A Project Born from Spite and Fear
The story of the iPhone doesn't start with a phone. It starts, weirdly, with Steve Jobs's intense dislike for a specific Microsoft executive. According to former Apple software lead Scott Forstall, Jobs was so annoyed by this person bragging about Microsoft's
stylus-based tablets that he was determined to show them how a real touch device should work. This sparked an internal project to build a tablet with a multi-touch screen. Around the same time, the iPod's dominance was being threatened by cell phones that could also play music. Jobs realized that if Apple didn't make a phone, another company would eventually create a device that made the iPod obsolete. The secretive tablet project, codenamed 'Project Purple,' was then pivoted to focus on creating a phone.
The War of Two iPhones
Jobs set up a fierce internal competition. He tasked two of his most trusted lieutenants to create competing versions of the phone, a high-stakes 'bake-off' to determine Apple's future. In one corner was Tony Fadell, the 'father of the iPod.' His team developed a prototype, codenamed 'P1,' that was a natural evolution of their hit music player. It used the iPod's famous click wheel, cleverly adapted as a rotary dial, to navigate menus on screen. In the other corner was Scott Forstall, a star from Jobs's NeXT days, who led the Mac software division. His team was tasked with the much harder challenge: shrinking the powerful Mac operating system onto a phone and making it work with a radical multi-touch interface. The rivalry was explosive, with teams arguing over resources and talent.
The Keyboard Conundrum
The central debate was the keyboard. At the time, successful smartphones like the BlackBerry and Palm Treo all had physical keyboards. Many inside Apple, including Tony Fadell, believed a physical keyboard was essential for serious use like typing emails. The idea of a virtual, on-screen keyboard was completely unproven. Early prototypes were clunky and unreliable; the prototype phone would drop calls and the software was riddled with bugs. When one journalist testing a prototype complained that the keys were too small and he kept making typos, Jobs simply smiled and replied, 'Your thumbs will learn'. He was betting on human adaptability and the elegance of a single, uninterrupted screen over the established convention of physical buttons.
The 'It Just Works' Ultimatum
While Fadell's iPod-based phone was a more straightforward project, Forstall's team was struggling to perfect the multi-touch experience. Jobs didn't just want it to function; he demanded it feel magical. He wanted inertial scrolling and the 'rubber-band' bounce-back effect at the end of a list—features that seem standard now but were revolutionary then. He gave the teams an ultimatum: show him something that worked. When Forstall's team finally presented a smooth, intuitive demo of their touch interface, Jobs was sold. He saw the potential not just for a phone, but for a true handheld computer. He chose Forstall's more ambitious, riskier P2 project over Fadell's safer P1. The click-wheel phone was dead; the future was a sheet of glass.
