It was a late morning in the fall of 2006. Almost a year earlier, Steve Jobs had tasked about 200 of Apple's top engineers with creating the iPhone. Yet here, in Apple's boardroom, it was clear that the prototype was still a disaster. It wasn't just buggy, it flat-out didn't work. The phone dropped calls constantly, the battery stopped charging before it was full, data and applications routinely became corrupted and unusable. The list of problems seemed endless. At the end of the demo, Jobs fixed the dozen or so people in the room with a level stare and said, "We don't have a product yet."
What a fantastic story! The whole story of the iPhone development appears as a four page article on Wired's site. Through the highs and lows of development, it really does tell you everything and has made me marvel at the device even more than I already do! The iPhone development is typical Jobsian (see the Folklore stories on the Macintosh development) and is much longer than I thought, and as most people did I imagine.
One thought that occurred to me, if they can have a project as large as this under wraps for so long, what else have they got coming? Only five more days till Macworld and we will see what Apple has under their sleeve. Tablet Macs? Blu-Ray? New Software? Screens? Who knows but I'm sure it'll be great.
to the website and writings Seb Payne - undergraduate Computer Science student from the 