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That’s right, the iPhone you know and love (or hate?) today was so very close to not actually happening. Jony Ive’s been talking up the design ethos and processes behind Apple’s biggest products in London, and said that the iPhone was nearly shelved several times over “fundamental problems that we [couldn't] solve”.
Apparently one issue was one I was personally very familiar with pre-iPhone touchscreen smartphone days, and that’s “where I put the phone to my ear and my ear dials the number” of a random contact. That was solved by a proximity sensor, which shut the screen off when you shoved it up to your ear — sounds pretty simple now, but imagine having to try and come up with that idea, and actually get it right every time.
It’s amazing to think that the iPhone, which basically gave the touchscreen smartphone a massive kick in the pants and forced others like Google, and even now Microsoft, to innovate and create the awesome phones we have today, could have easily been canned. Whether we’d have then gotten the iPad, who knows. Apple apparently came up with the iPad idea first, and shrunk it for the iPhone.
Ive is currently making the rounds in London town (probably sneaking off to the Olympics), first talking at the British Business Embassy event, and then giving an interview to The Independent, which is well worth a read in its entirety. [Independent]
Jony Ive: It Was "Extraordinarily Painful" Working For Apple In the "Newton Era"
Jony Ive Wasn't Always Quite So Smooth
Jony Ive: Just Doing Something Different Or New Is Wrong
Surely this is the same for nearly all products? They go through a design process, things become difficult, they overcome these problems. I’m sure in reality it probably was never really close to being shelved..
Well, when it comes to Jobs, who knows. He could have picked that thing up, called his wife by accident and said “kill it; what is this rubbish?!”
I forget that Steve Jobs had a wife, I imagined him as a bit of a robot – sleeping in a box at the office.
The proximity sensor does sound pretty simple now, especially since I had one in my Ericsson R520 11 years ago…
The touchscreen totally made it “unique”
With the R520 it turned the speaker phone off when you brought the phone to your ear. Damn, I miss that phone – GPRS, Bluetooth, triband and voice dialling
Bet you could drop it a thousand times too…. Although, it’s not a 3310…
What’s the big deal? Apple had a problem with your ear pressing the screen, so they needed a way to disable it when your ear touches the screen.
The idea to use an off-the-shelf proximity sensor will have come up in the VERY FIRST brainstorming session about this problem, no doubt.
The Doctor is describing what is essentially the same thing, some years previously.
I don’t think this was a new or novel idea even when the first iPhone came out. When it comes to Apple, people seem to inexplicably forget everyone else’s R&D that has gone into literally everything upon which Apple’s products are built.
Sam, I’ve noticed square brackets [] in articles like in this quote here – “fundamental problems that we [couldn't] solve”. what does it mean?
I think it’s an implied word; it wasn’t there in the original quote. The original quote wouldn’t make sense to new audience had this extra word not been added. Or something along those lines.
[words] inside of a quote denote a part of the quote that is not original. Usually it replaces an existing word or words to give context to the sentence or to increase it’s readability.
Technically, however, it could be used to change meaning entirely. For example, the original quote could have been “fundamental problems that we knew to be easy to solve.” could be changed to “fundamental problems that we [couldn't] solve.”
Technically that quote is still correct, however the changed meaning makes it a journalistically bad thing to do.
Stay away from movies with lots of [words] in the “reviews.”