“No, I’m Steve Jobs,” he replied. “Put me through.” The assistant refused. Jobs called Brown and complained that he had been subjected to “typical East Coast bullshit.” When Weeks heard that, he called the main Apple switchboard and asked to speak to Jobs. He was told to put his request in writing and send it in by fax.
When Jobs was told what happened, he took a liking to Weeks and invited him to Cupertino.
Jobs described the type of glass Apple wanted for the iPhone, and Weeks told him that Corning had developed a chemical exchange process in the 1960s that led to what they dubbed “gorilla glass.” It was incredibly strong, but it had never found a market, so Corning quit making it. Jobs said he doubted it was good enough, and he started explaining to Weeks how glass was made. This amused Weeks, who of course knew more than Jobs about that topic. “Can you shut up,” Weeks interjected, “and let me teach you some science?” Jobs was taken aback and fell silent. Weeks went to the whiteboard and gave a tutorial on the chemistry, which involved an ion-exchange process that produced a compression layer on the surface of the
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glass. This turned Jobs around, and he said he wanted as much gorilla glass as Corning could make within six months. “We don’t have the capacity,” Weeks replied.
“None of our plants make the glass now.”
“Don’t be afraid,” Jobs replied. This stunned Weeks, who was good-humored and confident but not used to Jobs’s reality distortion field. He tried to explain that a false sense of confidence would not overcome engineering challenges, but that was a premise that Jobs had repeatedly shown he didn’t accept. He stared at Weeks unblinking. “Yes, you can do it,” he said. “Get your mind around it. You can do it.”
As Weeks retold this story, he shook his head in astonishment. “We did it in under six months,” he said.
“We produced a glass that had never been made.”
Corning’s facility in Harrisburg, Kentucky, which had been making LCD displays, was converted almost overnight to make gorilla glass full-time. “We put our best scientists and engineers on it, and we just made it work.” In his airy office, Weeks has just one framed memento on display. It’s a message Jobs sent the day the iPhone came out: “We couldn’t have done it without you.”
The Design
On many of his major projects, such as the first Toy Story and the Apple store, Jobs pressed “pause” as they neared completion and decided to make major revisions. That happened with the design of the iPhone as well. The initial design had the glass screen set into an aluminum case. One Monday morning Jobs went over to see Ive. “I didn’t sleep last night,” he said,
“because I realized that I just don’t love it.” It was the most important product he had made since the first Macintosh, and it just didn’t look right to him. Ive, to his dismay, instantly realized that Jobs was right. “I remember feeling absolutely embarrassed that he had
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to make the observation.”
The problem was that the iPhone should have been all about the display, but in their current design the case competed with the display instead of getting out of the way. The whole device felt too masculine, task-driven, efficient. “Guys, you’ve killed yourselves over this design for the last nine months, but we’re going to change it,” Jobs told Ive’s team. “We’re all going to have to work nights and weekends, and if you want we can hand out some guns so you can kill us now.” Instead of balking, the team agreed. “It was one of my proudest moments at Apple,” Jobs recalled.
The new design ended up with just a thin stainless steel bezel that allowed the gorilla glass display to go right to the edge. Every part of the device seemed to defer to the screen. The new look was austere, yet also friendly. You could fondle it. It meant they had to redo the circuit boards, antenna, and processor placement inside, but Jobs ordered the change. “Other companies may have shipped,” said Fadell, “but we pressed the reset button and started over.”
One aspect of the design, which reflected not only Jobs’s perfectionism but also his desire to control, was that the device was tightly sealed. The case could not be opened, even to change the battery. As with the original Macintosh in 1984, Jobs did not want people fiddling inside. In fact when Apple discovered in 2011
that third-party repair shops were opening up the iPhone 4, it replaced the tiny screws with a tamper-resistant Pentalobe screw that was impossible to open with a commercially available screwdriver. By not having a replaceable battery, it was possible to make the iPhone much thinner. For Jobs, thinner was always better. “He’s always believed that thin is beautiful,” said Tim Cook. “You can see that in all of the work. We have the thinnest notebook, the thinnest smartphone, and we
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made the iPad thin and then even thinner.”
The Launch
When it came time to launch the iPhone, Jobs decided, as usual, to grant a magazine a special sneak preview. He called John Huey, the editor in chief of Time Inc., and began with his typical superlative: “This is the best thing we’ve ever done.” He wanted to give Time the exclusive, “but there’s nobody smart enough at Time to write it, so I’m going to give it to someone else.” Huey introduced him to Lev Grossman, a savvy technology writer (and novelist) at Time. In his piece Grossman correctly noted that the iPhone did not really invent many new features, it just made these features a lot more usable. “But that’s important. When our tools don’t work, we tend to blame ourselves, for being too stupid or not reading the manual or having too-fat fingers. . . . When our tools are broken, we feel broken.
And when somebody fixes one, we feel a tiny bit more whole.”
For the unveiling at the January 2007 Macworld in San Francisco, Jobs invited back Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, Steve Wozniak, and the 1984 Macintosh team, as he had done when he launched the iMac. In a career of dazzling product presentations, this may have been his best. “Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything,” he began. He referred to two earlier examples: the original Macintosh, which “changed the whole computer industry,” and the first iPod, which “changed the entire music industry.” Then he carefully built up to the product he was about to launch: “Today, we’re introducing three revolutionary products of this class. The first one is a widescreen iPod with touch controls. The second is a revolutionary mobile phone. And the third is a breakthrough Internet communications device.” He repeated the list for emphasis, then asked, “Are you
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getting it? These are not three separate devices, this is one device, and we are calling it iPhone.”
When the iPhone went on sale five months later, at the end of June 2007, Jobs and his wife walked to the Apple store in Palo Alto to take in the excitement. Since he often did that on the day new products went on sale, there were some fans hanging out in anticipation, and they greeted him as they would have Moses if he had walked in to buy the Bible. Among the faithful were Hertzfeld and Atkinson. “Bill stayed in line all night,”
Hertzfeld said. Jobs waved his arms and started laughing. “I sent him one,” he said. Hertzfeld replied,
“He needs six.”
The iPhone was immediately dubbed “the Jesus Phone” by bloggers. But Apple’s competitors emphasized that, at $500, it cost too much to be successful. “It’s the most expensive phone in the world,”
Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer said in a CNBC interview.
“And it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard.” Once again Microsoft had underestimated Jobs’s product. By the end of 2010, Apple had sold ninety million iPhones, and it reaped more than half of the total profits generated in the global cell phone market.
“Steve understands desire,” said Alan Kay, the Xerox PARC pioneer who had envisioned a
“Dynabook” tablet computer forty years earlier. Kay was good at making prophetic assessments, so Jobs asked him what he thought of the iPhone. “Make the screen five inches by eight inches, and you’ll rule the world,”
Kay said. He did not know that the design of the iPhone had started with, and would someday lead to, ideas for a tablet computer that would fulfill—indeed exceed—his vision for the Dynabook.
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CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
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ROUND TWO
