Bonus: Brian Merchant, author of The One Device

We’re doing two episodes of The Vergecast this week — the usual one on Friday, and this very special edition with Brian Merchant, author of The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone. We ran a big excerpt of the book this week, and we got deep on talking about the book, where it came from, and Merchant’s feeling that we should know more about the technology products in our lives — and know more about the hundreds of people who make them, from the unsung engineers at tech companies to the extremely unsung miners who dig the raw materials out of the ground. And, of course, we talk about the quotes from Tony Fadell and Bill Bilbrey in the excerpt we just published, in which Fadell tells a story about Phil Schiller arguing the iPhone should have a hardware keyboard. Schiller has said the story isn’t true, and Fadell has tried to walk it back as well. “So I wasn't in the room at Apple 10, 15 years ago when this would have happened,” says Merchant, who has the exchange on tape. “But this is a quote verbatim as Tony Fadell who was in the room told it to me. He told me this quote in such detail and he gave such a vivid account and I had no reason to believe it was untrue.” Merchant says the controversy has “blown him away.” “It certainly wasn't intended to make Phil Schiller look dumb. It was an opposing viewpoint... I think that it's totally fine to be a dissenting voice and want to contextualize this emergent technology and even be opposed to it. Why would you not have someone in the room who is forcing people to think critically about this potentiality?” There’s a lot more on the podcast, including a deep dive into the early research projects at Apple exploring touch interfaces. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast. There's usually like a whole little bit I do at the beginning of our show here, but this is a very special edition of The Vergecast. It's just me, Neil Patel, I'm at The Verge, and I'm joined for the full hour here by Brian Merchant, who is author of The One Device, a new book about how the first iPhone was made. Hey, Brian.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  Hey, Neil. Wait, wait a minute. I don't get the scissor vodka treatment?

• 0:23Nilay Patel?

  Oh, man. One day, someone's gonna write a book about that. So I want to start with just a little story about how you and I came to meet and how we ended up running a big excerpt from your book, On the Verge, which has caused some controversy that I want to talk about. But you, I have said on The Vergecast many times, I don't think anyone's ever told the story of how anyone made the iPhone. Like, the real story isn't out there. And Brian, as you may have surmised by the scissor vodka joke, is a Vergecast listener. And he emailed me and said, "I'm writing this book." So like, several months ago, he came by The Verge offices, we hung out, and I was like, "I cannot wait to read this book. And when it comes time, I want to run a chunk of it." So we did. But it's amazing to me. I love

• 1:08Nilay Patel?

  it when little things happen because of the podcast.

• 1:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. I just couldn't help myself. I heard you say that, and I just was like, I think I may have like, literally, like, put my hand up in the air, doing dishes or whatever. I'm like, "I did, I did."

• 1:22Nilay Patel?

  I know the answer.

• 1:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I just had to reach out. And yeah, it's, it's, it's, everything's been great.

• 1:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Anyhow, like I said, there's a little bit of controversy. We will definitely talk about it. But let's start at the start, so people know what's going on with this book. So just tell me about your book.

• 1:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. So The One Device is, it's the secret history of the iPhone. That's, that's the billing. It's sort of about all of the human stories, which are often invisible, that go beyond sort of the, the narrative that we all kind of glom onto about, you know, Steve Jobs and presenting this thing, which is a big part of the story, but... You know, I I just kind of woke up one day and it it it was actually I had I left my phone in a cab. Uh, I think everybody has like this moment where you are without your phone for an extended period of time and you feel a little uncomfortable. And I was fortunate enough to go years without ever having that, but I I did eventually leave it in the back of a cab.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  And the, you know, the the cab driver turned it into the police nicely enough. So, I mean, there there are just so few things where you're like, okay, you know, that's my day. I'm off, I'm taking the day off work to go down to the police department, get my phone back, like, everything else can wait. So I'm sitting there in line, just, and I just, I I was just kind of musing on it. And I was just thinking about this thing that has so much power over us. And I really kind of quickly arrived at the conclusion that I had very little idea of of of of how it works. Um, or what goes into making each one, or how it became so ubiquitous, how it became the most uh, popular device on the planet, how it became the one device. So from there, I just started, uh, peeling away at it.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  And as I detail in the book, I really pretty early on went to the folks at iFixit. Just curious about what was under the hood of this thing. And then that's when it really kind of sunk in, when they were explaining piece by piece. This whole like sea of components and materials and concepts that they were talking about. So I I really sort of saw an opportunity to kind of create, um, you know, something of like an atlas of our moment, like this is it's it's invention, it's technology, it's labor, it's marketing, it's culture. It's, you know, everything kind of has been poured into this thing, um, very, very successfully.

• 3:45Speaker 01

  So the book is about, uh, homing in on all of those layers and, you know, going piece by piece. Like, how did this happen inside Apple?

• 3:54Nilay Patel?

  I think as I was reading it, and listeners, if you read it, which I recommend you do because it's great. Um, it's almost every other chapter is, there's the inside narrative of Apple in the, you know, sort of mid, late 2000s when they were making the thing. And then there's Extreme present day, you're in a tin mine, you're in, you know, lithium mines, literally, where the battery components are being made, talking about how they physically have to make it. What kind of prompted that part of it?

• 4:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, so the goal was really to kind of obtain sort of as comprehensive an understanding of how we arrived at this moment as possible. And that means, just as you said, on, on the one hand, understanding how it was built as a product, but on the other hand, it means trying to understand the nature of a, of a device, of a thing, of something that is comprised of minerals that have to come from somewhere, of parts that have to be put together somewhere, and this massive spiraling, you know, supply chain that sort of binds them all together. So I, I really kind of did my best to condense,

• 5:07Speaker 01

  you know, what makes the iPhone the iPhone, into a series of chapters, and then I explored them one by one. So you have the concept of a smartphone in the very beginning, like what, why do we even want this thing, this audio visual communicator that puts us in constant touch with anybody that we've, we've ever met and, you know, hundreds and thousands of people that we never have, or never will. Why do we want this? And so you look at, I look at the history of where that sort of idea evolved from and how it was inspired by both fiction and, and technology. And then I move on to, you know, the basic mineral

• 5:45Speaker 01

  parts, like this thing is made of silicon and tin and tungsten and, you know, so many different elements that have to be mined and pulled out of the earth by real people that we wouldn't have this thing in our hands if there weren't miners, sometimes child miners, for instance, in, in Bolivia, pulling this stuff out of the earth so we can get this final product. So like, to me, like, the iPhone is really an amalgam of all of these threads, and it was really just... Pretty incredible to get the opportunity to pull out each of them.

• 6:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think in talking to you and talking to your publishers, we were figuring out what excerpt we're gonna run, it is interesting to me how much you focused on the labor side of what's happening here and how important that is to you as part of the book.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, because I think it's one of the most overlooked and most invisible parts. You know, from time to time, there will be a attention given to manufacturing, for instance, in China, in the mega factories operated by Foxconn.

• 6:51Nilay Patel?

  And you went out there too, right?

• 6:53Speaker 01

  I did, you know, I really was interested from the very beginning. It's actually one of the first things I did for the book is I flew out to Shanghai and I went over to Shenzhen, which is home to Longhua, which is probably the most famous Foxconn factory where the iPhone used to be made almost exclusively. And now it's, the iPhone's so big that it's made in other plants. But, yeah, so one of the things I was fortunate enough to be able to do was to get inside the Longhua, this famous factory that had a suicide epidemic years ago. And to discover by talking to a lot of the workers, the former workers, the people who

• 7:37Speaker 01

  live right next to this behemoth factory and the people who work within it, that it's still ongoing, that this thing that we kind of marveled over and was very tragic and struck us and caused a media stir five or six years ago is still ongoing. It's still, it permeates the culture there. It's still very, very difficult to manufacture technology products. It's still, you know, its conditions are a little bit better, they're getting paid a little bit more. But it's, you know, every single device that we use that feels so seamless, that feels like this beautiful, you know, responsive artifact is, goes through, you know, dozens

• 8:22Speaker 01

  and dozens of hands. And these people see hundreds, sometimes thousands of iPhones go through their stations and they have to do this very difficult, repetitive work. And there haven't been massive correctives to that work culture. It remains long hours, on your feet, brutal management style. You know, people last a year and there are still sadly, still some suicides. One of the people we interviewed was a line worker who had just quit because he couldn't take it anymore. And he knew somebody who had just had enough and had committed suicide by jumping off the buildings. And one of the places where there are not nets.

• 9:07Speaker 01

  The CEO of Foxconn famously installed nets to catch the bodies falling down.

• 9:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  And didn't really, yeah. So, long story short is that there's still, there's a lot there. I hope people pay attention to that chapter. That chapter may be coming out in an excerpt as well. But I, I, I, I think that that's, it's important to really connect those two parts of the process. How something goes from an invention and an idea and a bona fide innovation. And then, you know, we kind of outsource its realization. We outsource collecting the hard materials and putting it together. And, you know, oftentimes there are exceptions. But, so it's, we really feel like would, could, I think we would do well to internalize and to combine all of the factors

• 9:57Speaker 01

  that, that, you know, make possible this incredible device.

• 10:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I, I, we're, we're going to talk about sort of the inside Apple part of it for the rest of this podcast. I'm sure that's the section that we ran, which was one of the most fascinating decision points inside of Apple. But as I read the book, I was struck by, there's as much emphasis on that part. And I think on the, on the, the labor and resource part. And I think it's, it's very few authors have decided to focus on that as much as the other thing. And, you know, the, the drama inside of the company making the innovation. And I, I thought it was very smart, so I wanted to make sure we talked about it right off the bat. But having done that now. Let's do some drama. Let's get into it. So who'd you talk to?

• 10:44Nilay Patel?

  Because one of your big theses in the very beginning is there's the myth of the sole engineer, right? Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, and that they're rightly lionized because it takes a lot of effort and will and dedication to to bring innovations to market in the way that those people did. But then there's these huge branching chains of people working below them to actually realize the stuff. And so you talked to a lot of people who don't get the credit, basically.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  Right, yeah. Yeah, no, that's exactly, that's exactly the point I'm trying to make. And like, yeah, like, name one person who worked in Edison's lab, who like, you know, helped perfect that bamboo filament that made the light bulb work. We can't, they're totally lost to history that we glom onto these figureheads.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  And for a wide range of reasons, and sometimes parts of that's justified. I talked to anyone and everyone that was willing to talk, basically. I just reached out to current, former, and affiliated Apple employees, people who all worked on the iPhone project or who had inside knowledge of it. I spoke to, you know, in a book like this, you know, like, that's unauthorized by Apple and given Apple's secrecy and its sort of non-disclosure policies, which I also touch on in the book.

• 12:15Speaker 01

  I didn't do a lot of on-the-record interviews with current members. I did do a number of anonymous interviews with current employees, but this was more people who've left Apple for whatever reason. So I think some figures that come to mind are like Boss sorting, who is one of the great unheralded sort of user interface geniuses, and his partner Imran Choudhury, who together have probably done more to, you know, under the leadership of their boss, Greg Christie. This human interface team.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  Is really one of the unheralded sort of design forces in uh in in all of technology over the last twenty years. I I really believe that that sort of they took ideas that had been, you know, lying around that were kind of maybe there was a, you know, this a patent or a paper here or there for a little, you know, pinch to zoom or multi-touch. But these guys really took the software and using like Adobe Macromedia like built the entire user interface that is like it's like Imran says, it's like water. It is. It's everywhere. We we touch, we expect things to sort of move like paper, like a tactile

• 13:37Speaker 01

  object when we touch them. And that's because of the work that these guys did really sort of perfecting this interactivity paradigm. So that crew is really important. And then I highlight a bunch of the early engineers who really were sort of cut from this like OG Apple sort of cloth from the Mac days where they're just like gung ho, like crazy, like, let's, let's like throw together these prototypes. Let's make a rig. Let's do whatever it takes to sort of make, you know, these sort of like abstract ideas turn into like functional technologies. So, yeah, and I, you know, and I went up, I went on up the chain and I and I talked to Tony Fadell, who was an executive at the time. I talked

• 14:20Speaker 01

  to people who'd become VPs like Henri Lamarrue, who was just fascinating, just interview, just a really, really, really had interesting things to say. Richard Williamson, who was sort of the brains behind Safari and then subsequently the brains behind squeezing Safari and a bunch of these other maps down from Mac size to iPhone size. Richard was, Richard is a really fascinating, really brilliant person. So there's all of these people. And then under them, you know, I Evan Dahl, who was at the time, sort of a, in the trenches, sort of jack-of-all-trades engineer

• 15:01Speaker 01

  helping out on the iPhone and went on to found Flipboard and is now, I think, a bigger wig at Apple. But it really took this huge, sort of concerted effort. Neat and Gnatra did mail. They knew that was going to be a big thing, so.

• 15:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's, I did dozens of interviews.

• 15:20Nilay Patel?

  So you talked to Fidel. Did he, you, you point out in the book, right, there's, there's three people. There's Fidel, who is sort of in charge of hardware bring-up. There is Scott Forstall, who's famously in charge of the software. And there's Johnny Ive, who's in charge of the design. And there's a line in your book that by the end of it, these three people would not even speak to each other. Right? So you got Fidel. Did you talk to the other two?

• 15:44Speaker 01

  Uh, I actually did. I did not talk to Johnny Ive. Again, no, uh, no sitting Apple people participated on the record. And I did not talk to Scott Forstall on the record. We drew from the existing, sort of his, he did, he did court testimony, fortunately, which was lengthy. Pulled from that, he did sit for a profile with Bloomberg Business Week. And, you know, I, and he worked very, very, very closely with Henri, Richard Williamson, and Neat and Gnatra, who were kind of his, his core, sort of, managers underneath him. And, you know, a, a lot of the, I mean, these guys spent every day together, in and out

• 16:29Speaker 01

  of meetings, bouncing ideas back and forth, you know, and perfecting things in this crazy hurricane that was the iPhone development process.

• 16:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It seems like Apple just wasn't, like, they were not very responsive to you. Did you reach out to them? What was that like?

• 16:42Speaker 01

  So, Apple was made aware of this book. I reached out to them as soon as I inked the deal. I just wanted to be completely above board and I would have loved to interview their, you know, entire staff and everybody who was involved with the iPhone project.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  Would have interesting things to say about it and people who are working with it today. Obviously, it would have been great to hear from Tim Cook, but I, yeah, no, you know, I made it very clear, I was very transparent about everything that I was doing. I gave them outlines. I gave them lists of people that I was hoping to speak to. Um, I gave, uh, I gave them many, many, many opportunities to comment and we've kind of played a year-long game of, uh, of email tag. I, I met with one of their reps, uh, in, in Cupertino and we had this chat where he's like, you know, Apple might be opening up and, um, it, it turns out they never did, but.

• 17:43Nilay Patel?

  They did and they did. I mean, they did and they didn't, but I, that's like a, yeah. There was a time when Apple was like, we're, we're opening up. Those of us in the press sort of watched it happen and not happen in different ways, but that, I'm sure every journalist has an anecdote of some Apple person saying there, like, Apple's opening up now. Um, so I want to start at the very beginning, sort of the, the proto-history, kind of a sense of what the book is about, who you were talking to. There is, I've never heard this before and I found this fascinating. The origins of like touch computing at Apple started with this group ENRI. And they were doing like the first, it was like a projector over a Mac. Can you, tell me about that?

• 18:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there was a period, you know, at Apple where things kind of seemed, uh, sort of a little more informal and, and looser and just this, sort of this collection of guys from different departments, um, had slowly sort of met one, met one another over the years. Um, there were, beginning in the late nineties to early two thousands, there were a boss in Emran, who we mentioned earlier, uh, Were on the the human interface team and they'd been doing a bunch of stuff with the Mac. Trying to update its its its. Uh OS and doing and and sort of pulling it out of the the gray.

• 19:06Speaker 01

  Black and white knobs and dials stuff, so they kind of built their renown, sort of. Making the little icons sort of bounce around and be more playful and look. Look more stylish and so their their star kind of rose and they got a little more freedom to do what they wanted. Meanwhile, there's a couple guys on the. Input engineering team, Brian Huppie and then Josh Strickon, who just wanted to, they they were kind of, they'd come to Apple to innovate, to do. To build crazy stuff and they didn't want it to do more than just build laptops. Uh and then there was, they they both knew Duncan Kerr, who was this kind of. This guy who was was on the industrial design group, but a little uh less siloed there, like he was interested.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  In software too, um so this group just started kind of like informally meeting. Every week and they called the meetings, um. Explore new rich interactions. The idea was that. They that that sort of the way that we, uh, you know, interface with computers, which around the time was all. Uh, you know, mouse keyboard, uh, was was getting too cumbersome, like media was getting richer. The internet was getting faster, processing power was improving, we were gonna want to be able to do more stuff. And they sort of focused around this concept of direct manipu- manipulation, where if, you know. If you have a mouse, you're, it's still indirect manipulation, there's still an intermediary between you.

• 20:31Speaker 01

  And the uh the the computer and and and what you want it to do. So they kind of really, they looked at a bunch of sort of. Technologies, some of them, you know, a little more mundane, like just like, you know, force feedback. Mice and stuff that was way more out there, like iterations of sort of like the connect style. You know, hand sensing, field sensing stuff. Um and they kind of like gravitated around this. This technology that had just gotten a boost called uh multi-touch. Which now is sort of like the computer language we all speak with our hands. But at the time, it was very niche and it had been developed by another one of the great unsung heroes

• 21:15Speaker 01

  of the iPhone development process, Wayne Westerman. Who Wayne just has this incredible story, like again, I couldn't speak to him because he still works at Apple, but I was able to get in touch with his sister and learn his story. And he has a hand disability where he has kind of severe tendonitis. And while he was writing his dissertation on AI, he realized he just, he couldn't write. So he had to build himself a system that was less hard on his hands. So he kind of looked at multi-touch, which was kind of this experimental technology and had been bubbling up for a while, but never got much traction. And he built a pad for Fingerworks.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  And it had just so happened that an intern had brought one of these hand disability.

• 22:02Nilay Patel?

  This was like a cording keyboard. And I'm sure not, like half of the Vergecast listeners know what I'm talking about and half don't. But a cord, it was, they used to advertise it in like print Macworld. This Fingerworks cording keyboard where you would put your hands on it and you would push literally like piano chords to make letters. And so someone at Apple, an intern at Apple had purchased one of these.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. And Wayne had played piano all his life. And so that was kind of part of the inspiration. And yeah, with the intern, or actually, I take that back. She was described to me in an interview as an intern, but she was not. I think she was a junior engineer who had just been hired. But she had brought one in and they had noticed it and they just said, okay, what can we do with this thing? And as the discussions progressed, they really kind of got the sense that this thing was gonna, this had the kernel of being the future. So like what you were talking about is like, and. They they sort of pulled this thing uh like on onto like on onto a table,

• 23:04Speaker 01

  brought in a projector screen, uh put a piece of paper over the keyboard, over over the the Fingerworks pad, rather, which was this black opaque pad, and that piece of paper was gonna be the screen. So they're like, what if we just like shine down like basically a Mac like, oh, you know, like home screen onto this? And then we just kind of like tweak it so tweak the software so we can make it register touch? And like we can see what this would look like. Like it's it was it was a totally slipshod like they totally just kind of like hacked this thing together. There was uh like Greg Christie, the head of HI, told me that he just like went home and like fished a camera lens out of his garage and like screwed it onto the top so they could focus it up well enough.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  And meanwhile, like, it's just funny that so they were doing this all in this abandoned user testing lab that was down the hall from the ID uh ID studio because like before while while after Jobs had been ousted, uh they had built this user testing lab where you bring people in to see how they respond to, you know, like you focus group technology, basically. And when Steve Jobs came back, it was like, no, like, we're not doing that anymore. We're gonna tell them what they want. Uh so this place had sat idle, so there's all these cameras and this like weird, there's like VHS tapes.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  Like this all this uh kind of like this like sound mixing studio and a one-way mirror. And anyways, that was where they got to work is no one would bug them in there. So Boss and Imran and Josh Strickon and and Brian Huppy all sort of really started trying to hack this thing together to see if they could, you know, make make a demo that they could that they they could show to to Johnny and then to Steve as uh as maybe some uh as a way to the future, uh doing this direct manipulation stuff. Because at this point, Steve Jobs had no idea this was going on. Um both because, well, mostly because they didn't want him to to say, what the hell are you doing in here and then just kill the project, you know?

• 25:06Nilay Patel?

  Walk in on this crazy projector rig with a piece of paper. I if someone if I caught somebody here like doing that, I think, what are you doing? Please get back to work.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  Oh, I I would side with him totally. Like this thing sounds like just like a crazy, crazy mess. But then, you know, and the and the funny stuff about this process was that like they were really sort of going about it like old school DIY. They were looking at videos on the Internet. Josh Strickon was reading, you know, the the available literature like Sony had done something sort of similar with a giant table sized touch touchscreen called Smart Skin. So they they looked at that and they.

• 25:52Nilay Patel?

  I love the story. They they like read the research paper and copied it, right? Or something like that and they got in trouble?

• 25:57Speaker 01

  Well, so I don't know. They don't know that they actually got in trouble, but they got so, you know, they're

• 26:02Nilay Patel?

  Not not in trouble with Sony, but like in internal management trouble.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  Internally, right. So like they're just doing this freewheeling. Josh Strickon was just like this guy right out of MIT. So it was like anything goes. You you take you pull from research, you like, you know, you incorporate other ideas, you copy when necessary. So, yeah, so he, yeah, built, you know, like they they, I guess they were still, they had some trouble with the Finger Works stuff for technical reasons that they had just done it a different way because it was opaque and they could layer the sensors and the chips inside it differently, but they needed a glass screen that you could interact with directly. So the Sony Smart Skin stuff was was closer to that. So he was like, he was like, oh, yeah, we did it this way.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  And then when they when the, you know, periodically you have to check in with the with the legal team and they're like, oh, yeah, we just we just did this like because Sony did it. And they were like, wait, wait a minute, like, no, stop looking at other stuff. We're doing it ourselves. This is our invention. Like, yeah.

• 27:00Nilay Patel?

  That's great. So we've got this weird research project happening. A bunch of people in a projector with this Finger Works keyboard. The sort of canonical story of how the iPhone happened, Steve Jobs actually told to Walt Mossberg at the D conference, he said, at first I had to make a tablet. Because I wanted a tablet and then we couldn't figure out what to do with it. So I put it on the shelf and then later I wanted to do a phone and we took the tablet off the shelf and made the phone. That's the, that's the, you know, 30,000 foot Steve Jobs version of the story. How do you go from a bunch of crazies in a room to tablet to iPhone?

• 27:40Speaker 01

  Well, so, yeah, so I think like the second, the second half of that is accurate and we'll, we'll probably get to that in a second, but, uh, yeah, these, the engineers all took issue with, with, with that state, with the first part of that statement and that Steve Jobs asked for this, um, when it was really kind of them that came up with, with it. So, so what happened, I, I think they were imagining it first as sort of a new like sort of input paradigm for the Mac, but then once they realized they could do it with the clear screen, they sort of naturally started gravitating around a tablet and, and, and doing a, doing a, a, what, you know, kind of prototyping something that would look

• 28:25Speaker 01

  closer to, to the, to the iPad and that, and, and when they showed something like that, that would be sort of in the trajectory towards tablet to Johnny Ive, that's when he says that he loved it and he, uh, in turn showed it to Steve Jobs who initially did not. But then, you know, it was, and then Steve Jobs came around to it because he, you know, he thought about it and he's a smart guy, obviously, and he sees sort of the potential there and he's got meanwhile, like a couple of his best, uh, user interface guys, like who are just in love with this project. I mean, the way that these guys talk about this project, it's just like, they were down there experimenting, the days would like turn into night, there were no windows, so

• 29:08Speaker 01

  like they'd forget to eat and they were just, I mean, it's like, it talks, they talk about it like, you know, like a, a painter who like painting is breakthrough masterpiece or something like, it really is something that they, is near and dear to them. Uh, so, so there's clearly a lot of passion motivating the project and it, uh, you know, the, Steve Jobs signed on to it and there's this funny quote from, from Greg Christie where after he does kind of give it the green light where like he comes back and, you know, the team's kind of all gathered around a table and they're like, oh, so you've been talking to Steve, like, what did he say? And Greg Christie's like, well, We're gonna have to change our notebooks, guys, uh, cuz it turns out Steve Jobs invented multi-touch, or something like that.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  Like, just cuz he, he got so excited about the idea then that it, he owned it, you know?

• 29:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, which is like a very classic Jobs story, right?

• 30:02Speaker 01

  Classic Jobs, and that's part of what like made him such a great leader, too, is that he like absorbed all that passion and said, you know, like, this is, this is what we're doing, and he would channel that again later. Um, and people, he really did inspire people. Uh, but, but yeah, so the, so the rig, the, the challenge was then turning the rig into a, a prototype tablet, and the, the, the, the input engineering team sort of doubled down on that effort and went through a bunch of hurdles that, you know, they're going to Radio Shack, they're like scavenging parts, they had, they had to buy a, a Windows computer to run some of the firmware, and they, they, they just kind of like managed to like hack

• 30:45Speaker 01

  this thing together that looks like a big fat, kind of ugly iPad. Um, and it was, that, that was called the, the Q79 project, it was codenamed. Um, it got, it got more resources, got a little more visibility, um, but it, it, it still had its, its share of hurdles, mostly that it was looking like the thing was gonna be expensive, like just as much as a laptop, maybe more, because you didn't have all these parts to scale, no one was making multi-touch capable touchscreens or sensors at the time, so like you had to work out supply issues, and you needed new chips, you know, you needed pretty much, you know, i- i- to, to, to invent a lot of stuff, and that's what these guys

• 31:29Speaker 01

  were doing, they were, they were perfecting a lot of stuff that was out there, they were making big innovation leaps on their own, you know, Josh Strickon has a patent for sort of integrating the SmartSkin-esque te- technology into a more like Apple-y tablet and eliminating sort of the, the grid work that would otherwise appear on the screen, so there's a lot of, you know, a lot of, of innovation had to go into, into, you know, even getting it that far.

• 31:56Nilay Patel?

  So, now we shift into the, the drama, the real drama, the controversy that is erupted after he published this thing. So at the same time, Jobs says we're gonna make a phone, it was not clear I was talking to Dieter, who usually hosts the Verchast before I came on. His note to me was, "Remind everyone that at the time, Apple was deciding between the thing that we now know as the iPhone and an iPod phone," which was the other concept. "The idea of an iPod phone made total and complete sense because of the way that carriers controlled the market, the idea that they were dumb phones, they had limited functionality, the idea that you could just glue an iPod and a cellphone together and call about it

• 32:36Nilay Patel?

  as a cell phone was totally legitimate, given the state of the market at that time." So they're pursuing both tracks.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  Right, and totally, and not only that, but iPod is one of the most powerful brands in the world at this time. It's like the coolest device. So iPod phone, okay, you can see that leap being made easy enough. And it would just be, it wouldn't have been that difficult from a technological standpoint to just, you know, get a radio in there and allow it to take calls, which they did, in fact. They did. And they, you know, hacked in, you know, a modem, they hacked in a radio, and there were working, callable iPod phones. So, yeah, just to back up a quick second, and this part has been told a little bit

• 33:22Speaker 01

  before, but Apple was really kind of like feeling the heat from smarter handsets, smarter cellphones, in that they were going to encroach on iPod territory pretty soon. iPod was their big cash cow. When the Henri guys started experimenting with this new stuff, it wasn't, the iPod was just a blip, it was this kind of weird accessory that Apple was making. But come, you know, 2004, 2005, the iPod is a hit, and, you know, it really looks like, you know, computers are going to be getting small and powerful enough to fit an entire little operating system onto a phone. It's easy to squeeze like songs onto phones. Like

• 34:05Speaker 01

  people like their iPod, they, you know, stomach their cellphones just fine. Like, let's put them together, that makes sense. So it was really kind of like motivated by this business imperative. And, yeah. And then so when they started casting around, say, "Okay, what do we have? We have this hit product, this incredible, like, you know, proven technology with an iconic click wheel, iconic look, iconic brand." And what else? Well, we have this like create experimental like like touchscreen based rig like you it's tethered like the battery lasts for like forty five seconds if you unplug it and it's like it heats up and it's it's like there there's this thing

• 34:49Speaker 01

  and early on, you know, according to everybody like Steve Jobs did like you know, that's when that that lines up. He was like, this would be great for that. Like this would be it would eliminate some of our issues because we can have carriers subsidize it. It would be a little easier to manage the technology because by virtue of its size, it would sort of you know, it would be easier to get the touch to register. There'd be less like awkward. Uh, you'd have to deal with fewer sensors, that kind of stuff. So

• 35:15Nilay Patel?

  subsidize the expense, right? Because the initial problem with the touch stuff was it's gonna be so expensive. And Jobs is looking at the business model of the carriers and saying, will they pay for most of this anyway? Which I think is fascinating.

• 35:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's what that's what a couple of these guys who are familiar with the dealings said. So I mean, meanwhile, like as kind of a stopgap. The you know, there's the the Motorola rocker is this thing that Apple

• 35:38Nilay Patel?

  I don't want to spend one second talking about the Motorola.

• 35:41Speaker 01

  Done. Yeah, it was just like

• 35:42Nilay Patel?

  deserving of any attention in this world.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like it has to be one of the most whenever I would bring it up in interviews, it's just like one of those universally reviled products. Uh, just but it was important for one reason and that's that it got uh, Apple and it got Jobs into the meetings with the

• 36:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  with the the telecom folks and

• 36:02Nilay Patel?

  There is a great comment on the excerpt. There's a comment for somebody which we obviously can't verify it's a commenter, but a great comment. It's like Motorola deserves credit here because Ed Zander uh, told all the engineers to just be as open as possible with Apple because he thought he would get paid by Jobs. And Jobs told his engineers to just steal everything. And like learn as much as they could and walk away. Uh, and that that guy apparently worked at Motorola at the time. Anyway, so now we're we're on to okay, Tony Fidel, you're in charge of, I think he was in charge of P one, which is iPod phone, a code name is P purple one. Scott Forstall is in charge of software for P two. And they're they're basically in a bake off.

• 36:43Speaker 01

  In it. Yeah, exactly. So there basically wasn't any hardware for P two. It was really just like per perfecting this this uh, interaction paradigm. So it was

• 36:55Speaker 01

  And it wa- and it wasn't like they were both sort of like, it was like, okay, you two, you know, like, one of you is gonna be the winner, you know? Tony, do your best. Scott, do your best. And, you know, whoever has the shiniest product wins. It kinda worked out that way, like, eh, you know, effectively, but not, but it wasn't like the imperative from the beginning. We both, they just both had these two sort of tracks that were going, going. And Tony, to his credit, saw early on that there was movement towards a phone, and he got a team doing a Skunk Works early to get this iPod phone ready, so that he could just show Jobs and say like, "Oh, you want one? Like, here's what it looks like." Unfortunately, like, it just kinda boiled down to the fact that you can't make calls with a,

• 37:39Speaker 01

  with like a rotary dial wheel. It just-

• 37:41Nilay Patel?

  Well, you can, but like, the world moved beyond that fairly quickly when the advent of digital.

• 37:47Speaker 01

  Right. So you had, so there's a third element. There's like, there's Tony doing the iPod phone. There's Forstall and Williamson and, and, and those guys sort of working on this software side. And then there's the human interface team, which is working on both. So like, Boss and Imran went over to see if, eh, if after the rocker failed, Jobs apparently called like, "In all hands," and said, "Okay. Like, we need to do a phone. We need to do it better, and we need to do it fast." And since Tony's project was the closest one to realization, he's like, "Okay, HI, Boss, Imran, HI team, see if you can like, make this thing work." So they built like predictive, you know, text analysis. They built like this,

• 38:31Speaker 01

  they tried to, to mess with the UI to make it more amenable. They did all these things. And it just, you know, I think after months and months and months of trying, and, um, in Tony's version of the story, Jobs is egging them on to try to get it to work. Eh, eh, eh, it's just not bearing any fruit. Meanwhile, like the the touch paradigm, the scrolling stuff like the uh the the demos that they're working up with the multi-touch is looking more and more compelling. Like you can, the boss has whipped up a like a really good sort of scrolling through the address book demo, for example, like and that's one of your key things. If you have a phone, you want to be able to like flip through your your uh your address book in a way that's

• 39:15Speaker 01

  not cumbersome, like typing through names or like jamming on a hard down button.

• 39:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  So they were working on stuff like that and they knew they could do richer media stuff, uh like pinching and zooming and sort of swiping around. So that, you know, became the next focus. Uh and there's a great story from Greg Christie, who was also, you know, trying and failing to meet Steve's expectations with this thing where they had all these like little demos and shards and Christie calls them tapas. But Jobs is like, I don't, I don't like, this not, I, this isn't what I want. Like, I don't want this, like, these abstractions. Like, show me something that looks and feels like a phone or something we can relate to a phone. Uh otherwise, I'm going to give it to another crew. Uh and

• 40:04Speaker 01

  then Christie goes, says they went on what he calls a two-week death march where people are just sleeping in there, crashing at his house. Just the place stinks. It's, you know? And they're hacking up a out, you know, this really sort of rudimentary thing that he says at the end of that two-week stretch was sort of like the basic sort of foundation and layout of what we would recognize as the iPhone today.

• 40:30Nilay Patel?

  That's wild. So, let's get into it. So the excerpts you published, there's a, there's a moment where they're arguing about what's going to happen. And you have a story from Tony Fadell that says, in the middle of all this, Phil Schiller, who is still head of marketing at Apple, is insistent that they do a hardware keyboard. We published the excerpt. Uh there's another quote in there, a guy named Bill, Bill Bree, who says, Phil is not like smart, like Jobs kept him around, uh because he sees the technology like grandpa and grandpa, grandma and grandpa. So obviously, I think this surprised you. It was less surprising to me. Everyone seized on this moment in the excerpt.

• 41:11Nilay Patel?

  Tony tweeted today, "This is not true," which is incredible because it's just a quote from Tony.

• 41:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:20Nilay Patel?

  Is it true? Like, what's going on here?

• 41:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, so here's what I can say about it. So like, I wasn't in the room. I wasn't in the room at Apple, you know, 10, 15 years ago when this would have happened. But I, you know, this is the quote verbatim as Tony Fadell, who was in the room, told it to me. And he told me this quote in such detail, and he gave this such a vivid account, and I had no reason not to believe it was untrue. So I went ahead and included it.

• 41:54Nilay Patel?

  And you presumably, you were like in a restaurant with him, right? You presumably like taped it, right? And then you transcribed it?

• 42:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:02Nilay Patel?

  I'm just like, this is the basics, right? I mean, like, his claim is, "This isn't true," but it's a quote. And I was saying to you earlier, I know Tony, I like Tony, Tony is a very colorful person, a huge personality, but you just quoted him, right?

• 42:17Speaker 01

  I did. I just quoted him. So this whole thing, and not only that, but I have a source who wanted to stay anonymous, not corroborate the whole thing, but corroborate the fact that Phil had been against multi-touch technology. So I felt comfortable in including this direct quote from an interview that was, you know, this quote was given on the record. So I 100% stand by that, and the whole thing is a little perplexing to me. You know, I know that there's professional relationships and whatever that, you know, people get concerned about. But yeah, this controversy has kind of blown me away.

• 43:00Speaker 01

  It was, there was very little controversial about it to me before I saw any of the fallout.

• 43:08Nilay Patel?

  So you haven't been a part of the Apple media circus, I guess, in the past? Because to me, this is a train that I just saw coming. But it's a quote, I mean, it's a direct quote with his name by it, so I figured, you got quotes with their names.

• 43:26Speaker 01

  It's a direct quote, you know? I've verified the quotes, you know, as soon as this dust started kicking up. And, you know, it's, I mean, it's unfortunate that...

• 43:39Speaker 01

  That that he feels uncomfortable about it now, but like, yeah, I it's again, it's a very straightforward situation. You know, a an interview in person quote was given, you know, it's it's very, very straightforward. And I wanted to also wanted to comment on the the the Brill base stuff because Yeah. It's.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  I think like he everybody's taking it as this like sort of vicious insult, which I can see how it's it kind of is. But it's also like you want somebody like that at the higher echelons who's not who's not going to be like so deep in the weeds that like he only understands what power users are going to be able to do with this thing. So I think I mean, this is Apple's great strength, actually. Right. So I think what Brett was trying to say was that, and maybe it stems from some frustration with

• 44:32Speaker 01

  with with Schiller or something, but it didn't seem like it. It seemed like he was just saying like, look, like, like, like Phil, you know, has this strength. He interprets technology. He can. He can say like, OK, this is going to play well with with with an older generation or folks who are not, you know, just early adopters or or beta testers or whatever, you know. So I think that that that's that's part of it.

• 44:58Nilay Patel?

  Can I can I just interrupt you for one second?

• 45:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:01Nilay Patel?

  So like I said, I know Tony. I know Tony's PR person. I asked Tony and his PR person, what's going on here? And I just got an email back from her that says, Tony stands by his tweet and has nothing more to say about this. So that's that's that's where he's landed. Like I said, I like Tony a lot. I hope one day he he tries to explain what is going on in his mind with these quotes.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  Well, he did. So, yeah, I mean, that's what that's if that's what he's saying, he stands by his tree tweets and he says it's not true. I don't, you know, I don't know what else to, you know, what else to say about this. He did. He I mean, he he did write me and say, I I told you a lot of funny hyperbolic stories when we met. I did not mean for you to take the iPhone keyboard story literally. I don't know what that means.

• 45:51Speaker 01

  I don't. I like I like I said, I like I really enjoyed our interview together. I really thought that it was pretty straightforward. I think that it's a case of somebody, you know, maybe regretting saying something after the fact and wanting to preserve a professional relationship. Or I don't know, I can't, I shouldn't really speculate. I don't know.

• 46:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, here's what I'll say. I think the two quotes together are, they work interestingly together, right? So there is the extreme hindsight of knowing that physical keyboards weren't the right answer, which we are, we have a decade of hindsight.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 46:31Nilay Patel?

  But at that moment.

• 46:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:33Nilay Patel?

  The BlackBerry was so popular. BlackBerry ran the world.

• 46:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:36Nilay Patel?

  And everyone thought the iPhone was stupid because it didn't have this keyboard. So when they launched, that was the primary criticism of the iPhone, was there's no physical keyboard. So to have someone in the room saying, we're screwing this up without having this keyboard is actually fine and appropriate. But then there's this other, and so in that context, the Fidel story is fine, right? Like, it's just a moment that happened that it would have been honestly, pretty weird if it hadn't happened, based on the market at the time. Then there's the other quote that's like, Phil is, Phil is not a technology guy, which is a quote, right? And I think those two paint this picture of Phil that is, I will

• 47:19Nilay Patel?

  say this, I've, you know, seen Phil, I've talked to Phil, I've had nerdy conversations about cameras with Phil. Walt has had many, many more conversations with Phil than I have over the years. And he assures me, Phil is just as geeky as it gets with some of this technology stuff. But, and this is Walt saying this to me, he says, a lot of times engineers have contempt for people who aren't engineers. And Phil, not an engineer, is a marketing person.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:48Nilay Patel?

  And that you can see how that can filter up and down. So I don't doubt that Phil, if, you know, Phil was on this show, or Phil's, he goes on John Gruber's show all the time. When they get into the weeds about the details of consumer technology, I'm sure he's there and he's. He knows what he's talking about. I think it's this other level of here's what I'm actually doing way down in the nitty gritty of engineering and that's there's this disconnect there. And I think it's like, but I think that conversation around should this thing have a keyboard in 2005, 2006, 2007, right before this thing comes out, that is like a, that is the, the conversation to be having in mobile technology at that time.

• 48:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And I think that like that, that quote, it wasn't, it certainly wasn't intended to make Phil Schiller look dumb. It was, it was an opposing viewpoint. I think, like you're saying, in hindsight, like now that, now that's like, now that it is like water, to quote Imran Choudhary, it, it, it does look, how could you be against this thing? But so it was like, somebody with the interests of like, the current echelon of technology users in mind and somebody that, you know, knew very well the marketing power of something like BlackBerry or a hard keyboard was making this argument. The reason

• 49:11Speaker 01

  that I, that, that I, that I paired them together is that there, I do have, you know, other sources who have said things to this effect. And I think primarily, it, it has to do with, with this, this multi-touch moment and the opposition to multi-touch and maybe not understanding fully at the time, what, you know, these, what the guys that were trying to convince people like the marketing department to take this on as a product, you know, to, to, to give this more resources, resources. I, I, I think it was like there was some frustration that he wasn't on the same page with them. I don't, you know, I, I don't, I don't know anything beyond the quotes that I'm given, the, the stories that

• 49:55Speaker 01

  people tell me and the, you know, the research that I've done about what it was like to, to, to be at Apple at the time, through, you know. You know, documents, Phil Schiller gave his own court testimony and there's been plenty of Apple reporting over the years. So, you know, I think that this whole thing is maybe just a little blown out of proportion, I think. I think that it's totally fine to be a dissenting voice and to, you know, want to contextualize this emergent technology and even be opposed to it. Like you said, why would you not have someone in the room who is forcing people to think critically about this potentiality? So I think that

• 50:38Speaker 01

  there's, you know, a lot of people who don't, you know, like to see that kind of, who interpret it negatively and I don't think it necessarily is.

• 50:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, the Apple, the Apple media, the Mac media, they used to call it the Mac Web way back ago, but it's not like the iPhone Web. But the Apple Web, if you will, is a unique force in the tech media. It's funny, right before I started the show, I was like, well, welcome to this. Because sometimes, sometimes they take things at necessary extremes, I think, in order to make sure Apple looks good in the end.

• 51:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I'm getting that sense too. And I don't, you know, I can't really speculate on the machinations behind sort of the efforts to, you know, discredit or if they even exist or what's going on at all behind some of this blowback. But, you know, I will say that I was, I'm sure that it was destined to happen, you know. People, there is a culture of appreciation for Apple that in many ways is well deserved. Like, it's this crazy, they've created this incredible run of products that people love. So, you know, I don't begrudge anyone for, for, you know, having a stake in it. I do think that it's, you know, it's

• 51:59Speaker 01

  interesting to see some of the pre-coiled backlash from some of the people who just, you know, don't, who have an image of Apple that they, that's, that they want to, you know, hold up themselves and promote, especially some of these bloggers and commentators.

• 52:20Speaker 01

  So maybe this maybe this narrative and maybe some of the stories in this book will violate some of the Apple myths that are more deeply held, but I think that's a healthy thing. I think that the truth is, is that like a lot of these ideas like percolate and spring up from the ground. And I think that a lot of people who really make Apple Apple, a lot of the people in the, you know, in the trenches, the engineers, the designers, quality assurance people, people who like are tasked with like really sort of hacking together these crazy, these crazy products and doing the grunt work, you know, elude a lot of, a lot of credit. And I'd like to focus on everything that they did too. And,

• 53:04Speaker 01

  you know, honestly, I'd like to focus more on that than, than, you know, a war of words between executives.

• 53:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but sometimes it's like unavoidable. You're in it.

• 53:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's part of the culture too, for sure.

• 53:16Nilay Patel?

  So there's one thing that I want to ask about. And it was interesting, you know, I read it, I read the book, I read the excerpt again when we put it up. And I noticed that in our comments, a lot of people picked up on this, that the iPhone had broken up marriages, like multiple marriages. And there was a little bit of a debate on, is that, you know, is that a product of the culture? Is that good? Is that how it is now? What's your sense of that? Were you expecting so many people to focus on that little detail? Was that a pervasive thing that you heard about? Give me some more on that.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. It was. It was pervasive, that is. It was. And I don't necessarily think that it is endemic to Apple's culture alone. You know, Apple's demanding sort of work culture may have

• 54:10Speaker 01

  Played a role in amplifying it during this project, but I think that we should look at this more as sort of a relationship between people, really, really brilliant, smart, hardworking people who are sensing that they have an opportunity to work on something revolutionary, so to speak, something that is going to be big. You know, you can sense a bigness and wanting to, wanting to tap into it and to, you know, really sort of dedicate themselves to it. So I think it's more of a comment on the toll that they paid. You know, they had choices,

• 54:54Speaker 01

  of course. I've seen some of those comments too, that, you know, like it's, you know, they could have gone home earlier, they could have, you know, maybe that wouldn't have been tolerated under, under the, the management during the time, but nobody really spoke of it in those terms. I wanted to like communicate the terms that people spoke in it, which spoke of that particular element, which is like, this is what it took. There wasn't much of a question about it. And I think Greg Christie like put it, put it the best. Like in hindsight, you know, like, you know, we could have done things differently, but it, but, but at the moment, we, we couldn't have. We, we just, we just really, we really were so absorbed

• 55:38Speaker 01

  in the task at hand, the pressures were so great that we didn't ever really think about, you know, abdicating work. And, you know, that it was so stressful. It was stressful for some more than others, depending on which department you were in and what your tasks were and what you, what you were responsible for. But I think it's worth examining that this sort of. Lionization of, of, of work, especially in Silicon Valley, you know, I was just, I just was randomly pulled into like a, a Twitter thread a, a, a week or so ago where this VC was saying like, you have to, you know, like, we only found people who, you know, work weekends, work all the time, work everything.

• 56:23Speaker 01

  And, you know, and it, there's something that's a little bit toxic about that, I think, in, in making those demands and perpetuating, perpetuating this culture of, of, you know, round the clock work as a norm or as mandatory for success.

• 56:40Speaker 01

  But, you know, and in this book, you know, I, I did a lot of interviews with people who had lived the consequences of that. And some said, you know, like, I would do it all over again, the same way, and some are much more ambivalent. And, uh, some, you know, are still sort of coming to terms with what, what even, uh, that sort of investment of time and resources at the expense of family, uh, meant. Some feel like they have to sort of pay pennants to like make up for it, which is interesting.

• 57:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. The other thing I'll say, um, we've talked now for just over an hour. Uh, and you've mentioned a lot of names. You've talked to a lot of people. Not one female name so far, right? This is like a male dominated team. I think there's, there's only one, you, you pay attention to this in the book. There's only one, uh, woman on the, the core iPhone team.

• 57:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's, uh, and in the beginning there, you, you know, and from the design phase on up, there, there were none, um, which is sort of like a, uh, well, you know, it's, it's, it's a problem. Obviously, and it's something that's been true of Silicon Valley for, for a long time. And it's, it's, it's something that, you know, A lot of the guys that I interviewed um didn't quite, you know, know what to make of it when it would come up in interviews and and and some, you know, straight up lamented it and it was, you know, it is, it's crazy, it's crazy.

• 58:13Speaker 01

  This device that is in, you know, has a billion sold, it's inspired, you know, its design paradigms and its software have inspired knockoffs uh that have many more billions sold in Android phones and, you know, many of the design flourishes and and uh the design architecture has been changed, but it's but it's incredible to think that this it was designed, you know, by men ostensibly for men, um mostly white men, um you know, it's the in the in the in the human interface design team, which came up with a lot of the interaction design,

• 58:52Speaker 01

  it was a little more diverse, uh there were, there were, you know, two non-white members as opposed to to less than that than others. But yeah, it's it is, it's a snapshot of this industry uh at uh ten years ago, which was it was which was doing even less about diversity then than it is now and, you know, I don't really know what the biggest, you know, uh result of the of of sort of like the way it was designed and the and the software, but you know, it is, you know, a lot of a lot of smart writers uh have have pointed out that it's like these products are designed with men in mind and that sort of, you know, like Rosevelith, for instance, has done a

• 59:36Speaker 01

  lot of interesting work uh looking at, you know, the implications of design and when you have a room full of men designing a product, it's going to come out more tailored for uh men's hands and men's usage. So that's a real thing that we should be thinking about and not only that, but the culture was very masculine, you know, there, you know, there's stories of people looking at pornography in the hallways of the of the place, uh you know, there's a lot of you know, testosterone and, you know, I can't imagine, you know, what it would what it must have been like for a for a woman working on that team and and the woman who was.

• 1:00:19Speaker 01

  There, Kim Vorath is a polarizing figure. As a result of these interviews, people call her, you know, derogatory terms and that could be just because she, you know, collided with them on a personal level, but you have to think about it. You have to think about what this means for the product at large.

• 1:00:41Nilay Patel?

  So, what's your last kind of big thought about this? Obviously, when people read the book, tell them when it comes out, where to buy it, how much it costs, all that, but after they're done reading the book, what do you want people to think about?

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I want people to think about technology products, especially one that's become as ubiquitous as the iPhone, which means Androids and it means, you know, this smartphone sort of staple, this iconic black rectangle. I want people to think about the whole immense sort of tapestry of work, of invention, of ideas, of innovation, that all has to be threaded together. I really hope people come away from this book, you know, looking at the iPhone and being cued to think, oh, okay, there's the work of a Bolivian miner in there.

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  Okay, there's the work of Imran Choudhry, the great UI designer in there. Oh, there's the work of Wayne Westerman, who had, you know, who built multi-touch and brought it to fruition because of his hand injuries. Oh, there's Sophie Wilson, the brilliant, you know, transgendered architecture designer. There's just so many different people and personalities and centuries-long ideas stewing that all bubbled up to make this thing possible. So I really want everybody to be able to look at it and kind of, you know, recognize what it takes to create something so ubiquitous and think about how that, you know, reflects back on us, too.

• 1:02:16Nilay Patel?

  So now you gotta pitch the book. When can you buy it? How much does it cost?

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  It's on sale, June 20th.

• 1:02:24Nilay Patel?

  How much did it cost?

• 1:02:25Speaker 01

  It's, uh, it's, if you preorder it, you get a special deal. It's, uh, it's 18 bucks and 50 cents. So preorder it on Amazon, on iBooks, uh, but it'll be out.

• 1:02:35Nilay Patel?

  There's something really special about buying the book on iBooks, I think.

• 1:02:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was, uh-

• 1:02:39Nilay Patel?

  I feel, it feels like you're closing the loop.

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Complete the experience and then read it on your iPhone, you know?

• 1:02:47Nilay Patel?

  Exactly.

• 1:02:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:48Nilay Patel?

  Um, great, man. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for diving deep in the weeds of the, the controversy. Uh, thank you for experiencing the Apple press with me, cause very few people know what that's like on the other side. Uh, and thank you so much for, for writing this book and doing the work. I, I, again, I've read it. Um, I think it's outstanding. I was proud to publish, uh, a big chunk of it on The Verge, uh, and I hope everybody else reads it too.

• 1:03:11Speaker 01

  All right, man. Well, thanks so much for having me on. I, it was a pleasure to talk about some of this stuff. Um, and I, I'm just thrilled with the excerpt and, uh, Vergecast, man. This was fun.

• 1:03:22Nilay Patel?

  Cut through the night.

• 1:03:23Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:03:24Nilay Patel?

  See you, everybody.

• 1:03:25Speaker 01

  All right, bye-bye.