Inside Apple Software Design

What was it like to build and demo new things for Steve Jobs? How did Apple develop the software components of iconic hardware products iPhone, iPad, and more? Longtime Apple software engineer and designer Ken Kocienda shares stories and lessons from his career at Apple with a16z's Frank Chen.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  What was it like to build and demo new things for Steve Jobs? How did Apple develop the software components of iconic hardware products like iPhone, iPad, and more? And what can we learn from these stories? In this wide-ranging conversation from April 2019, A16Z's Frank Chen sits down with Ken Koscienda, a longtime software engineer and designer at Apple, who was there from 2001 to 2017, who also wrote a book about his career called Creative Selection. They discuss Ken's unconventional path from freelance photographer to software engineer at Apple, his work on many core products from Safari Web Browser to iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and features like autocorrect, and what it was like to demo new products for Steve Jobs, and more.

• 0:45Frank Chen?

  Hi. Welcome to the A16Z Podcast. This is Frank Chen. This episode, which is called "Inside the Apple Software Factory", originally aired as a YouTube video. You can watch all of our YouTube videos at youtube.com/A16Zvideos. Hope you enjoy. Well, welcome to the A16Z YouTube channel. I'm Frank Chen, and today I am so excited. I feel like I have won the golden ticket to Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. Because, look, if you're in Silicon Valley, the one chocolate factory you want, you're desperate to go visit, is Apple. And the reason for that is Apple has consistently, over its history, turned out some of the most intuitive and delightful

• 1:30Frank Chen?

  and just plain awesome products that people use. And people are dying to find out how is it that Apple makes such delightful products? And so today, I'm here with Ken Koscienda, and I'm so excited for him to tell us all about the creative process that he used and his team used to create these products. So Ken, thank you so much for coming.

• 1:53Speaker 02

  Well, thank you so much. It's great to be here with you.

• 1:55Frank Chen?

  Well, let's get right into it. So maybe talk a little bit about how you ended up at Apple, because like on paper, you don't look like the typical software engineer. So go back and do the longboard. Like, where were you born?

• 2:08Speaker 02

  Oh, well, I was born in New York, stayed there on Long Island, downstate. Grew up close to beaches, lived there until I went away to college. I went to Yale and got a degree in history.

• 2:23Speaker 02

  And then after I graduated from Yale, I didn't do the typical thing. I went to motorcycle mechanic school.

• 2:28Frank Chen?

  Really?

• 2:29Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:29Frank Chen?

  All right. Ivy League, and what motivated that? Like, you just loved motorcycles?

• 2:33Speaker 02

  Wanted to learn how to fix motorcycles. Well, when I graduated from college, I wanted to do something that was as different from Ivy League college as possible.

• 2:44Frank Chen?

  Yeah. I think that qualifies.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  Right, right. This was dismaying to my parents, my father in particular, I can tell you.

• 2:52Frank Chen?

  I'm sure.

• 2:53Speaker 02

  But, yeah, so I...

• 2:54Frank Chen?

  At least he didn't have an Asian parent.

• 2:56Speaker 02

  Well, I...

• 2:58Frank Chen?

  You would've been disowned.

• 2:59Speaker 02

  My dad was pretty confused about the choice. But anyway, but eventually, you know, they got behind and supported that. And so I fixed motorcycles. And then I wasn't really quite sure what I wanted to do. I had this degree in history, but wanted to, you know, kind of keep following my nose, find new and interesting things to do. I also did a lot of work in photography when I was at Yale. I spent a lot of time in the art and architecture library on the Yale campus, just reading books, learning about art.

• 3:37Frank Chen?

  Yeah, beautiful buildings on campus, gothic.

• 3:40Speaker 02

  Oh, for sure, yeah. Very interesting architecture, the art and architecture building in particular. Well, anyway, so I became more interested in photography. I wound up getting a job at a newspaper in the New York area, Newsday. Did two years there, working in their editorial library with their photo archive. But then I kind of decided that wasn't really going anywhere fast enough, so I moved to Japan.

• 4:05Frank Chen?

  Wow.

• 4:06Speaker 02

  And I had a three-part plan for going to Japan. I was gonna photograph myself, make a portfolio of my own work. And I thought that it might be interesting to get some teaching experience. So I taught English. And I was chasing a girl.

• 4:24Speaker 02

  So that was the three-part plan, right? Photograph, teach, chase a girl. Right. I wound up catching the girl and so we've been married for, it's gonna be 25 years. Congratulations. And just a couple of months here. That's awesome. And so after that, I took that, the portfolio of work that I put together two years in Japan and applied to a fine arts program at the Rochester Institute of Technology for a Master of Fine Arts and a degree program. But it was there that I discovered the World Wide Web. And so I put my plans to be a fine art photographer or maybe a professor of photography or, you know, putting together the teaching experience with photography.

• 5:09Speaker 02

  I just set that aside. Yeah. And because I saw the web for the first time. It was probably 1994 and I thought it was the most amazing thing. So Mosaic, when, and the professor oddly enough loaded up, you know, one of the few websites comparatively that was available than Yahoo when it was text only. Right, right. And so to me, the interest was, I'm gonna make photos show up on this thing. I'm gonna take my, experience my love of fine art and liberal arts and figure out how to make that come alive on the web. And I just wound up getting more and more into programming. I graduated, or I left RIT without graduating with any degree, but I, by that time, I'd

• 5:54Speaker 02

  learned enough to go get a job at a web development company and wound up making websites and this startup, that startup, the next startup. Yeah. I wound up, I had a company called Easel. Oh, right, of course. Where I did Linux software development making, desktop Linux. Right. Every year is the year of desktop Linux. Desktop Linux, we thought that 1999 or 2000 was gonna be the year of desktop Linux. It turned out not to be, but...

• 6:23Frank Chen?

  But you worked on the Nautilus file browser?

• 6:25Speaker 02

  I actually worked on the portion of Nautilus that connected to these sort of proto-cloud services.

• 6:31Frank Chen?

  That's for Dropbox before its time, right?

• 6:34Speaker 02

  Interestingly, for where I am here, Andreessen Horowitz, we host our cloud services at LiveCloud.

• 6:40Frank Chen?

  Oh, thank you very much.

• 6:41Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 6:42Frank Chen?

  Very good customer.

• 6:44Speaker 02

  So, we went ahead with that project, but of course, that company didn't succeed. But of course, Ezel had this long-standing connection through some of its principals, Andy Hertzfeld, Mike Boig, Bud Tribble.

• 6:58Frank Chen?

  Yeah, the legends, right? Macromedia.

• 7:00Speaker 02

  And that got me an introduction to Apple. I started Apple in 2001 and started getting into making the web browser for Apple was my first project.

• 7:10Frank Chen?

  That's fantastic. And why don't we get into that story? Because as you tell in the book, you sort of started experimenting with the old Metscape codebase, right?

• 7:21Speaker 02

  Right.

• 7:22Frank Chen?

  By the, called Mozilla, I guess, right?

• 7:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:25Frank Chen?

  By then. But you ultimately didn't go that way.

• 7:27Speaker 02

  Right. Well, you see, you know, it's sort of interesting, and maybe we'll get into this more as we talk. The way that Apple worked in this period, during the Steve Jobs era, is that he would set this vision.

• 7:39Frank Chen?

  Yeah.

• 7:40Speaker 02

  And so, his vision was, we, Apple needs its own web browser. So, at the time, when I joined in 2001, macOS X, the new version of the desktop operating system, replacing the old classic version of macOS that had been shipping on the computers since the 80s.

• 8:00Frank Chen?

  Right.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  Right? So, it came along with this Unix-based replacement. But that system didn't have its own web browser. It was still part of the agreement that had been made a couple of years earlier with Microsoft to provide Apple with web browsers. So, Internet Explorer.

• 8:16Frank Chen?

  Right. When Bill invested.

• 8:18Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 8:19Frank Chen?

  He brought Office to the Mac and then IE became the default browser.

• 8:22Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 8:23Frank Chen?

  People don't remember this anymore.

• 8:24Speaker 02

  Correct. But that was, that was the, that was the situation that Apple was in, is that this exciting new technology, the web, was something that... Wasn't under its own control. And so the, you know, the vision for Apple back then and even still today is that Apple wants to be in control of what it considers to be critical technology. It's critical to its future, critical to its user experience.

• 8:49Frank Chen?

  Yep. And as all the operating system companies decided, right, the web browser was critical. It wasn't an optional add-on component.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 8:57Frank Chen?

  Netscape and Microsoft famously got into a legal battle.

• 8:59Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 9:00Frank Chen?

  Over this. So, Apple arrived at the same insight.

• 9:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:04Frank Chen?

  And then, interestingly, the two code bases that you considered to get Safari off the ground were Mozilla, right, the Netscape codebase, and then Conqueror, which was a Linux web browser. And they were both open source. And so, talk to me about what it felt like at the time to be looking at open source inside Apple, which is a famous, sort of like, we'll build it all ourselves.

• 9:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. It was interesting that the executives, people like Avi Tavanyan, who was the chief software VP at that time, and Steve, were willing to consider open source. But just to give a brief summary of our full investigation, we considered writing a browser from scratch. We also considered going out and licensing from a company like Opera.

• 9:52Frank Chen?

  There are many who would license you browsers back then.

• 9:55Speaker 02

  Right, right. And so, but we, Don Melton and I, which was the two people, we joined on the same day in 2001 to begin this browser investigation. And we looked at open source because it was, we were a team of two people.

• 10:11Frank Chen?

  Yeah.

• 10:12Speaker 02

  And a web browser is a pretty complicated thing, if you, right?

• 10:14Frank Chen?

  It's harder than it looks.

• 10:15Speaker 02

  It's harder than it looks. So, we thought that if we could make a compelling case to use open source as a way to jump ahead in the effort, you know, stand on the shoulders of giants, right? It would get us to a point where we would have something sooner. And that was really the goal. And being open source, if we took the software from, say, another platform that neither Mozilla nor Conqueror worked on the Mac. So, we were going to have this opportunity to bring this code from elsewhere and make it. Apple's own and really make it look and feel like it was a native program to the Mac.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  So that was, and looking at that, it really just came down to Conqueror was one tenth the size of Mozilla. And so as a two-person team, soon thereafter, a three-person team, this just was the easiest way to get from where we were to where we wanted to be.

• 11:13Frank Chen?

  Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, people don't remember this about the early days of the browser, but when we shipped Netscape, we had to do it on 20 platforms. So every build was a, all right, here's the one for Eric's, here's the one for Digital Unix, here's the one for AIX, here's the one for HPUX, and here's, by the way, is Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT. Like, it was such a cross-platform exercise. You know, the code base sort of grew and grew.

• 11:39Speaker 02

  Sure. And so we only had to do that once, in that we took this Linux code and brought it over to the Mac. And of course, it was a challenge for us, so I can only imagine what it would be to kind of keep all of these platforms going concurrently as you're trying to make improvements and add features and make things better.

• 11:56Frank Chen?

  Yeah. And so you ultimately decided on the Conqueror code base as sort of your starting point. And then pretty early in the development process, you ended up building a stopwatch, the PLT.

• 12:07Speaker 02

  Right.

• 12:08Frank Chen?

  And so maybe talk a little bit about the, why did you decide to do that? And then ultimately, flash forward, like when Steve announced the browser, he would say, this is the fastest, like, it was one of the key features.

• 12:20Speaker 02

  Right.

• 12:20Frank Chen?

  And did you know at the time that you built the stopwatch that he was going to do that? Or like, did you get lucky?

• 12:26Speaker 02

  So, no, no, we didn't. It was not luck at all. Steve was very, very clear to us at a very early stage in our browser development process was that, well, of course, he wanted to deliver the best experience out to customers. That was it. He wanted to put a smile on the user's face, right? And so... If you think about the challenge that we had, there was this existing browser on the platform. Right. Internet Explorer that people were familiar with. Right? And so now we're going to come along and we say, "No, you had that other thing. Here is this new browser that we want you to use. It's Apple's own browser.

• 13:08Speaker 02

  And well, what is going to convince people to make the change?" Yeah. And so Steve thought, "Well, we're going to need a compelling argument." And to be compelling, it needs to be simple. And so his idea, his vision was, "Look, we need to make this thing perform fast." Again, thinking back to the time that, you know, the network wasn't so fast. I mean, some people were getting, you know, maybe broadband at the office, but certainly at home, you're still doing dial-up. Right? And so anything you could do to sort of speed up the browsing experience was something that would be attractive to people. People would notice.

• 13:51Speaker 02

  And so he said, "Browser team, you need to figure out how to make this browser fast." And he told us this a year-plus ahead of time. So this PLT, the page load test, as PLT stands for, was this performance tool that we used during our daily development. So that every code check-in that we had, we would run our page load test to see that there were no speed regressions. We had this idea, that was really Don Melton's idea, who was the manager of the team. He had this little bit of sneaky logic where he said, "Okay, team, if we check in code

• 14:34Speaker 02

  and it doesn't make any speed regression, only two things can happen. Either the code will remain the same speed, or it'll get faster." Right? And again, it's just one of these simple things that just turns out to be this profound truth. Because as we would go over the weeks, the months, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of check-ins.

• 15:02Speaker 02

  That's what happened. Either the code either stayed the same or it got faster. And over time, because there was this speed priority, straight from Steve, we would look for ways to make it faster.

• 15:12Frank Chen?

  Yeah.

• 15:12Speaker 02

  And eventually Safari, when it was released, it was three times faster than MSIE at loading webpages.

• 15:21Frank Chen?

  Yeah.

• 15:22Speaker 02

  And so, and the point is, again, you know, this, you know, Steve Jobs going out on stage, you know, he has this reputation of being this great marketer, you know, the reality distortion field. Anything that Steve says, you'll believe just because he has this, through the sheer force of his personality. But this was more of a matter of just, of him just saying, "Well, we executed on this plan. We got a great result, and here it is."

• 15:48Frank Chen?

  Yeah. So I love this idea that sort of Steve set this goal early on. Ship the fastest browser that you can ship. Because when I launch it, like, that's what I'm going to talk about.

• 15:56Speaker 02

  Right.

• 15:57Frank Chen?

  And as I was thinking about sort of basically the software development process, you know, it's rare for a CEO of a big company, and Apple was a big company back then, to be so intimately involved in the planning process. And sort of, how important do you think that was to sort of your age of design?

• 16:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. I think the way that Steve organized the company and built the teams, built the culture, was an essential part of how we did our work. And the way I like to describe it is that Apple was this wonderful combination of top-down leadership and bottom-up contributions. So Steve, the top-down part, I think is almost well-known. Steve was very, very clear. He could be almost, you know, domineering, right? In pushing his vision forward, right?

• 16:55Speaker 02

  So when you worked at Apple in software development, you knew what the vision was. That was always very, very clearly communicated. But it still was just a vision. Now, sometimes he would get specific, but most of the time, he just would tell us, "I want a great browser, and it's got to be fast." And so with that, as a brief handed over to the engineering team, it was our job to figure out how to do it. And so then that's where the bottom-up contribution comes from. He didn't say, "I want you to make a performance test, and I want you to institute this policy where every check-in doesn't allow any speed regression." No, no, we came up with that,

• 17:39Speaker 02

  providing that bottom-up contribution that helped to realize the vision. And then one of these other things, and perhaps we'll get into it a little more as we go, because it is such an important part of Apple's culture, is that there would be demos. So we would periodically, I remember quite clearly there was a 0.1, there was a 0.2 demo where we needed to demonstrate the strength and the potential of this open-source idea, of the conquer source code that we had chosen, and of our porting plan and efforts before they would commit to going through to the project

• 18:22Speaker 02

  to go from 0.2 to 1.0.

• 18:25Frank Chen?

  And was Steve at the demo at that point?

• 18:28Speaker 02

  He would see the code, very, very often.

• 18:33Frank Chen?

  So that's a little unusual. Compare that to sort of a typical Silicon Valley company where you're doing these demos frequently, right? And so in general, you sort of think of the CEO of a company this size not being involved in every single milestone, right? Because you're Safari on macOS. macOS is one of the many products that Apple was shipping at the time. And so it seems unusual that the CEO would be involved in this many demo points. And how important do you think that is to sort of...

• 19:00Speaker 02

  Well, see, and I'm actually going to dispute one of the things that you said, if I may, is that certainly during the Steve Jobs era, and I still think to today here in 2019, Apple didn't ship a whole lot of products. Back then, Steve, quite famously, when he reestablished control over the company, he came up with that product matrix, right? Where we're gonna have, you know, consumer product, the pro product, a desktop product, and a portable product, right? And so we've got four products, and it's the same operating system, right? macOS. And so, there's actually very, very few products.

• 19:39Speaker 02

  Now, interestingly, when I joined Apple in June of 2001, macOS X had come out, and so we had that two-part product matrix that we were still working in, and that was still four months before the announcement of the iPod, which was just that beginning of Apple expanding out from being, well, Apple Computer to being Apple Inc., right? Get into more consumer-focused products that weren't really thought of as being computers. But, because, I mean, the point of going through all that is that since there were so few products, Steve could keep tabs on what the software teams were doing, that

• 20:23Speaker 02

  there was this big initiative to make a web browser, so he could keep his, he could keep tabs on it. He could find the time on his schedule to get updates on how the software was doing, and he did.

• 20:37Frank Chen?

  Yeah. So it was sort of a focus thing, right? But Steve saying, "Look, we're not gonna have that many SKUs, we're not gonna have that many products." Like, then I can put all my eggs in one basket and watch that basket very carefully.

• 20:48Speaker 02

  You say the word, and it is one of the best words, perhaps the best word to describe Steve's approach, which was focus. Focus on what? Great products. I mean, there, in those three words, focus, great products, you get, you can distill down Steve's approach, his formula, to just a couple concepts.

• 21:12Frank Chen?

  So you shipped Safari, awesome browser, fast, native. You get a lot of people to switch over. And then, at that point in your career, after having been this individual contributor that shipped this awesome product, you thought, like many people in your shoes, time to be an engineering manager. So maybe talk a little bit about that story of how you thought about it, and then how you got the job, and then what the job was like when you got it as your first engineering manager job.

• 21:39Speaker 02

  Right, right. Well, I always try to think about, well, what's next? And I don't really have a big career vision. Especially in the tech world, it changes so fast. And so it always seems like you come to the end of one thing, and then that's the moment to really decide what the next thing should be. And as you say, engineering management seemed to be like this new domain, that I didn't have a lot of experience in. So I thought that this would be an interesting opportunity. And so I pushed for it, I asked for it.

• 22:18Speaker 02

  And it was actually Scott Forstall, the software executive, really instrumental in coming up with a lot of the interesting user interface work in the iPhone software project later, which I'm sure we'll get to. But he was the one who was in my management chain who gave me this opportunity. And so I started working on the sync services software for the Mac, which at that time was really still the software that would be up in the cloud and would help two Macs sync with each other. I mean, we didn't really have...

• 22:57Frank Chen?

  There were no phones, no iPod.

• 22:59Speaker 02

  Right, right. Okay, so it's like you have a desktop computer in the office, you have a desktop computer at home, or maybe you have a portable and a desktop. And it was to get those systems exchanging some data, your contact, your address book, things like that. And so I thought this was an interesting challenge, and people were going to be getting more devices and things like that. But I found that very soon after I got into the job that I was miserable. That I hadn't really reckoned, at that point in my career, with...

• 23:34Speaker 02

  What management really is, it's about people.

• 23:37Frank Chen?

  Yeah.

• 23:38Speaker 02

  I was still, certainly at that point in my career, still fascinated by the software itself. That's what was attractive to me about sync. It seemed like this distributed computing problem and I was enamored of the technology and you had client server and all of this. And not really, again, thinking about how the right focus was to build a team, build a team culture, support the people so that they could do the technology.

• 24:08Frank Chen?

  Right.

• 24:09Speaker 02

  And again, at that point in my career, I wasn't really ready for that. And I found myself, within just a couple of months, I was miserable.

• 24:17Frank Chen?

  Yeah. It's the lament of a lot of first-time managers, which as you think, on the other side of it, of course I want to manage a job. It's the way up, it's the natural hierarchy. And then you get there and your job is about shipping a team and not a product.

• 24:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:31Frank Chen?

  And a lot of people go through that, "Oh, I don't want to ship a team, I want to ship a product."

• 24:35Speaker 02

  Right.

• 24:36Frank Chen?

  So it sounds like that's what you did? You sort of went back to being...

• 24:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I had a, I almost shaped to say, it was like a mini meltdown. I went to Scott Forstall and I say, "Hey, look Scott, I don't want to do this. I led you astray, led myself astray. I quit. I offered to resign."

• 24:54Frank Chen?

  Yeah.

• 24:55Speaker 02

  Because I know, because, and you know, part of the thing was, is that it was a feeling of responsibility, that I had taken on a responsibility that now I did not want to fulfill. And I felt like, well, the only thing for me, there's really just two choices. I could continue on being miserable about it or I could just go and say, "Look, I'm done with this. I submit my resignation." So Scott was like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, just a second. Stop right there, I want to understand what's going on there." So I explained to him what I just explained to you about really wanting to still be in closer touch with the technology. And so he said, "Okay, well, just go away." He was not pleased with me.

• 25:33Frank Chen?

  Yeah. Yeah, we got to the management job you asked for.

• 25:37Speaker 02

  You said that you wanted, right? And now you're coming back and now, a couple of months later, saying that you want something else. What's going on? So, yeah, he wasn't that happy, but he had...

• 25:47Frank Chen?

  And at that time, you had sort of started taking calls from Google recruiters, right?

• 25:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, because I thought that I was resigning. So I just needed to go get another job. So I actually did, and I went to Google.

• 25:59Frank Chen?

  Full interview cycle, right?

• 26:00Speaker 02

  I went and did the interview process at Google, and they offered me a job.

• 26:04Frank Chen?

  Yep, so you were serious. You were ready to go.

• 26:07Speaker 02

  I was serious. I was serious. But I turned it down, turned down that job because Scott continued to engage with me. And he said, you know, just, you know, kind of, you know, sit tight, you know, maybe, you know, we've got something for you. And a couple of days later, it was actually my direct manager at the time said, you know, come here. And he took me into this, into his office. And he said, "We want you to work on this new project. Sign this paper." And I kind of thought, there was just the barest little hint on the grapevine. So I just like reached out, I signed the paper.

• 26:51Speaker 02

  And he said, "Yeah, we're making a cellphone."

• 26:53Frank Chen?

  Yeah.

• 26:54Speaker 02

  And you're now on the team.

• 26:55Frank Chen?

  So that's fascinating, right? So this is a great part of Apple that's sort of very different than most Silicon Valley companies, which is in most Silicon Valley companies, if you get assigned to another project, there's not this level of secrecy. You're not signing papers, saying... So tell me a little bit about that. Like, what did they read you into at the time? It was Purple at the time, right? What's the code name?

• 27:15Speaker 02

  You know, the funny thing is that at Apple, I was already under this blanket nondisclosure agreement.

• 27:22Frank Chen?

  Couldn't say anything about anything.

• 27:23Speaker 02

  I mean, for the whole time that I worked there, I was under these document retention orders. I would get these periodic emails from the lawyers saying, "Do not destroy anything because of the work that I had done was then submitted in patents and, you know, perhaps there was going to be patent litigation." So this is just the...

• 27:45Speaker 02

  The whole mindset, the whole culture of what Apple was. There was secret. We were doing patentable, where we were trying to innovate. And we were interested in treating that work as a trade secret. Something that was valuable to the company.

• 28:01Frank Chen?

  So already super secret culture.

• 28:04Speaker 02

  Already.

• 28:04Frank Chen?

  And then you have to sign something, which is, I'm going to introduce you to an even more secret culture.

• 28:08Speaker 02

  Even more.

• 28:09Frank Chen?

  Inside Apple. It's kind of like when you do the logic classes, like infinite sets can be larger than other infinite sets.

• 28:15Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 28:16Frank Chen?

  Now you're in a bigger, deeper, darker.

• 28:19Speaker 02

  There's more secrecy? Infinity, that's right. It is a bottomless well, truly. And so, yeah, so I had to sign this additional NDA. And yeah, I got introduced to this project, it was called Purple. The codename for iPhone, and it was in development. And my job was to join the software effort, which at that point was maybe six or eight people.

• 28:44Frank Chen?

  Yeah, it's a tiny team.

• 28:46Speaker 02

  It's a tiny little team. To do what I like to term the high-level software. The plan was that we were going to take as much of the Mac as possible and bring it over and squeeze it into one of these, a tiny little smartphone form factor. And so we were going to take the operating system kernel and some of the low-level libraries, the networking stack, things like this, the graphics stack. But above the level of core graphics, which was the low-level graphics library, above that, it was then I was invited onto the team that was going to invent the touchscreen OS.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  So we weren't going to take any of the, naturally, the mouse tracking or handling or anything of AppKit, which was the user interface level software for the Mac. We were going to make that from scratch for the phone. So what became UIKit, for people who know about the technology for what became the iPhone software, iOS, that was our job. And so we started with a clean slate, and that slate was pretty well... Clean when I joined again, just about six or eight people on that effort at the time.

• 29:58Frank Chen?

  Yeah, so they tap you on the shoulder, you're on the purple team. It's like six to eight people. So tell me about the people on the team. Like, what are the roles? Are there product managers? Are there UX designers?

• 30:08Speaker 02

  Right, right. So when I say six or eight people, that was software engineers.

• 30:12Frank Chen?

  Yeah.

• 30:12Speaker 02

  There was also this other team of designers, which in Apple we called the human interface team, the HI team, right? Human interface. And that was the team of designers. They would do graphic design, animation design, but they would also do concepts. They would provide the thinking behind what is going to be the experience of the person that is going to be using this product that we make. And so there was this small team, half dozen software engineers and HI designers, and then executives, managers. So there was a fellow named Henri, who was leading the software engineering team. There was a fellow named Greg Christie, who was the day-to-day manager of the HI team.

• 30:58Speaker 02

  They both reported to Scott Forstall, who was the executive who reported to Steve. And that was it. That was the team. Now, eventually, we wound up adding, over time, more people. We probably never had more than 20 software engineers and maybe 10 designers. Those two managers and the executive and Steve, and that was it. So...

• 31:22Frank Chen?

  Yeah.

• 31:22Speaker 02

  And so there were no product managers.

• 31:25Frank Chen?

  No product managers, no QA engineers, like until later.

• 31:28Speaker 02

  Until later.

• 31:29Frank Chen?

  Yeah.

• 31:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:30Frank Chen?

  So the core that sort of got the whole product going is software engineers, human interface designers, and executives.

• 31:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, we started then, we added then a program manager.

• 31:41Frank Chen?

  Right.

• 31:41Speaker 02

  So there were maybe like two people in just managing the schedule, tracking risk, looking at the bugs. A couple of QA people joined. But, you know, at Apple, certainly from my standpoint, I consider them engineers.

• 31:57Frank Chen?

  Yeah.

• 31:57Speaker 02

  They're the QA engineers, right? And so, but still, that still is all encompassed in the numbers that I gave you.

• 32:05Frank Chen?

  Yeah.

• 32:06Speaker 02

  And in a way, I say there were no product managers, but if, you know, I would say that we had one product manager. There's two ways that I could say it. We either had one product manager, Steve.

• 32:18Frank Chen?

  Right. Yes, the ultimate decider.

• 32:20Speaker 02

  Right? Or that we all were. We all were. It was all our responsibility to make sure that the product was going to be great for people. We all shared commonly in that responsibility.

• 32:35Frank Chen?

  So that's really interesting because you sort of distribute the responsibility. Now, it's everybody's responsibility, but you know, a lot of companies would think, oh, I've got to have a throat to choke. I've got to have like the one person. But of course, at Apple-

• 32:47Speaker 02

  So we did.

• 32:48Frank Chen?

  Right? One person was Steve.

• 32:49Speaker 02

  Okay, well, so, but then another way. When you get down to the level of features, we had this notion at Apple of directly responsible individuals.

• 32:59Frank Chen?

  Oh, yeah.

• 32:59Speaker 02

  Right? So we had DRIs, right? And so when I started working, when I was invited to join the Purple effort, because of my experience on the web browser, I started working on making crunching down Safari, optimizing Safari so that it could fit a smartphone operating system and form factor. And, but then, after a couple of months, we had a bit of an impasse with the software keyboard. And we had, what was really quite unusual, really unique in my experience at Apple, is that this was judged to be, that the development of the

• 33:41Speaker 02

  software keyboard was judged to be sufficiently high risk, and that the risk was not being matched by commensurate progress. Right? I mean, the whole thing was high risk.

• 33:54Frank Chen?

  Right.

• 33:54Speaker 02

  Right? We're going to make a whole new touchscreen operating system, right? So the whole thing was high risk. But the thing is, is that we were, we were making good incremental progress on most of those areas. Touchscreen, and the UI kit, and Safari, and messages, and calendar, and you know, all of these, you know, the phone app, and, but the touchscreen keyboard was lagging behind all of these other projects. And so, one day, it really, really, again, unique in my experience, Henri, who was the software engineering manager, called all of the engineers out, out of our offices into the hallway. We had a group meeting, again, about two dozen people, probably even less than that, and said, "Okay, you all stop." Stop what you're doing.

• 34:39Speaker 02

  Stop working on, yeah, calendars, phone, app, you know, the user interface, level software, everything, stop. Starting from now, you're all keyboard engineers.

• 34:48Frank Chen?

  Wow, that is crazy.

• 34:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:50Frank Chen?

  Like, the entire team.

• 34:52Speaker 02

  Entire team, stop.

• 34:53Frank Chen?

  Everybody's a keyboard engineer.

• 34:54Speaker 02

  Because, because the idea was that if we don't crack this problem, we might not have a product.

• 34:59Frank Chen?

  Yeah, so I think we need to take people back to that era, right? Because this seems super counterintuitive, that you'd put all 20 people

• 35:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:08Frank Chen?

  on one project, and so, the, take us back in time. So, the most popular phone at the time was the, the Crackberry.

• 35:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:15Frank Chen?

  The, Rin BlackBerry.

• 35:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 35:17Frank Chen?

  And it has a physical keyboard.

• 35:18Speaker 02

  Has a physical keyboard. And so, um, this was in the fall of 2005. And again, to just give the time perspective, Steve stood up on stage and announced the iPhone in January of 2007. So, again, this is a really, really compressed timescale. So, where, where, you know, just a little bit more than, you know, it's less than a year and a half out from, from the day where, where we were trying to hit, you know, that target.

• 35:46Frank Chen?

  Yeah. 18 months, not a lot of time.

• 35:48Speaker 02

  And we still, we still had, uh, really nothing to show for this effort to give a, a, a solution for our phone which would compete with the BlackBerry, right? Of course, the BlackBerry had this wonderful keyboard, the hardware keyboard, the little plastic keys, click, click, click, click, the little chicklet keys. And again, you meant, you said the word Crackberry. People loved.

• 36:09Frank Chen?

  Love those things.

• 36:09Speaker 02

  Loved. The product's a great product, right? But we were going to provide this, this different vision for what a smartphone would be, is that it was going to be this, that there wasn't going to be enough room for a plastic keyboard with the, the, the, the keys fixed.

• 36:27Frank Chen?

  Yeah.

• 36:27Speaker 02

  We were going to, uh, give more of the front of the display over to a screen, to software. Uh, and so, the keyboard had to be in software.

• 36:37Frank Chen?

  And the idea of an all, the sort of software-based keyboard was one of the design things that came from Steve early?

• 36:44Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 36:44Frank Chen?

  Like, it was just like, look, this is non-negotiable. I'm not shipping a physical keyboard.

• 36:47Speaker 02

  That's right. No, his idea was that we need a keyboard some of the time, but we certainly don't need it all of the time. And so, the idea of the keyboard being in software is that it could get out of the way. It could go off the screen, which would then make the rest of that screen real estate available for a customized user interface that was great, that was optimized for either the phone app, or if it's the calendar, you can see more of your appointments, or see more of a month view for the calendar. So it was absolutely essential that the keyboard could get out of the way when you weren't using it, so that the device could be opened up for these other, better, richer experiences

• 37:31Speaker 02

  in the apps that we were going to be shipping.

• 37:33Frank Chen?

  And what problems were you running into at the time? Like, were people missing keys, were the keys not big enough? Like, what caused the...

• 37:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay. Again, I mean, in some ways, it's hard to think back, given how history has played out, right? That we have our phones now, and, you know, maybe you've got, you know, I've got my phone here today, and I'm, you know, two thumb typing, and I'm hardly even looking, and whatever. Back when we were working at this early stage, and we were all new to interacting with touchscreens, we found that we had this real sense of apprehension. Apprehension, whenever we were going to touch a target on the screen that was smaller than our fingertip, right?

• 38:19Speaker 02

  That was actually a really interesting threshold, a constraint that we were dealing with when we were designing the user interface, is that if the target that you were going for was larger than your finger, you could target, because you could maybe move your head a little bit out of the way, and you could see what you were going for. If the target was smaller than your fingertip, it's like, did I get it? I don't know, right? And so, we started...

• 38:47Frank Chen?

  You don't have tactile feedback, yeah.

• 38:48Speaker 02

  We didn't have the tactile feedback of that BlackBerry, right? You could feel the edges of the keys with your fingers. And of course, with the touchscreen, it was just this sheet of glass. And so, that's the challenge with the keyboard, is that you needed enough keys to have a typing experience, right? But in order to give the number of keys necessary, the keys needed to be smaller than your fingertips. So, what do you do? And so, it turns out that, you know, through investigation and lots of demos and lots of sleepless nights, right, that the way to close that gap was to give software assistance.

• 39:25Frank Chen?

  Yeah. And so, on re-waved the magic wand, everybody now is a keyboard engineer. Everybody needs to figure out how we're going to make a reliable keyboard that's delightful. And so, what happened from that point? Was it like a series of demos where people just...

• 39:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, we did this series of demos. We see, again, going back to the way that it was on that hallway, and it was just one hallway, since it was so few people, you know, 20-ish people. And we all had our individual offices at the time. This was not open plan office, right? Everybody had their office. Mine, when I was working and thinking, I had my door closed, right? But then, okay, so I would be in my office with my door closed, and I would come up with a demo, an idea, right, that could be represented in a demo. Then I opened the door, and I go to see who else's door is open, and I say, "Here, try this," right? And so, we would have this culture. We were all demoing to ourselves all the time.

• 40:24Speaker 02

  And when we were set off on this thing, you're all keyboard engineers now, well, we all just went in our own directions. Some of us, you know, had already well-established, you know, collegial relationships, where I would collaborate a lot with you, and some other people, you know, they had maybe, they worked by themselves. Some people had a good relationship with one of the AI designers or whatever. So we just cobbled together our own little teams, our own little efforts, and started making demos.

• 40:50Frank Chen?

  Yeah.

• 40:51Speaker 02

  And again, trying to combat this problem of the keys being too small. So one idea that we experimented with was making larger keys with multiple letters on the keys. I started experimenting with software assistance. Maybe there could be a dictionary on the phone that the software could consult to provide suggestions that maybe, you know, much like we have today, that there's this bar on top of the keyboard that is updating as you're typing keys, giving you some notion of what the software thinks you're trying to do.

• 41:24Frank Chen?

  Autocorrect. The author of Autocorrect, which is now not only super useful on the phone, but probably my favorite comedy genre. So, you know, go watch the Facebook videos on Autocorrect comedies. They're fantastic.

• 41:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, sorry about that. So eventually, you know, the breakthrough, if you will, that made it possible for software keyboards to really work in a shippable product was a software assistance to the extent that the software may change the letters that you type.

• 42:02Frank Chen?

  Right, right.

• 42:03Speaker 02

  That it'll change it to what it thinks, rather than what you did. And it's actually, this phrase is really, really important. I think really, really, one of the important organizing concepts for so much that we did to make the touchscreen operating system work is because you didn't get this tactile feedback, because you couldn't feel the edges of either keyboard keys or any button or anything in the user interface, is that the software had to be there working behind the scenes to give you what you meant, maybe differently than what you did.

• 42:37Frank Chen?

  Yeah. And how did you come up with this idea? Because this is a classic thinking outside of the box idea, right? Like, if you were going to try to solve this problem, I bet you saw a lot of variations of sort of key sizes and, you know, that type of thing. But like, consulting the dictionary, putting up suggested words, like, where did the idea come from?

• 42:54Speaker 02

  It's just this iterative process. It just takes a long, long time. You start with ideas, maybe somebody else does a demo that does an idea, and you had your idea, and you think, oh, maybe if I can combine those two ideas and make a demo that does the best of everything that I see. And it was just this collaborative soup of ideas all swirling around, and you just take the, you know, all of us were, there was a sense of friendly competition, and it was both of those. We all wanted to do the best, we all wanted to be the one. I mean, I think we all had a sense of...

• 43:36Speaker 02

  Maybe a sense of ego that we wanted to be the one to crack this hard problem that we were given. But it's all very friendly in the end that if your idea wound up winning, proving useful, yeah, you got a little bit of sort of geek cred for that on the hallway. Everybody knew who it was that came up with the idea.

• 44:04Frank Chen?

  I want to talk to you a little bit about this sort of secrecy, right? You got right into the holy of holies. It's more secret than sort of other parts of Apple. And at one point, you decided, as you were refining the autocorrect algorithm, that there were actually experts outside of the Purple team that might be able to help. But of course, they hadn't been disclosed. And so, like, what was that like to try to go get their help?

• 44:27Speaker 02

  It was tough. It required getting approval. It's like, well, I'm going to go and talk to these people. But there was no process, really, at that point to get them disclosed. I mean, really, at a certain point, Steve was still personally approving every person that was submitted to get disclosed on the project. But I did get permission to talk to them. So as long as I told them, I can't tell you why I want to know how, say, the Japanese input method works. The way the Japanese works is that there is this input method, that there is a sophisticated

• 45:10Speaker 02

  way to take the keys that a user types and turn it into the Japanese language, a text that actually reads as Japanese. And so, I just won't get into the details of that. But it seemed like it was similar in a way, I mean, at least in the thought processes, is that we have this real software whirring away in the background, other than, you know, different than, say, just like a desktop keyboard where if you type the A, you get an A, right? And so, I went and talked to them. But, you know, in the end, it was...

• 45:49Speaker 02

  It was just more of conceptual help than really, you know, anything concrete that I could put into the software. It just turns out really that the problem that I was trying to solve, which is really input correction, that you weren't sure what key you hit, was a classic problem that was different enough that it really required different solutions.

• 46:12Frank Chen?

  Yeah. Looking back at it now, which is sort of the extreme secrecy, you couldn't really describe the problem, right? And so as a result, you got some conceptual help, but not sort of concrete design help. Would you think of this sort of tiers of secrecy inside Apple as a feature or a bug or somewhere in between?

• 46:28Speaker 02

  Yes. Yes. You know, the thing is, I think there is a really underestimated power in keeping your team small. The cohesion, the small unit cohesion that you have, where you're simple things like it's we're going to have a meeting. Who do we invite? Well, everybody, right? We're going to have a team meeting, right? Where we're going to talk about important milestones. We're going to call everybody out of their office. Henri could say, hey, everybody, come out of your offices, please.

• 47:09Speaker 02

  And within 30 seconds, everybody was standing there, right? So, you know, you get these, there are advantages to keeping things really, really small. And of course, then there is the disadvantage that when you are trying to tackle difficult problems, you may not have all of the talent that you need. And you may not have a sufficient amount of diversity, right? That all the, you know, especially, you know, a company like Apple is trying to make products for everybody. Well, how do you design for everybody?

• 47:48Speaker 02

  Right? If the design team isn't a microcosm of everybody. And so there are these really profound challenges, right? You know, back in these times, we did the best that we could within the constraints and, you know, and we tried to then really tap into the benefits that the smallness and the secrecy gave us as well.

• 48:12Frank Chen?

  Yeah. Another funny thing that I learned reading your book is the secrecy was so extreme that like you didn't even know what the product was gonna be named and so like the word iPhone wasn't even in the dictionary.

• 48:23Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 48:23Frank Chen?

  Until like after Steve launched.

• 48:24Speaker 02

  That's absolutely true. So, so there was, we were all heading toward this, this announcement for the iPhone in January of 2007. And, so if you remember how Steve introduced the product, he, he said, you know, give his, you know, very dramatic introduction, you know, he said that something to the effect of, "Well, we've got, you know, a groundbreaking product and, you know, and you're privileged to be involved in, you know, a product like this maybe once in your career." But Steve, he had been involved with the, you know, the Mac and then the iPod.

• 49:05Speaker 02

  And he said, "We're gonna have three new products of this class today." And I'm saying like, "Wait, there were two other secret projects that I didn't know about." I mean, truly for a moment.

• 49:16Frank Chen?

  Yeah.

• 49:17Speaker 02

  I, I, I didn't get, and it's like, "Oh, no, no, no, it's just how he's gonna tell the story."

• 49:22Frank Chen?

  It's my product he's talking about.

• 49:23Speaker 02

  That's right, about he's, it's gonna be, you know, the phone and it's, you know, gonna be the, you know, the touchscreen music player and then, you know, the internet communicator.

• 49:30Frank Chen?

  Yeah.

• 49:31Speaker 02

  And that how, "No, this is actually all just one product and we'll call it iPhone." And when he said that, that's when I knew that I was gonna have to go back the next day and add iPhone to the autocorrection dictionary.

• 49:43Frank Chen?

  That's awesome that he fooled you too, because he fooled me, like, click, line, I got, and like, you were working on it, so I don't feel quite as bad.

• 49:49Speaker 02

  What you just, I mean, again, this secrecy, you know, I, I have to admit that it was just a moment where it's just like, "Wait, wait a second, is there something that I don't know?" It's like, "No, it can't be." But, but yeah, it was, that was just the, the culture and the times and, and the way Steve liked to run things.

• 50:08Frank Chen?

  Yep. Now, a feature we all take for granted now actually didn't appear in iOS until several releases later, and that's copy and paste. So I wonder, at the time, did you guys talk about that? And did you make an explicit decision to sort of like, "Yep, let's ship without copy and paste"? And was that contentious? Because on the surface it would seem like that's contentious.

• 50:26Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, it was. But one of the other things that we were really expert at, to bring back the word that we talked about earlier, was focus.

• 50:37Frank Chen?

  Yeah.

• 50:38Speaker 02

  In that we were very, very good, really very, very early in the development process, to say what was in and what was out.

• 50:49Frank Chen?

  Right. Physical keyboard out. That was super early.

• 50:52Speaker 02

  That's right. Very, very early. And that it was clear that this was, that getting the text entry system working at all was going to be one of the real challenges. I mean, I got used to being in the team meetings where Henri, team engineering meetings, again, everybody's in the room. So, you know, we've got 20 people in the room, and Henri is up at the, you know, up at the front of the room, and he's got a keynote slide deck, and he's saying, "Okay, big challenges, well, keyboard, of course." You know, and then whatever other challenge there may have been, and those challenges came and went, but keyboard was just a constant throughout the whole, you know, 18-month development cycle.

• 51:37Speaker 02

  And so, we knew that we wanted cut, copy, paste, but we knew that there was simply not going to be time for it. So we didn't spend any real development effort on it. The one thing that I did implement for the first iPhone was the loop. So you press and hold, and it would give that little magnifying glass above your finger that would show. And the whole idea of that is that we wanted your finger to be right where the insertion point, you know, the little cursor would move. And so then we needed to show you what, and so this was an idea that I came up with. But then there was no time to capitalize that, then expand on that, to do cut, copy, paste.

• 52:22Speaker 02

  And it even got delayed an extra year.

• 52:24Frank Chen?

  Correct.

• 52:25Speaker 02

  Because in the second year, after we did the initial release of the iPhone, and then we had that six-month delay before we did the first customer shipments, and then that whole next year was taken up by making third-party APIs.

• 52:42Frank Chen?

  Yep. So two releases before you had copy and paste.

• 52:45Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 52:47Frank Chen?

  And so I want to get right into this because, look, Apple was famous for having exquisite taste around the design trade-offs. And a feature like copy and paste kind of feels like, wait, you're arguing against copy and paste? Like, that's not a great user experience. And so like, how did the argument evolve? And sort of, the big setup is, look, there's taste, tastemaking, making hard decisions like this. And then there's sort of another style of decision-making, which sort of Google made super popular, which is just relentlessly A/B testing everything, right?

• 53:18Speaker 02

  Right.

• 53:19Frank Chen?

  And so, like, maybe the way Google would have come at this challenge is, all right, let's give people tasks. This one has copy and paste, this one doesn't have copy and paste, let's A/B test it. But Apple made sort of like, what I would argue is a pretty courageous call, right? That seems to fly against the user intuition to exclude it.

• 53:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, it was simply a matter of setting the constraints and keeping them. You know, again, you know, maybe if we had doubled the size of the team, we could have gotten some other things done, but maybe not to the same level of quality. And again, once you start adding people, other things begin to break down, right? You can't invite everybody to the team meetings, you can't find a conference room big enough, right?

• 54:00Frank Chen?

  Right. And now there's 40 people who can break the build.

• 54:03Speaker 02

  That's right. That's right. I mean, you start to have problems like this. And so we just decided that, well, you know, it's like a Steve way of maybe communicating this was, look, this is the greatest product ever, right? It's a touchscreen iPod, it's the greatest iPod that we've ever shipped. It's got all these great features, it's a phone, you've got web browsing that you can take anywhere with you now. And there's no copy paste, well, who cares? Well, we'll get to it, right? I mean, in the meantime, you've got this, you know, the most amazing product that we've ever made. And so that was, and Steve just was, you know, in his mind, was, was,

• 54:44Speaker 02

  he believed that the things that we did do were good enough to counterbalance for the things that we couldn't do.

• 54:51Frank Chen?

  Yeah. So that's great. Great segue to sort of the next segment. I'd love to sort of take us into what it was like to demo for Steve. Like, what was the room like? Who's in there? Like, what's the emotion of it?

• 55:05Frank Chen?

  Everybody wants to know this, right?

• 55:06Speaker 02

  It's pretty...

• 55:07Frank Chen?

  It's probably the scariest room in Silicon Valley.

• 55:09Speaker 02

  It was pretty scary. Steve could be intimidating. There is absolutely no doubt about it. But, to get back to this point I mentioned before of the top down and the bottom up. As I mentioned, except for this very brief interlude where I was a manager, throughout my whole Apple career, over 15 years, almost 16 years, I was an individual contributor. And yet, I got the opportunity to demo to Steve some of the latest work that I did at various points in my career. Because he wanted to see from the person who did the work. And because when he would ask questions,

• 55:53Speaker 02

  well, he could go and ask the expert, right? Go ask a person who is the DRI, right? The directly responsible individual. The person who is, at least according to plan, the person who, when they lose sleep, they are losing sleep over that thing that they're going to be demoing to me. So that's what he wanted to do. And these demos were very, very small affairs. Now, interestingly, the demo room for Steve, the software demo room, was this really shabby little room.

• 56:25Frank Chen?

  That's not what you would expect for Steve Jobs' command performance, right?

• 56:29Speaker 02

  This pristine room that it's...

• 56:32Frank Chen?

  Beautiful log room.

• 56:33Speaker 02

  It's like an air filter. The air is clean. Or, like, the scent of redwoods or something like that piped in. No, it was this shabby little room with this mangy old couch and just standard-issue office furniture. And that's what there was. I don't know why he didn't want better. But the only reason that I can say is that, again, it was a matter of focus. He was focused on looking at the software. And not worried about the decor.

• 57:04Frank Chen?

  Yeah, all right, so take us in the room. It's a mangy couch. Who's in the room? Let's do the version where you're trading off sort of the keyboard with the big keys or the keyboard with the little keys.

• 57:13Speaker 02

  Okay, so skipping ahead, a couple of years after the original iPhone, when we were then doing the original iPad. So this is now 2009, as I recall. So a couple of years later. And so this is actually an original iPad right here.

• 57:33Frank Chen?

  Lovely.

• 57:34Speaker 02

  It's actually a really good one, which is actually autographed by Steve Jobs. So this was the iPad that I got at the end of the iPad development process. But back at the beginning of the iPad process, you know, I would have a prototype that looked pretty much like this. And so we were thinking of, well, what's the typing experience going to be like? And so here's an original iPhone and an original iPad. Well, we've obviously got a bigger screen.

• 57:59Frank Chen?

  A lot of pixels now.

• 58:00Speaker 02

  Right, so now what are we going to do to make great use of these additional pixels that we have? And one thing that I also noticed was if you turn the iPad to landscape, that screen distance is actually just about the same as the distance between the Q key and the P key on a laptop keyboard. So I was thinking, hey, like, wait a minute, we could maybe fit a full-size, something that is a full-size keyboard on a landscape iPad. Now, it turns out that right around at the same time, one of the HI designers, one of my favorite HI designers that I really loved working with and who I had also collaborated

• 58:42Speaker 02

  with on the iPhone keyboard, Boss Ordin, he was starting to think about iPad keyboards as well. And so he had come up with this demo where he had all of these variations, all of these ideas. And so he gave me a demo where he went through, he showed me, you know, 10, 20 different ideas, but one of them really made, really struck me, which was he had a design that showed pretty much just a shrunk-down laptop keyboard to fit. in this space. And so what that meant is that I had two ideas. Is that maybe I could use this larger screen real estate to make a version of the keyboard that had big keys

• 59:24Speaker 02

  that was almost the same size as a laptop keyboard. But then one that also gave you like the number row and all of the punctuation keys exactly where you would expect to find them on a laptop keyboard. And so I figured, well, you know, and I started talking with Boss and we came up with this demo where we would have a special key, we called the zoom key, that would take you from this keyboard that had the small keys that would zoom up to the larger keys and then back down to the smaller keys as a kind of a complement to the globe key that changes the keyboard language.

• 1:00:06Speaker 02

  So we would have this other key, this kind of complementary key that would change the keyboard layout. We thought this was a great idea. And again, the idea of what are we gonna do with this larger screen real estate for the iPad? The idea was, give the user choice. I have these pixels. Give the user choice, use these new pixels that are available on this new platform, this new form factor. And have that be the pitch that we make to people. And so before, of course, you can make the pitch to people, you need to make the pitch to Steve. To the man. That's right. And so I got to demo this for Steve. And so the way that this worked is that

• 1:00:50Speaker 02

  there was a very small team that was like the

• 1:00:57Speaker 02

  chief demo review team, the small group of people that Steve wanted around him as he was reviewing demos. And this was Scott Forstall, Greg Christie, Henri, people that I've mentioned, so the chief managers for iOS. And then a couple of HI designers. It's like Boss Ording, the fellow that I collaborated with on this keyboard, was almost always in this meeting. Another fellow, Steve Lemay, was another HI designer. Often in the meetings, but as I recall, he wasn't in this particular one where I was demoing the keyboard. So half a dozen people-ish. Half a dozen people in the room, yeah. And so then what would happen is that the people like me who had individual demos, and so it's like there were circles inside of circles.

• 1:01:40Speaker 02

  So I was in the circle of people who could demo to Steve. But then there was this circle inside of that who would stay for all the demos. And so my role would be that, or my, you know, how I would figure is I would go in, give my demo, and then leave. And so, you know, think of that beforehand is that, you know, I'm sitting there with my iPhone, you know, out, you know, down the hallway, waiting for Unruh to text me. Waiting for my turn. That's right. Say, you know, and, and so he sends me a text, "Go stand outside the door", and then, you know, and then the door is gonna open, I'm gonna get invited in. So I get the text, I go stand outside the door, and, you know, now I'm waiting, and I'm waiting, and I'm waiting, and it just seemed like, well, he just texted me, why did he text me? And so then the door opens, I get invited, and I figure I'm on.

• 1:02:25Speaker 02

  Gonna go do this iPad keyboard demo, and I come around the corner and, and turn into the room, and Steve is over there, and he's like this, he's like... He's on the phone. He's on the phone, staring at the ceiling, like, you know, going back and forth in his office chair. And, and I'm like, gulp, I was like, what do I do? Like, now, now I'm eavesdropping on Steve on his phone call. Yeah. Right? And so, you know, it's pretty uncomfortable. Yeah. And I think, I, I actually do, I actually do think that he was talking to Bob Iger, the, the head of Disney. Disney. Right? And so he's like, "Yeah, yeah, Bob, yeah, yeah, that sounds great. Yeah, yeah, I'll call you next week. Yeah, great talking to you." Right. So then he, you know, he hangs up.

• 1:03:09Speaker 02

  And, and so then he does this thing, he takes his iPhone, he puts his, you know, his phone back to his pocket, and then he does this. Right. It's like, you know, I mean, I don't know if you know, like the Eye of Sauron, right? The Lord of the Rings, right? You know, the Great Eye turns to focus on you, and that's what it feels like.

• 1:03:30Speaker 02

  And so, it's very, very interesting then how the demos go from that point. In that, he didn't want a lot of words. He didn't want a lot of, you know, used car salesman pitches, right? All he really wanted to know was what was next. And so what happened is, he hung up the phone, he turns towards me, and then Scott Forstall was the one who then stepped up. He goes, and the iPad was already in the room. And so he goes and wakes it up and brings my demo up. And says, "Steve, we're gonna be looking at iPad keyboard options." Now Ken, he did work on the iPhone keyboard, and now he's got ideas for the iPad keyboard. So Ken? And so I said, "Yes, Steve, go and look at the demo, it's on the screen now.

• 1:04:15Speaker 02

  Try the zoom button."

• 1:04:19Frank Chen?

  And that's it?

• 1:04:20Speaker 02

  That's it. That was the intro. And so then Steve goes, he slides his office chair over.

• 1:04:27Frank Chen?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:28Speaker 02

  And he starts like looking at the iPad screen. And what was up was one of the two keyboards. Let's say it was the big key keyboard, the one that was more like suitable for touch typing. And he's looking at it, he took a long time to look at it. It's like, he even did this little thing where he was like turning his head to see what it looked like, like in his peripheral vision. It's like he was just, it's just incredible to see. What does Steve do when he evaluates a product? Okay, so this is what, Dan, that's what he did. And see, he hadn't even touched it yet, he was just looking at it.

• 1:05:06Frank Chen?

  Yeah. And this is going on for a long time.

• 1:05:08Speaker 02

  It's, you know, it seems, it's like one of those things where it was probably maybe 20 or 30 seconds, that's felt like 20 minutes, right? But he took a long time to study. And then eventually he goes out and touches the zoom button. And this zoom button to change between the two keyboards, in this case shrinking the keys down to be the more laptop-like keyboard layout. The animation that Boss Ordin had designed was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen. I mean, it really looked like they were, like the keys were just like morphing. It was absolutely beautiful. But Steve just was like, no reaction. He does the zoom, and then he does this study again. He's like looking at all the, looking at all the keys, looking at how the screen changed.

• 1:05:53Speaker 02

  Then he does the zoom again, and it goes back to the state that it was in the beginning.

• 1:05:58Speaker 02

  And then he studied a little bit more and tapped the zoom button again to see that it's like, "Okay, there are just two states that we're going here between, right? We've got two keyboards. I see the animation, go between one, then the other, back to the first one." He satisfies himself that he's seen what there is to see. And so then he turns to me and he says, "We only need one of these things, right?" And you're like, "Oh, I'm on the hot seat." Uh, yeah. "I guess so." And then he says, I mean, this is again the interesting part. He asks me, "Which one do you think we should use?" He asks me.

• 1:06:40Speaker 02

  He doesn't ask, you know, Scott Forstall, who is, you know, he knows much better. He doesn't ask, you know, any of the other people in the room. He asks me, the individual contributor, you know, just coming in. But I'm the DRI, you see? That's the thing. He wanted the answer from me. Now, the thing was, I had to give an answer. You know, if I didn't give a good answer, maybe I would never be invited back again. Not the DRI anymore with that answer. See, but you know, and I had no idea that this is what he was going to ask. But in that moment, I came up with an answer. Because I thought about my experience with these two keyboards. And I thought that, you know, the one with the bigger keys, I found more comfortable. I was getting to be, you know, that maybe with, you know, like four or five fingers that I could touch type.

• 1:07:25Speaker 02

  And auto-correction was helping. So that's why I said to Steve, I said, "Well, I like the bigger one, you know, the auto-correction is kind of helping and I'm starting to get a feel for touch typing." And he says, "Okay, we'll go with that one." Wow. Demo over. Yeah. And, you know, the interesting thing is that then that's the keyboard that shipped on the product with the slight modification of taking away the zoom button, which was now no longer needed, right? And so Steve had this amazing ability to simplify and to rely on his people to have a good enough idea about what they were doing

• 1:08:07Speaker 02

  and to be involved enough in the work that even when you get asked difficult questions about it, that you've been thinking about it. You have this background of just context of having been thinking about the problem for weeks and weeks. That experience was then something he was interested in tapping into to provide a way forward for the product.

• 1:08:35Frank Chen?

  What was going through your head when you were just watching him sort of head tilt in silence? Were you tempted to explain things?

• 1:08:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, you just know that that's not where you're not supposed to do that. Yeah, I would imagine that if he had done so, he would have been in no uncertain terms. He's like, "Let me look at the thing." Because now, what was he doing? He was, in my view, I don't know what's going on inside his head, but just having seen him do that, having at least enough experience with him and his approach to evaluating work, is that he was putting himself in the position of a customer. He was envisioning himself being in an Apple Store as a customer, walking up to a table, seeing this new iPad thing for the first time.

• 1:09:27Speaker 02

  What's going to be my impression of it? So he pictured himself as customer number one. And so, I don't want anybody, I don't want the engineers. The engineers aren't going to be there to be whispering in the ear of the person in the Apple Store. Sure, they can maybe get the help of one of the nice people working in the Apple Store, but gosh, wouldn't it be better if I can figure this thing out for myself? And decide for myself? And see the evidence of the care that the engineers and designers had put into the work. I can decide for myself, yeah, this is the thing I want to take home with me.

• 1:10:06Frank Chen?

  Yeah. So, obviously, if you have a leader like Steve that's that into being able to emulate the user, who has great taste, like you want to make this person benevolent design dictator for life, right? Now, the downside of that, you know, Silicon Valley is getting a lot of criticism for these sort of super charismatic, reality distortion field generating CEOs, where like you might not agree with them, right? And, you know, in the sort of ultimate downside case, there's sort of just too much worship, hero worship of CEOs. Like, do you think that ever became part of the Apple culture? Right? Sort of the blind obedience to the fearless leader?

• 1:10:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think the Steve's reputation and his success causes people to draw the wrong conclusions, to take away the wrong lessons. I think that if you go back and look at on YouTube of old videos with Steve, maybe, you know, on stage with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at their, you know, All Things D conference, or I just had a reason to go back and look at the Antennagate.

• 1:11:20Frank Chen?

  Oh, right? I forgot about that.

• 1:11:22Speaker 02

  Because I, and the reason that I did this is because this, you know, it's current now that there was a bug in group FaceTime, and Apple issued an apology, say, we're sorry that we had this problem and that we're going to be fixing it, whatever. And so I wanted to go back and see, well, what did Steve say about Antennagate? You know, which was the issue with the iPhone 4, where you're holding it wrong and the signal strength would go down. And I wanted to see what he said. And it was, it's really interesting, this is on YouTube, you can go and look at it, and Steve held a little press event, and, you know, he was just very, very clear, very, very upfront, saying, "Our goal is to make our customers happy."

• 1:12:04Speaker 02

  And so, that's the kind of lesson that people should be taking away. It's not that he was domineering, not that he was this, you know, absolute monarch, you know, 21st century absolute monarch now in a company rather than a government. You know, that he had this, yeah, reality distortion field personality. It's that he had this focus on doing great work and making customers happy. That's really what he cared about.

• 1:12:32Frank Chen?

  Yeah. And then, sort of, how did the organization morph itself to sort of reflect that you had this, you know, great tastemaker who wanted to make these decisions at a sort of very granular level in the design? So, there was an example where you were designing an animation, I think it's sort of the Scrunched Zooming demo, and you got to the point where like Steve and Scott Forstall actually disagreed.

• 1:12:55Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:12:56Frank Chen?

  So, maybe tell us a little bit about that.

• 1:12:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, and so this was for iOS 5. So, this was, you know, maybe the second version, second or third version of iPad software. And we wanted to come up with multitasking gestures is what we called them, so that you would have some way of interacting with your whole hand on the screen. Well, obviously, from the beginning, even though multi-touch was something that shipped even in the first Apple product, there was no way that you could have sophisticated gestures, multi-finger gestures on a screen that size. But with the iPad, we thought that you could. And so, you had this idea of, well, what if you've got the Home button that way, you still maybe want some gestures to interact with the device to control going between app to app.

• 1:13:39Speaker 02

  So, I came up with this idea of using this five-finger gesture, like you take a sheet of paper and crumple it up and throw it away, to go from an app back to the Home screen. There was then this other interaction where you would swipe side to side to just go between one app directly to some other app, right? So, you're, you know, you launch Mail and then you launch Safari, well, then I can just swipe to go from Safari back to Mail, right? So, that the system would keep track of the history of apps that you launched. So, now, here's the part That Scott didn't like. So let's say you start up your iPad from nothing, right? You know, you take it out of the box and you bring it home.

• 1:14:23Speaker 02

  And yeah, you launch Mail and you launch Safari. You've only ever launched two apps. So you swipe to go from Safari back to Mail. Well, what happens if you continue swiping in that direction? Right? There's no other apps.

• 1:14:35Frank Chen?

  End of list.

• 1:14:36Speaker 02

  End of list. And so what I came up with was this sort of morphing, stretching, rubbery distortion of the app to show you that you were at the end of the list. And it would kind of do this bloop, bloop, bloop sort of animation when you let your fingers up off the screen. And Scott Forstall hated it.

• 1:14:58Speaker 02

  He hated it. And his argument went like this. He said, you know, that's not fair to the designers of the apps because they really didn't design for what their apps would look like when you stretched them.

• 1:15:12Frank Chen?

  Oh, that's super interesting. They didn't have a say in what it's gonna look like.

• 1:15:15Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:15:16Frank Chen?

  You've taken away their taste.

• 1:15:17Speaker 02

  And it's an interesting aspect to what happens as you evolve a product. They would then, for the subsequent version, but we would be shipping a version that added a new feature, multitasking gestures, and it would have to work with all the apps that were already in the world. Of course, there was a huge ecosystem by that point. So this was Scott's argument, is that the designers, you've done something to the designers that they couldn't really have accounted for in the design of their apps. Okay, so I got the chance to demo this to Steve too. And I remember that Steve, what he did was, he had the iPad in his lap. So he was sitting like this and doing the gestures, trying them side to side and whatever. And when he just discovered by himself this rubbery

• 1:16:03Speaker 02

  animation, end of list animation, he did it, he did it again, and he didn't look up. He said... This is Apple.

• 1:16:14Frank Chen?

  Ah, awesome.

• 1:16:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it was a pretty good moment for me.

• 1:16:18Frank Chen?

  How did you stop yourself from like doing the victory laugh? Look at him!

• 1:16:22Speaker 02

  He thought that it was, you know, sort of tapping into the, excuse me, the little sort of whimsical, whimsical aspect that went all the way back to sort of like the Happy Mac on the original Macintosh, right? That it was this whimsical little animation that showed that the system has this playful character to it, and that was an aspect that he really loved. And so, and it also just goes to show that there could be disputes, even up at the highest level. Scott knew that I was very excited about this feature and wanted to show Steve, so he let me, and Steve was the one who had the final vote, and he sided with me in that instance.

• 1:17:06Frank Chen?

  And do you feel like that slowed decision-making down at all in the org where basically, "We're just gonna wait for Steve to decide, so like, why bother making a decision?"

• 1:17:14Speaker 02

  See, but again, the DRIs were responsible. You needed to bring him proposals, right? You know, you might think of that keyboard demo example was, "Well, we were bringing him two keyboards and we wanted him to pick which one." No, that wasn't it. We were presenting him with a design, we wanted to ship in the product. The design was going to have these two keyboards. He was the one who unpacked it, and to say, "We only wanted one of these." So, no. And the point is, is that if you brought him shoddy work, that was like, you know,

• 1:17:57Speaker 02

  the equivalent of a shoulder shrug, "Yeah, Steve, we've got five things, we don't really know which one we think we like." That was a way to

• 1:18:07Frank Chen?

  Never get invited back to a demo, right?

• 1:18:09Speaker 02

  It's a way to get not invited back to the demo. And that was the way that Scott Forstall then would have gotten blowback from Steve offline.

• 1:18:16Frank Chen?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:16Speaker 02

  To say, "Scott, why aren't you presenting me with solid designs? I'm not here wasting my time. I want to see the full result of that bottom-up process." So that he could then give his top-down approval, disapproval. "No, send this back for more work with specific feedback on what to change." That was the outcome of every demo with Steve. Approved, not approved. "Bring me something different next time." Or, not approved, "Give me these specific changes." It was one of those three things.

• 1:18:54Frank Chen?

  So Steve himself is sort of legendary for sort of fusing liberal arts and engineering thinking, right? And if you think about the classic Silicon Valley stereotype, companies are a lot more about like the pet-aggreed computer science engineer, right? Like, that's the stereotype of like, that's what we're looking for now. But your own background and other people at Apple who've sort of had the valued liberal arts and engineering degree, talk about like, what are the advantages of sort of melding the traditions? What's an example of a decision that got made that was a better decision?

• 1:19:24Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, it's all the process of designing experiences for people that are useful and meaningful, right? And I think that, how do we define what's useful and meaningful? Well, we look to literature, right? We look to philosophy, right? We look to art, we look to the creative media, right? To decide what's useful and meaningful. And so, you know, I think, and, you know, I don't know, I didn't know Steve well enough to know what he thought. But the culture that he helped to create and that I found my place in that culture

• 1:20:08Speaker 02

  was, you know, the part of the approach was that these devices are a part of people's lives. More and more now, to the extent that now, right, we think that there's a problem with the number amount of time that we're spending looking at these screens, right? That we need apps and features on the phone to help us track. Too much screen time. Too much screen time, right? And so if we're going to have this object, this device, these experiences that are so important to us, so deeply ingrained, well, then it requires, I think, the care and attention and the thought about, it's not just a technology artifact, it's a social artifact, right?

• 1:20:53Speaker 02

  It's a human artifact, right? And so that's where liberal arts comes in. Yes, you do need to have the technological background to come up with the hardware and the software and the networking and the services to get everything packed together so that a product like this is possible. But if you, you know, you're gonna ask, well, what is it good for? You know, why do we do this feature rather than that feature? I think that, yeah, that's a liberal arts process.

• 1:21:23Frank Chen?

  Tell the story, if you would, of how you guys arrived at the home screen app icon size, right? There's a fun liberal arts twist to this.

• 1:21:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, okay. So now, you know, going back to a phone that looks more like this, this is my original iPhone that I still have. So, you know, this is the screen size that we were dealing with. Now, one of the, you know, again, now, jumping back all the way to 2005, 18 months out from the, you know, the product announcement, we were still in the early stages of trying to figure out, well, what is the home screen of apps gonna look like and how is it going to work? And one of the fundamental questions that we had was, well, how big should the icons be? And again, I mentioned before, this apprehension of touching targets that were smaller than your finger.

• 1:22:15Speaker 02

  And we were still in the phase where we didn't know how big on-screen objects should be. And so we had some experiments, but this was still, we didn't have a good handle on it. And so one of the engineers on the hallway had an idea. And his name was Scott Hirsch. He was doing work on Springboard, the icon launching program himself. And so he had this idea, he said, I'm gonna make a game.

• 1:22:42Speaker 02

  It's the first ever iPhone game. Truly, because this is a point where we didn't even have, all of our units still needed to be tethered to a Mac. We didn't have standalone enclosures yet. So we were still at this phase where we had touchscreens that still needed to have a wire tethered to it. But still, we were trying to figure out what the ideal size is. And the game was the solution. And the game went like this. You would launch the game, and there was a minimal user interface. All it was was a rectangle on the screen. That was a random size and a random position. And the game was tap the rectangle. And as soon as you did, it didn't tell you if you succeeded or failed.

• 1:23:26Speaker 02

  Because the idea was just go tap the rectangle as quickly as possible. You tap the rectangle, the next one would show up at some other random size and some other random position on the screen. And the idea was to just go as quickly as possible without, again, being sort of weighed down by the feedback of whether you were succeeding or failing. And you would get then 20 of them, and then it would give you your score. And so, it was fun, right? Before Angry Birds? Before Angry Birds, we had the little... Angry rectangles, going in. Now, naturally, what he was doing, he also wrote the software so that he was tracking rectangle by rectangle,

• 1:24:06Speaker 02

  whether people were succeeding or failing, and also based on where the rectangle showed up on the screen. And within a couple of games, of course, the game was actually fun, right? I finally got 20 out of 20, right?

• 1:24:22Speaker 02

  We determined that if you made a rectangle that was 57 pixels square, that pretty much everybody could tap it 100% of the time. No matter where it was, again, since you were going quickly, you could tap it comfortably. And that number, he just then, since he was working on Springboard and it was his game, it was his app, he put that number into the app, he made the pixels 57 pixels square. And since that was a good number, we never changed it. And so that's what wound up shipping on the iPhone.

• 1:24:57Frank Chen?

  Yeah, I love that story. That it was sort of a game that led to it as opposed to, alright, we're just gonna do every possible pixel variation. We're gonna bring people in to test it and we'll see what works.

• 1:25:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, it was, again, he was the DRI for Springboard. It was his job to figure out how big the pixels should be. And he came up with a good solution, so we didn't change it.

• 1:25:16Frank Chen?

  Yeah. So, let's switch gears a little bit and talk about sort of your advice for young people who are thinking about getting into the computer industry. Sort of, you know, liberal arts degree, computer science degree, what set of life experiences? Like, what's your general advice for people who want to join a tech company?

• 1:25:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it needs to be a mix. I think if you're going to be a programmer, yeah, go write programs. I mean, the only way to get better at things is to do them. You know, and one of the wonderful things, we mentioned open source, you know, a bit earlier, the barriers now have never been lower to get involved. I knew that when I was, you know, a young person in college, I actually started in college in 1984, I couldn't afford a Mac, right? I wanted one.

• 1:26:11Frank Chen?

  Yeah, they were thousands of dollars.

• 1:26:12Speaker 02

  Thousands of dollars. There was no way, there was no way that I could afford one. And so now the barrier to entry is much lower. So if you're interested in making projects, well, just go out and join a community and start making them. Or maybe you don't even, you can even lurk in the community. You can download the software and try to make something of it yourself. So I think that, again, if you want to do something, just start doing it. So that's one piece of advice. And then the other piece of advice is, yeah, you do need to look at... More than technology, again for the reason that I said a few minutes ago,

• 1:26:54Speaker 02

  which is these technological artifacts that we're making now have become so important to people that if you don't know anything about people, right, I don't think that it's, you're going to be successful in the long term. And so, yeah, read books. Read books. Study philosophy. Go to art museums. Learn about what's beautiful and meaningful to you. Answer those questions for yourself. I don't think, you know, if you can't answer those questions for yourself, it would be then hard as a product designer to then take on the responsibility

• 1:27:39Speaker 02

  of answering those questions for other people. Because that's what you do when you're a technologist and say a product company like Apple. You're going to be making decisions on products and it is then going to go out in the world and it's going to be affecting other people. Other people are going to be putting those things and bringing them into their lives. And so, how do you know what's good? And so, that's a question that you should be prepared to answer for yourself. What do you like? And why? What are your goals? Why do you make a choice to make the product turn like this rather than that? And so, it's this combination of learning about the technology so that you can actually implement your ideas. But then you've got to actually have good ideas.

• 1:28:23Speaker 02

  And again, it's the liberal arts that provides the grounding for that.

• 1:28:26Frank Chen?

  Super, and that's counterintuitive in Silicon Valley, right? The suite of interview questions you typically encounter when you're interviewing for jobs are about linked lists and do you know TensorFlow? And can you program in Python or whatever, as opposed to what's good?

• 1:28:40Speaker 02

  And really, you know, it's unfortunate that there are so many questions like that. Well, obviously, linked lists, we're still going to have need for those as we go into the future. But, you know, the work that I, much of the work that I did in my life, there was no way that I could have predicted, right? When we, when I was handed a, you know, a piece of hardware like this and say making a touchscreen operating system for a smartphone, well... There were precious few examples that we could have looked at. And so how do you have experience in that thing? So again, I think getting a flexibility, being able to answer the sort of more general questions about what you like and what's good and what your higher level goals are.

• 1:29:25Speaker 02

  Because technology is going to change.

• 1:29:28Frank Chen?

  Yeah. And then sort of thinking about a company, like how important do you think it is, if you're thinking about joining a company, that there be a figure like a Steve Jobs, who has a trusted lieutenant like a Scott Forstall? Like, is the absence of those ingredients like a, "I'm not going to join that company"? Or, right? How universal is the Apple experience is another way of asking this question versus how sort of specific to a set of characters and a time in history?

• 1:29:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a hard question. I mean, Steve was unique, right? And unfortunately, he's not around anymore. And so I think it's kind of a fool's errand to go out and find who is the direct successor to Steve Jobs. It's just, you know, it's just like the questions are always changing. And so I think it's a matter of finding a place where you feel comfortable, where you feel some sort of connection to what the organization is trying to accomplish. And that you like the people and that you feel that you're bringing something.

• 1:30:39Speaker 02

  You know, it's again, this kind of this interesting contrast of both fitting in, but then also, I think, providing more diversity. I mean, that's an ongoing challenge for high-tech companies, is that, again, as the products become more and more important for our culture, I think the people who are making the products need to be a better reflection of the world as it is, right? That it's not just a bunch of computer geeks who went to maybe just a few high-powered schools that have good computer science departments.

• 1:31:15Frank Chen?

  In your book, there's sort of a couple of key ingredients that you distilled the Apple experience down to. Like, this is basically, in reflection, this is what made the iPhone team so productive. And you talk about things like collaboration, and taste, and decisiveness. So, we'll pick up sort of a few of these things as we finish up the segment. So, collaboration, right? Every company says, "We have a collaborative culture." What do you think made Apple's unique?

• 1:31:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, it's interesting that we were very, very good at combining complementary strengths, right? So, we had this human interface design team, and I worked very, very closely over time with a couple of the folks in there. Of course, there were only a few folks in there in total. And what we would do is, let's say, the example of me working with Boss Ordin on the iPhone keyboard. And so, I was coming from the project primarily from an engineering direction. He was coming from the project primarily from a design direction. But Boss was pretty good at writing code. And I would fire up Photoshop and Illustrator.

• 1:32:28Speaker 02

  And so, we would come up with these ideas, and we would complement each other. And to the extent, and again, whatever you think of software patents, we got them for the work that we did at Apple. And one of the constraints that you have when you apply for patents is that you need to list the inventors. You actually need to be honest about who contributed to the specific invention. And so, they would ask us, "Well, which one of you two came up with this specific idea so that we can write it into the claim language? And maybe if we're going to take that claim and move it to a separate patent, we have to know who to put as the inventor." And Boss and I would look at each other, and we would go, "I don't know, we both came up with it." And so, that's the sign of collaboration, is that where the collaboration is so good

• 1:33:12Speaker 02

  that you don't know where it begins and where it ends. You're complementing each other so well that we did it, and there is no other way to describe it.

• 1:33:25Speaker 02

  Part of, you know, as a sort of, as a concrete piece of advice, or maybe a way of describing that more at Apple, is that we didn't have a lot of politics. You know, when Boss came up with that idea, I came up with that idea, it just didn't matter.

• 1:33:44Frank Chen?

  Wasn't a strong attribution culture, right? Like, oh, that's his idea, and like, how dare you claim that that was my idea?

• 1:33:50Speaker 02

  I can't work on that, and now my manager's gonna get involved, because now I'm not gonna get the credit for it, and whatever. It just wasn't like that.

• 1:33:58Frank Chen?

  Yeah, but you still had to have strong DRIs, right?

• 1:34:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:34:02Frank Chen?

  Right?

• 1:34:03Speaker 02

  But then, but that is also one of the ways that just made it clear about, you know, if I was collaborating with someone like Boss, or just some other engineer on the, you know, on the iOS engineering hallway, if I was the DRI for the keyboard, well, I was the one making the calls. You know, and as long as I kept making good calls, right? I mean, if somebody else had an idea that they really, really thought, they were gonna go to the mat, and they're gonna say, no, I think Ken made, you know, the wrong call on this, yeah, they could buck that up, the management hierarchy. But that was relatively unusual, because again, I mean, part of being a DRI is recognizing strong ideas

• 1:34:47Speaker 02

  that are coming from other people, and including them in the work. And so that was, that helps to describe some of the character of the collaboration that we had.

• 1:34:56Frank Chen?

  Well, Ken, it's been a fascinating conversation. Thanks so much for taking us inside the Chocolate Factory. Look, the Chocolate Factory did not have very many people, so I feel really blessed that, you know, one of those people made it out, and is willing to lead the tour and talk to us. And maybe that'll be the last question I asked you, which is, you know, famously secretive Apple Corporation, right? Did you have to get their approval to actually write the book and tell the stories?

• 1:35:22Speaker 02

  Well, no, I didn't. I don't know if I was supposed to, but I didn't. And I took a certain approach to it, which is that... I think it's a positive take on Apple. I loved my career at Apple. So I didn't throw anybody under the bus because there was nobody that I thought deserved it. And I limited myself to the Steve Jobs era, which is now, sadly, or for good or for bad, passing into history. And again, I was one of the few people who had this perspective, this opportunity to be there during the time that some of these products were getting made.

• 1:36:07Speaker 02

  And so, again, with my background, being in history and being in the liberal arts, I thought that it would be good if I collected these recollections, while I still do remember them well, and tell the story. And so I thought that it was really more of a personal story. And so, no, I didn't... I was imagining that maybe I would ask forgiveness if somehow they didn't really approve. But I thought that I wouldn't really run into trouble.

• 1:36:43Frank Chen?

  Well, that's great. Thank you for taking the time here and for putting the stories down so they don't fade into the mists of history. It's been great having you.

• 1:36:52Speaker 02

  Well, I've had a great time. Thank you.

• 1:36:54Frank Chen?

  Great. So for those in the YouTube audience, if you liked what you saw, go ahead and subscribe. And then in the comments thread on this video, let's talk about things that you might want to try in your own culture. And now, having listened, sort of can describe what it was Apple... what Apple did. Sort of what would work in your environment and what wouldn't work in your environment. We'd love to have a conversation about how would you implement some of the ideas that we talked about in your own software development lifecycle. So, see you next episode.