the secret origin story of the iphone

This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 97%. (I'm a bot)

Jobs told Scott Forstall, who would become the head of the iPhone software division, that even he couldn't breathe a word about the phone to anyone, inside Apple or out, who wasn't on the team.

"The problem with a phone," Steve Jobs said in 2005, "Is that we're not very good going through orifices to get to the end users." By orifices, he meant carriers like Verizon and AT&T, which had final say over which phones could access their networks.

From Steve Jobs to Jony Ive to Tony Fadell to Apple's engineers, designers, and managers, there's one part of the iPhone mythology that everyone tends to agree on: Before the iPhone, everyone at Apple thought cell phones "Sucked." They were "Terrible." Just "Pieces of junk." We've already seen how Jobs felt about phones that dropped calls.

"For at least a year before starting on what would become the iPhone project, even internally at Apple, we were grumbling about how all of these phones out there were all terrible," says Nitin Ganatra, who managed Apple's email team before working on the iPhone.

On paper, the logic looks impeccable: The iPod was Apple's most successful product, phones were going to eat the iPod's lunch, so why not an iPod phone? "Take the best of the iPod and put a phone in it," Fadell says.

"We got to build RF radio boards, it forced us to select suppliers, it pushed us to get everything in place." In fact, elements of the iPod phone wound up migrating into the final iPhone; it was like a version 0.1, Tupman says.

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