. Those first versions of OS X were not snappy.
- MBCook 5y ago
  Famously after the initial presentation BlackBerry had a meeting of important people and decided the whole thing had been faked because it was impossible. The original iPhone (and to a degree the iPad) really seemed to have been right at the edge of what was technologically possible.
  - simonh 5y ago
    The only people in the industry who seemed to get it were the Android team. It took Microsoft 3 years to realise they actually needed to go back to the drawing board on their mobile tech stack.
    - mushyhammer 5y ago
      iPhone announcement: January 2007 Android release: October 2008 Windows Phone 7 release: October 2010 Indeed it seems that Microsoft took their sweet time to rearchitect their OS, but these dates suggests Microsoft realized much earlier than 3 years later.
      - pronlover723 5y ago
        Microsoft was shipping PDAs (of which iPhone is an evolution of) since the 90s. I had a Casio E-95. It's about the same size as an iphone. It has a single button below the display at the bottom (same place as the home button on the original iPhone). It's home screen has a grid of 3x4 icons for apps (similar to an iPhone's 4x5 grid). What it doesn't have, it doesn't have capacitive touchscreen, it has resistive so it used a stylus, though I used my fingernail often). It doesn't have cellular service (but plenty did before iPhone shipped). Its UX is not optimized for touch as much as iOS. But it runs an OS, Win-CE, on a PDA so I'm not sure anything needed to be rearchitected rather than just deprecate the desktop UI widgets for more touch friendly alternatives (yea I know that's easier said than done but it's a tiny part of an OS vs all the rest). Also I'm not under any delusion that MS would have gotten it right. The same reasoning that led them to do the minimal changes from Windows -> Windows CE would have likely always been a drag on them fully embracing letting go and making the necessary changes.
thinkingkong 5y ago
Maybe I missed it but was the original TED demo of the multitouch prototype part of this? I thought that had a heavy influence on the design of how the iphone software would work?
somuchtodo 5y ago
The comparison of Facebook and Apple is a weird one. Apple is good at innovation. Facebook is good at acquisitions.
leoc 5y ago
That picture of the "Wallabies" https://twitter.com/kocienda/status/880451736049139712 https://twitter.com/kocienda/status/880451736049139712 suggests that the often-repeated claim about the hardware and software teams working in mutual igorance is overblown. The Wallabies really seem not so far from final hardware, especially compared to (IIRC) some other devkits for old mobile devices. It would have been quite clear that the release hardware would be substantially thicker and lighter (assuming those things are fairly heavy, as well as bulky) and if you imagine them so you get something pretty close to the original iPhone (aside from the metal-case flash and sizzle).
- encoderer 5y ago
  Seems they were truly just touchscreens in a housing. https://twitter.com/kocienda/status/880522635112726529 https://twitter.com/kocienda/status/880522635112726529
- pfranz 5y ago
  I always heard things were almost always on a need to know basis. Designing a keyboard kind of requires an approximate form-factor. Like the sibling comment says, "Wallabies" were a touchscreen in a housing. It sounds like other developers were writing software for a generic grey box. To me, that makes sense if the hardware wasn't known even if they weren't trying to be covert.
mellosouls 5y ago
"The cutthroat internal politics of Apple under Steve Jobs — strong personalities with large egos — amidst tumultuous technical drama (see timeline below) sounds like the makings for a damn good show like Succession)" Halt and Catch Fire and Silicon Valley (leaving aside Jobs) have arguably already successfully covered this ground from a reasonably safe biographical distance.
- jedberg 5y ago
  Pirates of Silicon Valley was literally about Jobs (and Woz and Gates).
  - rasz 5y ago
    2001 Antitrust is about Gates :)
  - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
    I don't think mellosouls means that those portrayals left Jobs aside. I think they mean we should put the 2013 movie, Jobs, aside (hence their italics). (Wise, though I personally think Kutcher did a good job with what he was given.) Jobs very famously liked (or at least whimsically came to terms with) Noah Wyle's amazing portrayal of him in Pirates Of Silicon Valley, getting Wyle to repeat his performance on stage at a a Macworld keynote. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIClAanU7Os https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIClAanU7Os At the time, people thought that was Jobs doing damage control because Pirates made him look like an asshole. At this point looking back, it seems more like part of his self-reflective pivot to what came next. Either way I am not sure it needs more treatment and more demonisation, but they were all pretty lucky with the care that went into their portrayals in Pirates Of Silicon Valley.
thomasjudge 5y ago
FTA: "There is a certain kind of Linux enthusiast who thinks the answer to any technical problem can be found in Linux."

> to scale the iPod’s embedded Linux OS up to serve as a phone OS The OS of the iPod was Linux-based? edit: hm I should have read all of the article before commenting, although the way it is written at the start is quite misleading, I find

withinboredom 5y ago
One of the first jailbreaks gave you a shell to the file system IIRC
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
LeoPanthera 5y ago
> The OS of the iPod was Linux-based? It wasn't. For those who didn't read the article: Apple was considering (not very seriously) replacing the iPod OS with one based on Linux, as the existing OS codebase was such a mess it was bordering on unmaintainable. Obviously, the idea was not implemented, but it was this proposed OS that would have been "scaled up" to the iPhone.
- vlovich123 5y ago
  Jobs if I recall correctly had tried to hire Linus to work on Darwin. I don’t believe the Linux on iPhone/iPad project had any meaningful realistic traction beyond engineering proposing it as a path forward and building the prototypes on it. My impression was that it was a nonstarter politically.

nhojb 5y ago

ninkendo 5y ago
It's perfect on mobile. You can zoom, there's no cookie popups, there's no prompt asking you to sign up for a mailing list, and the whole article loads at once without needing to click a "continue" button. There's no ads. It's just a clean site that you can zoom in on to read. All sites should be this good.
- quitit 5y ago
  Don’t all mobile browser support double tapping to zoom into logical segments? Or is that just mobile Safari? Because that’s all I do for it.
- cyral 5y ago
  I think it could be much better. You have to manually zoom into the article area on every page, and every time I scroll down it tends to scroll side to one side a bit since there is space to either side of the article. (I know mobile browsers tend to stop any horizontal scroll if it senses you are scrolling vertically, but not every swipe is perfect enough for it to do this.) Considering the desktop version and mobile version are identical, I suspect there was no effort to make it mobile friendly.
rubyist5eva 5y ago
I just use Reader Mode
- notreallyserio 5y ago
  Double-tapping the text is also a decent solution as it zooms the text out enough to fit the screen.
perardi 5y ago
I recall some comment he made about wanting to do a “final site redesign” to make it responsive at some point, but then never got around to it. Still, it’s a bit of an odd oversight, because this is the most simplest of 1-column-with-a-sidebar layouts, and it’s just a matter of getting that sidebar nav out of the way.

MichaelZuo 5y ago

That 2004-2007 period is really quite incredible from the perspective of Steve Jobs. To have that many balls up in the air simultaneously and getting every decision, even in hindsight, correct while raising children and recovering from his pancreatic cancer diagnosis scare. On top of that he was under undoubtedly intense pressure from internal feuds, external competitors (Motorola), buyout negotiations (Disney), suppliers (Foxconn) and the telecom industry (AT&T). This was a man at the peak of his life.

unfocussed_mike 5y ago
> "recovering from his pancreatic cancer diagnosis scare" I feel it's important to say here -- for all those with pancreatic cancer or who have lost loved ones to a shockingly awful cancer and who keep hearing about Steve Jobs beating the odds for all that time, that he didn't have a scare. He had actual pancreatic cancer. It's just that he was (a tiny bit) luckier with one of the rare diagnoses that has a very high degree of treatability, and as a result vastly better five year survival odds. But he didn't so much recover as delay treatment unnecessarily for alternative therapies, and nutrition. (Having lost a relative to less treatable pancreatic cancer, learning of this gamble made me furious at him at the time and still really does) The treatment he might possibly have avoided with earlier targeted intervention but ultimately received (the Whipple procedure) is effective but brutal, and the long term knock-on effects of that procedure affected him as they do almost everyone; needing a liver transplant as he did has a very high probability among Whipple patients. (He actually misled investors about the seriousness of his illness when people surmised that he was experiencing the longer-term side effects of his procedure.) An aside: as much as people like to claim Tim Cook doesn't have Jobs's guts or heart or bravery, he literally offered his boss a part of his own (compatible) liver to save his life. Tim Cook is brave and honourable.
- MichaelZuo 5y ago
  Well he rolled the dice, because from what I understand the treatment at the time still had some % of serious complications. If he elected to do so and unluckily suffered some complication after the procedure in 2004, very little, if any, of the subsequent events would have occurred.

perardi 5y ago

I have no idea why this sticks in my head, but way way way back when, I remember Leo Laporte being adamant, on MacBreak Weekly, that he was sure the iPhone wasn’t really running a version of OS X, because it was impossible to do so. And mind you, as someone who has been using a Mac since System 7, and OS X as a daily driver since 10.2—yeah, at the time, it seemed wild beyond belief that a phone could run what amounts to OS X. Those first versions of OS X were not snappy.

MBCook 5y ago
Famously after the initial presentation BlackBerry had a meeting of important people and decided the whole thing had been faked because it was impossible. The original iPhone (and to a degree the iPad) really seemed to have been right at the edge of what was technologically possible.
- simonh 5y ago
  The only people in the industry who seemed to get it were the Android team. It took Microsoft 3 years to realise they actually needed to go back to the drawing board on their mobile tech stack.
  - mushyhammer 5y ago
    iPhone announcement: January 2007 Android release: October 2008 Windows Phone 7 release: October 2010 Indeed it seems that Microsoft took their sweet time to rearchitect their OS, but these dates suggests Microsoft realized much earlier than 3 years later.
    - pronlover723 5y ago
      Microsoft was shipping PDAs (of which iPhone is an evolution of) since the 90s. I had a Casio E-95. It's about the same size as an iphone. It has a single button below the display at the bottom (same place as the home button on the original iPhone). It's home screen has a grid of 3x4 icons for apps (similar to an iPhone's 4x5 grid). What it doesn't have, it doesn't have capacitive touchscreen, it has resistive so it used a stylus, though I used my fingernail often). It doesn't have cellular service (but plenty did before iPhone shipped). Its UX is not optimized for touch as much as iOS. But it runs an OS, Win-CE, on a PDA so I'm not sure anything needed to be rearchitected rather than just deprecate the desktop UI widgets for more touch friendly alternatives (yea I know that's easier said than done but it's a tiny part of an OS vs all the rest). Also I'm not under any delusion that MS would have gotten it right. The same reasoning that led them to do the minimal changes from Windows -> Windows CE would have likely always been a drag on them fully embracing letting go and making the necessary changes.

thinkingkong 5y ago

Maybe I missed it but was the original TED demo of the multitouch prototype part of this? I thought that had a heavy influence on the design of how the iphone software would work?

somuchtodo 5y ago

The comparison of Facebook and Apple is a weird one. Apple is good at innovation. Facebook is good at acquisitions.

leoc 5y ago

That picture of the "Wallabies" https://twitter.com/kocienda/status/880451736049139712 https://twitter.com/kocienda/status/880451736049139712 suggests that the often-repeated claim about the hardware and software teams working in mutual igorance is overblown. The Wallabies really seem not so far from final hardware, especially compared to (IIRC) some other devkits for old mobile devices. It would have been quite clear that the release hardware would be substantially thicker and lighter (assuming those things are fairly heavy, as well as bulky) and if you imagine them so you get something pretty close to the original iPhone (aside from the metal-case flash and sizzle).

encoderer 5y ago
Seems they were truly just touchscreens in a housing. https://twitter.com/kocienda/status/880522635112726529 https://twitter.com/kocienda/status/880522635112726529
pfranz 5y ago
I always heard things were almost always on a need to know basis. Designing a keyboard kind of requires an approximate form-factor. Like the sibling comment says, "Wallabies" were a touchscreen in a housing. It sounds like other developers were writing software for a generic grey box. To me, that makes sense if the hardware wasn't known even if they weren't trying to be covert.

mellosouls 5y ago

"The cutthroat internal politics of Apple under Steve Jobs — strong personalities with large egos — amidst tumultuous technical drama (see timeline below) sounds like the makings for a damn good show like Succession)" Halt and Catch Fire and Silicon Valley (leaving aside Jobs) have arguably already successfully covered this ground from a reasonably safe biographical distance.

jedberg 5y ago
Pirates of Silicon Valley was literally about Jobs (and Woz and Gates).
- rasz 5y ago
  2001 Antitrust is about Gates :)
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  I don't think mellosouls means that those portrayals left Jobs aside. I think they mean we should put the 2013 movie, Jobs, aside (hence their italics). (Wise, though I personally think Kutcher did a good job with what he was given.) Jobs very famously liked (or at least whimsically came to terms with) Noah Wyle's amazing portrayal of him in Pirates Of Silicon Valley, getting Wyle to repeat his performance on stage at a a Macworld keynote. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIClAanU7Os https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIClAanU7Os At the time, people thought that was Jobs doing damage control because Pirates made him look like an asshole. At this point looking back, it seems more like part of his self-reflective pivot to what came next. Either way I am not sure it needs more treatment and more demonisation, but they were all pretty lucky with the care that went into their portrayals in Pirates Of Silicon Valley.

thomasjudge 5y ago

FTA: "There is a certain kind of Linux enthusiast who thinks the answer to any technical problem can be found in Linux."