Lesson Five
Steve Jobs
Walter Isaacson
Chapter Thirty-six
The iPhone
Three Revolutionary Products in One
An iPod That Makes Calls
By 2005 iPod sales were skyrocketing. An astonishing twenty million were sold that year, quadruple the number of the year before. The product was becoming more important to the company’s bottom line, accounting for 45% of the revenue that year, and it was also burnishing the hipness of the company’s image in a way that drove sales of Macs.
That is why Jobs was worried. “He was always obssing about what could mess us up,” board memb
er Art Levinson recalled. The conclusion he had come to: “The device that can eat our lunch is the cell phone.” As he explained to the board, the digital camera market was being decimated now that phones were equipped with cameras. The same could happen to the iPod, if phone manufacturers started to build music players into them. “Everyone carries a phone, so that could render the iPod unnecessary.”
His first strategy was to do something that he had admitted in front of Bill Gates was not in his DNA: to partner with another company. He began talking to Ed Zander, the new CEO of Motorola, about making a
companion to Motorola’s popular RAZR, which was a cell phone and digital camera, that would have an iPod built in. Thus was born the ROKR. It ended up having neither the enticing minimalism of an iPod nor the convenient slimness of a RAZR. Ugly, difficult to load, and with an arbitrary hundred-song limit, it had all the hallmarks of a product that had been negotiated by a committee, which was counter to the way Jobs liked to work. Instead of hardware, software, and content all being controlled by one company, they were cobbled together by Motorola, Apple and the wireless carrier Cingular. “You call this th e phone of the future?” Wired scoffed on its November 2005 cover.
Jobs was furious. “I’m sick of dealing with the stupid companies like Motorola,” he told Tony Fadell and others at one of the iPod product review meetings. “Let’s do it ourlves.” He had noticed something odd about the cell phones on the market: They all stank, just like portable music players ud to. “We would sit around talking about how much we hated our phones,” he recalled. “They were way too complicated. They had features nobody could figure out, including the address book. It was just Byzantine.” George Riley, an outside lawyer for Apple, remembers sitting at meetings to go over legal issues, and Jobs would get bored, grab Riley’s mobile phone, and start pointing out all the ways it was “brain-dead.” So Jobs and his team became excited about the prospect of
building a phone that they would want to u. “That’s the best motivator of all.” Jobs later said.
Another motivator was the potential market. More than 825 million mobile phones were sold in 2005, to everyone from grammar schoolers to grandmothers. Since most were junky, there was room for a premium and hip product, just as there had been in the potable music-player market. At first he gave the project to the Apple group that was making the AirPort wireless ba station, on the theory that it was a wireless product. But he soon realized that it was basically a consumer device, like the iPod, so he reassigned it to Fadell and his teammates.
Their initial approach was to modify the iPod. They tried to u the trackwheel as a way for a ur to scroll through phone options and, without a keyboard, try to enter numbers. It was not a natural fit. “We were having a lot of problems using the wheel, especially in getting it to dial phone num bers,” Fadell recalled. “It was cumbersome.” It was fine for scrolling through an address book, but horrible at inputting anything. The team kept trying to convince themlves that urs would mainly be calling people who were already in their address book, but they knew that it wouldn’t really work.
At that time there was a cond project under way at Apple: a cret effort to build a tablet computer. In 2005 the narratives intercted, and the ideas for the tablet flowed into the planning for the phone. In other
words, the idea for the iPad actually came before, and helped to shape the birth of the iPhone.
…
The Launch
When it came time to launch the iPhone, Jobs decided, as usual, to grant a magazine a special sneak preview. He called John Huey, the e ditor in chief of Time Inc., and began with his typical supe
rlative: “This is the best thing we’ve ever done.” He wanted to give Time the exclusive, “but there’s nobody smart enough at Time to write it, so I’m going to give it to someone el.” Huey introd uced him to Lev Grossman, a savvy technology writer (and novelist) at Time. In his piece Grossman correctly noted that the iPhone did not really invent many new features, it just made the features a lot more usable. “But that’s important. When our tools don’t work, we tend to blame ourlves, for being too stupid or not reading the manual or having too-fat fingers…. When our tools are broken, we feel broken. And when somebody fixes one, we feel a tiny bit more whole.”
For the unveiling at the January 2007 Macworld in San Francisco, Jobs invited back Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, Steve Wozniak, and the 1984 Macintosh team, as he had done when he launched the iMac. In a career of dazzling producer prentations, this may have been his best.
“Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything,” he began. He referred to two earlier examples: the original Macintosh, which “changed the whole computer industry,” and the first iPod, which “changed the entire music industry.” Then he carefully built up to the product he was about to launch: “Today, we’re introducing three revolutionary products of this class. The first one is a widescreen iPod with touch controls. The cond one is a revolutionary mobile phone. And the third is a break through Internet communications device.” He repeated the list
for emphasis, then asked, “Are you getting it? The are not three parate devices, this is one device, and we are calling it iPhone.”
When iPhone went on sale five months later, at the end of June 2007, Jobs and his wife walked to the Apple store in Palo Alto to take in the excitement. Since he often did that on the day new products went on sale, there were some fans hanging out in anticipation, and they greeted him as they would have Mos if he had walked in to buy the Bible. Among the faithful were Hertzfeld and Atkinson. “Bill stayed in line all night,” Hertzfeld said. Jobs waved his arms and started laughing. “I nt him one,” he said. Hertzfeld replied, “He needs six.”
The iPhone was imme diately dubbed “the Jesus Phone” by bloggers. But Apple’s competitors emphasized that, at $500, it cost too much to be successful. “It’s the most expensive phone in the world,” Microsoft’s
