The iPhone backstory
Posted on January 13, 2008
Filed Under: iPhone
Tagged: iphone
Wired’s Fred Vogelstein has an excellent piece on the backstory of the iPhone detailing the failures of the ROCKR, secret meetings in Vegas with Stan Sigman, AT&T’s king of wireless, and tense moments involving baseball bats within Apple that led up to the release of a working product.
It also sheds light on the level of financial and quality assurance commitments Apple makes when they develop a product.
To ensure the iPhone’s tiny antenna could do its job effectively, Apple spent millions buying and assembling special robot-equipped testing rooms. To make sure the iPhone didn’t generate too much radiation, Apple built models of human heads — complete with goo to simulate brain density — and measured the effects. To predict the iPhone’s performance on a network, Apple engineers bought nearly a dozen server-sized radio-frequency simulators for millions of dollars apiece. Even Apple’s experience designing screens for iPods didn’t help the company design the iPhone screen, as Jobs discovered while toting a prototype in his pocket: To minimize scratching, the touchscreen needed to be made of glass, not hard plastic like on the iPod. One insider estimates that Apple spent roughly $150 million building the iPhone.
The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry
Comments:
- There are no comments for this entry
Leave Your Comments:
Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.