Jobs created iPhone out of disdain

Jobs created iPhone out of disdain

Apple's iPhone is a beloved useful tool in this generation. This revolutionary phone inspires high-mindedness, genius and foresight. The birth of the iPhone, however, had little to do with any dignified feeling. On the contrary, Steve Jobs invented the iPhone out of disdain.

According to the iPhone's co-inventor, Scott Forstall, the origin of Apple's smartphone project are in founder Steve Jobs‘ disdain for Microsoft and a grating social interaction with a particular employee of the software giant. If it wasn't for Steve Jobs‘ hatred for the latter, Apple may have never created the iPhone.

Steve hated this guy at Microsoft, Forstall said at an event at the Computer History Museum, which celebrated the 10th anniversary of the release of the first iPhone. During the talk, Forstall recounted the story of the birth of the iPhone.

The iPhone had a very circuitous route. We'd been working on a tablet project, Forstall said. It began because Steve hated this guy at Microsoft.

First thing is, they're idiots, Jobs would say after interacting with this guy. Apple's founder was not referring to Bill Gates, his friend and rival who founded Microsoft, but to an employee Jobs hated. The unnamed Microsoft executive, who was supposedly the husband of a friend of Job's wife Laurene Powell Jobs, continuously bragged about Redmond-based company's plans for tablets and styluses.

Since the two couples ran in the same social circles, they would often end up at the same parties and functions. After every social interaction with the Microsoft executive, Jobs would return in a bad mood. Forstall said: Any time Steve had any interaction with the guy, he'd come back pissed off. His disdain for this Microsoft employee who wouldn't stop showing off drove Jobs to decide to beat them.

The turning point came when the Microsoft executive over dinner said how Microsoft was going to change the world with its Tablet PC software and stylus, that the software giant had solved computing with it, and that Apple should just license it. After putting up with this bragging, Steve Jobs lost his patience and, as recounted in Walter Isaacson's Jobs biography, said: Fuck this, let's show him what a tablet can really be.

Tablet PCs were smaller and lighter than laptop computers and included touch displays. What drove Jobs angry - and what made the employee's comment so annoying - was that Tablet PCs would work only with a stylus. Although iPads have Apple Pencils today, Jobs famously hated styluses. After the interaction between Jobs and the Microsoft employee over the weekend returned to the office on Monday and let out a set of expletives, according to Forstall who recounted Jobs as saying: First thing is, they're idiots. You don't use a stylus. Jobs argued that styluses are counterintuitive anyway and people lose them. We're born with 10 styluses, Jobs said.

That is how Jobs got Apple working to outdo Microsoft developing a touchscreen device of its own that would not rely on a stylus but only on the tap of the fingers.

The development effort focused on building the iPad - a tablet-sized multi-touch prototype on which you could move photos with your fingers. This effort was codenamed project purple. The Apple team were focused on building prototype multitouch displays.

During this project, Apple identified that smartphone were becoming a threat to its iPod business and, therefore, focused on developing what would later become the iPhone in 2004. A turning point also came when Jobs visited a coffee shop and noticed that many people in the shop where using their cellphones but they didn't seem happy about it, according to Forstall. This way Jobs identified an opportunity.

Forstall recounted Jobs saying: Do you think you could take that demo that we're doing with the table and the multi-touch and shrink it down to something small enough to fit in your pocket?

Although it was a difficult task to shrink the size of the device from the larger ones developed at the beginning of the project, once the project was complete, Forstall saw that Jobs was a visionary and he was right about this idea as well.

There was no question, Forstall said. This is how phones need to be made.