Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [177]
Rumors about Apple’s encore to the iPod had been in the air long before Steve Jobs used one of his hallmark solo shows in San Francisco in 2007 to introduce the company’s riff on hand-held computing. Though it was dubbed the iPhone, the device Jobs introduced was not a conventional cell phone or mp3 player, was far removed from a personal digital assistant and did not bear too many resemblances to a portable game device. The same day the iPhone was introduced, the word “computer” was dropped from the company’s name, which was shortened to Apple, Inc.—a sign of how far the company had traveled in the previous years.
The iPhone was a glorious expression of Apple’s approach to product design. It did not start with laborious research, focus groups or the acquisition of another company with a hot product. It began with a few people trying to design a product they would want to use and be proud to own. Like many previous products conceived under Jobs’ leadership, this required taking a close look at the short-comings of existing products, adapting ideas from others and melding them into something that, by 2007, could only have come from Apple. Such was the allure and romance of being associated with Apple that AT&T management signed up, on draconian terms, to be the exclusive U.S. distributor for the iPhone with barely a glimpse of the product. While the advertisements, commercials or press reports would frequently employ the term “revolutionary” to describe the iPhone and other Apple products, they were evolutionary—exquisite refinements of the half-baked ideas and products full of compromises and shortcomings that other companies had prematurely rushed onto store shelves.
The iPhone appeared simple. It fired up immediately. It was housed in a case less than 12 millimeters thick and could connect to any machine—from a supercomputer to a smoke detector—that was hooked up to the internet. But simplicity, especially elegant simplicity, is deceptively difficult. Jobs’ magisterial achievement, one that has few, if any, precedents, was to ensure that a technology company employing tens of thousands of people could make and sell millions of immensely complicated yet exquisite products that were powerful and reliable and while also containing a lightness of being. This is Apple’s triumph. It is one thing for an individual—Matisse with a line, Henry Moore with a shape, W.H. Auden with a phrase, Copland with a bar, Chanel with a cut—to express themselves. It is another matter entirely for the germ of an idea to be developed, refined, reshaped, molded, tuned, altered and rejected again and again before it is considered perfect enough to be reproduced in the millions. It is another matter too to steer, coax, nudge, prod, cajole, inspire, berate, organize and praise—on weekdays and weekends—the thousands of people all around the world required to produce something that drops into pockets and handbags, or in the case of a computer, rests on a lap or sits on a desk.
The iPhone, in some respects, came to be a throwback to the beginning of Apple and the way in which software developers all over the world had been encouraged to write programs for the Apple II. In a fashion that had not occurred since Microsoft had developed an army of software mercenaries trooping after its DOS and Windows operating systems, the iPhone ignited an explosion of interest from programmers around the world so that now tens of thousands of applications, from the life-saving to frivolous, can be bought with the tap of a finger from Apple’s AppStore.
Sales of Apple’s Macintosh computers are now outstripped by products that were not even imagined, let alone conceived, at the turn of this century. The popularity of the iPod and iPhone and the accessibility of Apple’s retail store have rejuvenated sales of Macintosh computers, which were also helped by a shift to Intel microprocessors and